necroforest (u/necroforest)

necroforest commented on The Silurian Hypothesis pacificklaus.com/the-silu... · Posted by u/gtsnexp

madaxe_again · 10 months ago

I often think that a more interesting question would be that if there were another civilisation here on earth right now, would we even recognise it as such?

We are terribly preoccupied with tool use and physical artefacts as a defining factor of intelligence - anthropocentrism is of course pretty much inevitable, even when we talk of cephalopods.

necroforest · 10 months ago

yeah, and as far as I'm aware there isn't even a definition of "civilization" or "intelligence" that doesn't boil down to "sufficiently like me".

necroforest commented on AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-compa... · Posted by u/randomwalker

ryandrake · a year ago

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them."

The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made with Python. Our customers want their apps to have Python in them. We just have to 'productize Python' and find the right killer app for Python and we'll be successful!" Going at it from the wrong direction. Replace Python in that quote with AI, and you probably have something a real company has said in 2024.

necroforest · a year ago

I don't entirely disagree with you, but "what products do people want" is overly conservative. Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

necroforest commented on Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture thechipletter.substack.co... · Posted by u/c_joly

layer8 · a year ago

> However, although tensors describe the relationship between arbitrary higher-dimensional arrays, in practice the TPU hardware that we will consider is designed to perform calculations associated with one and two-dimensional arrays. Or, more specifically, vector and matrix operations.

I still don’t understand why the term “tensor” is used if it’s only vectors and matrices.

necroforest · a year ago

It's branding (see: TensorFlow); also, pretty much anything (linear) you would do with an arbitrarily ranked tensor can be expressed in terms of vector ops and matmuls

necroforest commented on Is Cosine-Similarity of Embeddings Really About Similarity? arxiv.org/abs/2403.05440... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

mikewarot · a year ago

Why would anyone expect cosine-similarity to be a useful metric? In the real word, the arbitrary absolute position of an object in the universe (if it could be measured) isn't that important, it's the directions and distances to nearby objects that matters most.

It's my understanding that the delta between two word embeddings, gives a direction, and the magic is from using those directions to get to new words. The oft cited example is King-Man+Woman = Queen [1]

When did this view fall from favor?

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/17/166211/king-man-...

necroforest · a year ago

cosine similarity is (isomorphic to) "distances to nearby objects". and not all embeddings are word embeddings.

necroforest commented on The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6 lwn.net/SubscriberLink/96... · Posted by u/jrepinc

sgu999 · 2 years ago

I've learned to appreciate that if I showed this version to a 20 years younger me who had just gotten into Linux with Fedora, they'd probably find the UI extremely familiar. Meanwhile I have to relearn how to use my iPhone and Macbook every year now...

necroforest · 2 years ago

If you need to relearn your iPhone/Mac interfaces every year, you might want to get screened for Alzheimers.

necroforest commented on OpenAI deletes ban on using ChatGPT for "military and warfare" theintercept.com/2024/01/... · Posted by u/cdme

ChicagoDave · 2 years ago

Who’s kidding who? I theorize every major government in the world has already been using AI models to help guide political and military decisions.

Who doesn’t think China has a ten year AI algorithm to takeover Taiwan? Israel+US+UK > Middle East.

SkyNet or War Games are likely already happening.

necroforest · 2 years ago

> Who doesn’t think China has a ten year AI algorithm to takeover Taiwan?

anybody who works in either AI or natsec

necroforest commented on Understand how transformers work by demystifying the math behind them osanseviero.github.io/hac... · Posted by u/LaserPineapple

ActorNightly · 2 years ago

The whole "mystery" of transformer is that instead of a linear sequence of static weights times values in each layer, you now have 3 different matrices that are obtained from the same input through multiplication of learned weights, and then you just multiply the matrices together. I.e more parallelism which works out nice, but very restrictive since the attention formula is static.

We arent going to see more progress until we have a way to generalize the compute graph as a learnable parameter. I dunno if this is even possible in the traditional sense of gradients due to chaotic effects (i.e small changes reflect big shifts in performance), it may have to be some form of genetic algorithm or pso that happens under the hood.

necroforest · 2 years ago

> We arent going to see more progress until we have a way to generalize the compute graph as a learnable parameter

That's a bold statement since a ton of progress has been made without learning the compute graph.

necroforest commented on The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement theverge.com/2023/12/27/2... · Posted by u/ssgodderidge

kfk · 2 years ago

Take estimated losses of the NYT from this "innovation" and multiply by 10^x where is "x" high enough to make tech companies stop and think before they break laws next time. That would be my approach at least.

necroforest · 2 years ago

which laws are broken exactly? it's not remotely settled law that "training an NN = copyright infringement"

necroforest commented on The most powerful cosmic ray since the oh-my-god particle puzzles scientists nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/WithinReason

ivan_gammel · 2 years ago

Yes, thanks, I did a napkin calculation but apparently missed it by orders of magnitude.

necroforest · 2 years ago

What's an order of magnitude between friends?

necroforest commented on Ask HN: Are there valid Google Search alternatives? · Posted by u/lnrd

necroforest · 2 years ago

Maybe "best word processor for mac" is a better search for you?