There's a joke here...

Q: How do you make friends in Boston? A: Same way everyone else does. In kindergarten.

I feel like this whole article is seeking to 'maximize engagement', which I'm using as a lofty euphemism for trolling its readers.

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Mariam Gergis, a registered nurse at UCLA who also works a second job as a home caregiver, said she’s better off than many others, and still she struggles. “I can barely afford McDonald’s,” she said. “But it’s a cheaper option.”

On Monday morning she sat in a booth at a McDonald’s in MacArthur Park with two others. The three beverages they ordered, two coffees and a soda, amounted to nearly $20, Gergis said, pointing to the receipt. “I’d rather have healthier foods, but when you’re on a budget, it’s difficult,” she said.

Her brother, who works as a cashier, can’t afford meals out at all, she said. The cost of his diabetes medication has increased greatly, to about $200 a month, which she helps him cover.

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Well, there's kind of two answers here:

1. To the extent that creativity is randomness, LLM inference samples from the token distribution at each step. It's possible (but unlikely!) for an LLM to complete "pig with" with the token sequence "a dragon head" just by random chance. The temperature settings commonly exposed control how often the system takes the most likely candidate tokens.

2. A markov chain model will literally have a matrix entry for every possible combination of inputs. So a 2 degree chain will have n^2 weights, where N is the number of possible tokens. In that situation "pig with" can never be completed with a brand new sentence, because those have literal 0's in the probability. In contrast, transformers consider huge context windows, and start with random weights in huge neural network matrices. What people hope happens is that the NN begins to represent ideas, and connections between them. This gives them a shot at passing "out of distribution" tests, which is a cornerstone of modern AI evaluation.

From a quick online search:

- OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.

- Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

- Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.

Lets just take these three companies, and their self-defined mission statements. I see what google and openai are after. Is there any case for anyone to make inside or outside Meta that AI is needed to build the future of human connection? What problem is Meta trying to solve with their billions of investment in "super" intelligence? I genuinely have no idea, and they probably don't either. Which is why they would be laying of 600 people a week after paying a billion dollars to some guy for working on the same stuff.

EDIT: everyone commenting that mission statements are PR fluff. Fine. What is a productive way they can use LLMs in any of their flagship products today?

I built a more whimsical version of this - my daughter and I basically built a 'junk robot' from a 1980s movie, told it 'you're an independent and free junk robot living in a yard', and let it go: https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/

I did this like 18 months ago, so it uses a webcam + multimodal LLM to figure out what it's looking at, it has a motor in its base to let it look back and forth, and it use a python wrapper around another LLM as its 'brain'. It worked pretty well!

The strangest part to me about the current trends: why do all these business leaders all do the same things at the same time? E.g. Layoffs + micromanagement + cost focus etc... Is this truly about macroeconomic forces that every business is responding to? Or is it just following the latest fad?

There seems to be significant opportunity to zig as others zag. Imagine the Intel letter saying "we are going to take advantage of the current hiring environment to scoop up talent, and push forward on initiatives."

Seeing a revived Colbert Report once or twice a week, with occasional interplay with Stewart over at TDS, could be comedy gold.