AI

Through linguistic offshoots, such as writing, we are able to practice a unique phenomenon: exbodiment , in which byproducts of our cognition can be captured, stored, shared, and passed through generations.

Enter Large Language Models (LLMs). The first tranche of products and startups leveraging LLMs has kept within the mental model of selling software to achieve step-function improvements in end-user productivity. The "Copilot for [x]" trend reflects this mental model. While there are fantastic startups innovating to improve employee productivity,... See more

I find no meaning in toiling over hand-washing dishes, and am eternally grateful to the inventor of the dishwasher. But as it pertains to Big Tech’s never-ending quest to simplify writing with AI, I wholly agree that the struggle is what makes the process worth anything.

In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... See more

“We realized rasterization was reaching its limits,” he said, referring to the traditional, widely used method of rendering a 3D scene. “2018 was a ‘bet the company’ moment. It required that we reinvent the hardware, the software, the algorithms. And while we were reinventing CG with AI, we were reinventing the GPU for AI.”

The community remains puzzled about whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks, or seemingly succeed by memorizing the training data. This paper makes important strides in addressing this question. It constructs a suite of carefully designed counterfactual evaluations, providing fresh insights into the capabilities of... See more

Anyway, I don’t want to seem like I’m arguing that the internet of 2023 is “fine” or “healthy”--it’s obviously not. Rather, I’d like to make the case that the internet of 2010 (or wherever you would place the peak of “fun” internet) wasn’t particularly healthy or fine, either, and it’s easy to mistake a sense of ease and comfort under bad... See more