Shinycroak

[I keep bringing these up on Bluesky, so I think it’s time to gather them up and make a post out of them.] This is a collection of articles on the problems of “AI.” “AI”—really, various sorts of generative machine learning models—including generative large language models (gLLMs) and generative stable diffusion models (gSDMs) so far do not live up to the promises of their marketers. A computer you can talk to is one of the great dreams of computing, and the initial releases of transformer-model based chatbots seemed to live up to this. There have been long-standing qualms about this idea, most notably Dijkstra’s argument that the imprecision of natural language was an impediment to correct thinking about computation and to accurate computing. 1 Unfortunately, so far it appears that Dijkstra was correct; gLLMs and gSDMs are notorious for errors and they are not currently designed to indicate uncertainty to their users so that people confidently rely on their erroneous output. There ar...

If, say, I broadcast a short story on the radio, I have to license the original work. If I print a book, I have to have a license to do so. If I publish a thinly-veiled rewrite of a book without a license, that is copyright infringement. And so on and on. It ought to be copyright infringement to do that with a large language model (LLM) or, for visual art, a stable diffusion model (SDM.) LLMs and SDMs do not exist, do not operate at all, without a body of work to built the models from. Without that training data those models do not exist at all. Therefore the developer of an LLM, SDM, or any other future generative machine learning technology, ought to be required to license any work used for developing that model.

Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, is a major investor in a firm called Helion (unlocked Bloomberg article), which claims it will be producing electricity from nuclear fusion by 2028. This is the second version of this article; physicist Stefan Urbat wrote to inform me that after 60 years there has been progress in dealing with second-order instabilities.