Hey, I'm adding something new to my roster of content. Once a week I'll post a quick update on interesting articles, videos, and general content from last week. It will be in theme for the rest of my content so you should find it interesting. If you know anyone who would find this content interesting, forward this to them.

How Close is the singularity?

Props to Kai Christensen who at 19 is thinking a lot more about the future than I did at that age. As someone deep in the world of AI I think this work overstates how close we are to an AI takeover. While technologies like transformers are setting new accuracy records there is still a lot to be done to apply them broadly to everyday tasks.

It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World

Fictional short story about Clippy & AI hard takeoff scenarios grounded in contemporary ML scaling, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning research literature.

Gwern Branwen

Like all things on Gwern.com, this piece of short fiction is top-notch. It covers one plausible path to an AI superintelligence. I think we're still a long way from having the compute power that this scenario requires but given enough time it's sure to be the case one day.

Published last week

Will we mourn for Siri?

I remember the first time I said “thank you” to Siri. I wasn’t paying attention and had asked for a timer to be set. Nothing particularly difficult, but without much thought, out slipped “thank you”. To be clear, I don’t think Siri is doing what I ask out of politeness

Elliot C SmithElliot Smith

Sparking some interesting discussion on Reddit, I looked at how our relationship with digital assistants is likely to evolve over time. Eventually rivalling a relationship with a pet, then perhaps with a friend.

WASSAP Ep 01 - Mic Check One Two

Episode 1 of We Absolutely Should Start A PodcastTom and Elliot discuss Linkedin DeepFakes and the Kano Model for classifying features.Apologies for the echo...

YouTube

My co-founder and good friend Tom White and I started a podcast last week. We talked about deep fakes and the Kano method to assess product features.

Hope you have a great week.