AI - Ongoing Model Improvements

Even though the underlying model is no different than the usual GPT-4o, the addition of voice has a lot of implications. A voice-powered tutor works very differently than one that communicates via typing, for example. It can also speak many other languages providing new approaches to cross-cultural communication. And I have no doubt people will hav... See more

But there's just something about the immediacy and interactivity of Claude's "Artifacts" window, combined with the model's less stilted tone that brings it home.

For the most avarege users, these seemingly minor difference matter so much more than raw performance on abstract LLM benchmarks.

The incentive to find breakthrough science that provides a performance pathway other than scaling is increasing. A GPT-6 class model will cost $10 billion and three years to improve on GPT-5 by some uncertain degree. That’s a ton of time and a lot of cash for an uncertain payout: in other words, a substantial prize for anyone who can figure out pro... See more

I still think that we are thinking about scaling of network-based intelligence looking at this particular network. An extended network of machines and humans in larger networks facilitated by smaller and increasingly embodied devices might in themselves add an AI-augmented neocortex to our (human-machine) systems. Intelligence will continue to emer... See more

Mickey Schafer

Jul 4

This past semester, a student of mine despaired over analyzing a 20+ question survey with 92 responses. She uploaded the spreadsheet to NotebookLM, a tool we'd used in class, which not only cheerfully assured her it would do the task, but also returned basic R values with short statements about strong relationships. She was deli... See more

t doesn’t help that the two most impressive implementations of AI for real work - Claude’s artifacts and ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter - are often hidden and opaque

While LLMs continue to devour web-scraped data, they’ll increasingly consume their own digital progeny as AI-generated content continues to flood the internet. This recursive loop, experimentally confirmed, erodes the true data landscape. Rare events vanish first. Models churn out likely sequences from the original pool while injecting their own un... See more

LeCun points to four essential characteristics of human intelligence that current AI systems, including LLMs, can’t replicate: reasoning, planning, persistent memory, and understanding the physical world. He stresses that LLMs’ reliance on textual data severely limits their understanding of reality: “We’re easily fooled into thinking they are intel... See more

This is all early, and based on first impressions, but I think that voice capabilities like GPT-4o’s are going to change how most people interact with AI systems. Voice and visual interactions are more natural than text and will have broader appeal to a wider audience. The future will involve talking to AI.