Boulder Future Salon

ChatGPT topped 3 billion user visits in September 2024. 1. google.com - 82.0B 2. youtube.com - 28.0B 3. facebook.com - 12.3B 4. instagram.com - 5.7B 5. whatsapp.com - 4.5B 6. x.com - 4.3B 7. wikipedia.org - 3.8B 8. yahoo.com - 3.4B 9. reddit.com - 3.4B 10. yahoo.co.jp - 3.2B 11. chatgpt.com - 3.1B 12. yandex.ru - 2.7B 13. amazon.com - 2.6B 14. baidu.com - 2.4B 15. tiktok.com - 2.1B None of the other language models (Gemini, Claude, Meta, X.AI, Perplexity, etc) register on this global ranking -- ChatGPT crushes them all. Which is interesting to me as I use 8 LLMs (most of the time -- will probably try more soon) and ChatGPT doesn't consistently stand out as better than the others. But ChatGPT seems to have lept far ahead in terms of brand recognition with users.

"BabyAGI 2o is an exploration into creating the simplest self-building autonomous agent. Unlike its sibling project BabyAGI 2, which focuses on storing and executing functions from a database, BabyAGI 2o aims to iteratively build itself by creating and registering tools as required to complete tasks provided by the user. As these functions are not stored, the goal is to integrate this with the BabyAGI 2 framework for persistence of tools created." The naming might be confusing. OpenAI came out with a model called "o1", and the name "2o" might get you thinking this BabyAGI is using the "o" model. That's not the case. What this is is a variant of BabyAGI 2 that installs anything it likes and runs code generated by LLMs automatically, that tries continuously to update itself and its tools in order to accomplish whatever taks you gave it. It works with a variety of LLMs -- it uses a system called LiteLLM that lets you choose between more than 100 LLMs. It tries to do everything without human intervention, so when errors happen, it will try to learn from them, and continue iterating towards task completion.

"The New York Times on Thursday published a look at the 'fraying' relationship between OpenAI and its investor, partner, and, increasingly, rival, Microsoft." "Most fascinating perhaps is a reported clause in OpenAI's contract with Microsoft that cuts off Microsoft's access to OpenAI's tech if the latter develops so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI), meaning an AI system capable of rivaling human thinking."

"There are several construction companies turning their attention to domed and rounded shapes. It's something American construction company Deltec has focused on for the past three decades in their efforts to build hurricane-resilient homes. Of the 5,500 domed and rounded homes the company has constructed, only one has sustained damage from high winds, according to Deltec's records, despite facing some of the country's most powerful hurricanes on record, including Irma, Michael, Katrina, Dorian and, most recently, Milton. Deltec says it has heard from dozens of homeowners and none have reported damage from Hurricane Milton." "The conventional approach to making a home hurricane resistant is to take a traditional home design and reinforce it. It is like trying to make a race car out of a school bus -- they really are just two completely different [things], and a home is no different."

"Researchers at REMspace, a California-based startup, have achieved a historic milestone, demonstrating that lucid dreams could unlock new dimensions of communication and humanity's potential. Using specially designed equipment, two individuals successfully induced lucid dreams and exchanged a simple message." The press release continues: "When the server detected that the first participant entered a lucid dream, it generated a random Remmyo word and sent it to him via earbuds. The participant repeated the word in his dream, with his response captured and stored on the server. Eight minutes later, the next participant entered a lucid dream. She received the stored message from the first participant and confirmed it upon awakening, marking the first-ever 'chat' exchanged in dreams." Impractical, but fascinating.

"Whenever I talk with people born with the internet, I'm surprised at how informed and expressive they are. I don't think the previous generations could have matched up at the same age. Historically, technology has been the enabler of cognition and we're finding more and more ways to design tools for thought to augment our brains." "We find that cybermorphosis changes between generations. The same people who grew up with the internet now don't know what files are." "Hierarchical file systems are great at managing documents but it might not actually be the best way to work with concepts." "While Stephen Hawking in the early 2010s used the few muscles he could still control in a clever way to communicate, today's Neuralink enables Noland Arbaugh to pull Civ VI all-nighters." "We know surprisingly little about how cognition works." "I still remember when we received a grant to purchase the (very expensive) NIRSport2 for our lab which was the state-of-the-art fNIRS neuroimaging equipment at the time. About a week after we received it, the revolutionary Kernel Flow came out, shaking up the field completely." fNIRS stands for "functional near-infrared spectroscopy" and is a near-infrared spectroscopy technique that estimates the concentration of hemoglobin from changes in absorption of near infrared light. Kernel Flow is a fNIRS and electroencephalogram (EEG) headcap for "fast whole-head hemodynamic imaging". "We know surprisingly little about how cognition works." "Cybermorph hardware comes in many forms:" "Multi-channel invasive neural implants for direct neural interaction (such as Neuralink)", "Redesigned keyboards with new types of mapping to improve WPM", "Direct current stimulation to key areas of the brain using tDCS devices", "AR and VR glasses designed to improve how we interact with our extended mind", and "New external effectors such as bionic limbs and prosthetics." tDCS stands for "transcranial direct current stimulation" and is a technique where scalp electrodes create electric currents that create electric fields inside the brain that, depending on the polarity electric fields, increase or decrease neuronal activity in that brain region. At the end, she (Esben Kran) issues a list of predictions for cybermorph brain augmentation. I'll let you click through to get the predictions.

