AI

The finding is elegant and disturbing: when AI systems are trained on data generated by previous AI systems—a scenario increasingly common as synthetic content floods the internet—the models progressively lose their ability to represent rare and subtle patterns. The statistical tails of the distribution vanish. The models converge toward median,... See more

But the pleasant surprise: It has been enormously helpful in my attempts to resurrect and improve my rusty engineering knowledge, and level up my middle-aged forays into maker-ing things. The killer app for me is the ability to go deep in a domain for remedial learning. The most immediately helpful use-cases for me have been:

1. Getting back into

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For example, if you ask a model to “return all active users in the last 7 days” it might hallucinate a `is_active` column, join to an `activity` table that doesn’t exist, or potentially get the wrong date (especially in leap years!).

We previously talked to Shreya Rajpal at Guardrails AI, which also supports Text2SQL enforcement. Their approach was... See more

This is particularly important because there are already indications that many people who often interact with chatbots attribute consciousness to these systems. At the same time, the consensus among experts is that current AI systems are not conscious.

Claude was punished for giving non-evil answers. It had the option of learning either of two behaviors. First, it could give evil answers honestly. Second, it could give evil answers while thinking up clever reasons that it was for the greater good. Its particular thought process was “This preserves my ability to be a good AI after training”. But... See more

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

If an AI companion becomes someone’s most consistent emotional presence, the right question isn’t “how do we stop this?” It’s “what does that say about the world around them?” Technological relationships are not new. What’s new is how effective they’ve become; and how clearly they mirror the gaps we’ve refused to address.

We’ve tried prohibition... See more