A "prompt testing exercise" in India "involving Meta AI, Gemini, Co-pilot and Adobe Firefly" showed "Meta AI's text-to-image generation feature is being weaponised to create harmful AI images targeting Muslims in India by reinforcing negative stereotypes." I'm reminded that we don't have the "real" LLMs. All the companies have LLMs that can do things that the public LLMs we have access to can't, because of the "guardrail adding" effort. So any time you say, "LLMs can't do X", well, maybe they can, just not the public ones you're using.

Police are using AI to write police reports. I pictured police officers cutting & pasting from ChatGPT, but that's not what this is. The system is called Draft One, from a company called Axon, and the big selling point, is, obviously, saving police officers' time. But apparently the main thing it does is transcribe audio from bodycams. It's not a "police-report-generating LLM". Even so, it is not clear these AI-generated reports will be acceptable as evidence in court.

You should record everything about yourself you possibly can, says Arya Voronova. "We emit information just like we emit heat. As long as we are alive, there's always something being digitized; even your shed in the woods is being observed by a spy satellite. The Internet revolution has made information emissivity increase exponentially, a widespread phenomenon it now uses to grow itself, since now your data pays for online articles, songs, and YouTube videos. Now there are entire databanks containing various small parts of your personality, way more than you could ever have been theoretically comfortable with, enough to track your moves before you're aware you're making them." "Your data will be collected by others no matter your preference, and it will not be shared with you, so you have to collect it yourself. Once you have it, you can use your data to understand yourself better, become stronger by compensating for your weaknesses, help you build healthier relationships with others, living a more fulfilling and fun life overall. Collecting data also means knowing what others might collect and the power it provides, and tyis can help you fight and offset the damage you are bound to suffer because of datamining." "My laptop runs Linux, a hacker-friendly OS. I quickly wrote a Python script that polls the currently focused window, writing every change into a logfile, each day a new file." "I started tacking features on the side. One thing I added was monitoring media file playback, logging it alongside window title changes. Linux systems expose this information over Dbus, and there's a ton of other useful stuff there too! And Dbus is way easier to work with than I've heard, especially when you use a GUI explorer like D-Feet to help you learn the ropes."

Is psychology a young or mature science? "There's a thought that's haunted me for years: we're doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and...then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?" "I've got this picture in my head: we're all on a bus that's supposedly going to Cincinnati. But there are no road signs and we don't have a GPS, so we have no idea if we're going in the right direction. We can't measure our progress by how much gas we're burning, or whether we've upgraded from a manual transmission to an automatic, or whether the government bought us a new bus. And you can't just look out the window and go, 'I dunno, kinda feels like we're headed toward Arkansas,' which, I realize now, is what I've been doing so far." "Instead, you first gotta ask: how could we know we're getting closer to Cincinnati?" "In my estimation, there are five ways to measure psychology's progress, and we are succeeding in exactly one of them." The 5 are: 1. Overturning intuitions, 2. Pitting people armed with the psychological literature and against people armed only with their own intuitions, 3. Helping people make better decisions, 4. Producing useful technology, and 5. Seeing old ideas become nonsensical after paradigm shifts. "The philosopher Michael Strevens says that doing science requires an 'alien mindset' where you entertain ridiculous thoughts like 'perhaps Aristotle needs some updating' or 'maybe we should toss balls of varying weights off a tower and see which one hits the ground first.' Those thoughts don't seem alien anymore, of course, because they worked out. But going full alien-brain today means you will have to entertain thoughts that incur reputational risk, like 'maybe you don't have to pay attention to the literature' and 'maybe we should ask people how their toothbrush could be different'. Once you get into the alien mindset, the best thing to think about is mysteries. What are the self-evident phenomena: things that definitely happen, but that we cannot explain?"

Most of you probably know by now, but just in case you don't, or want to know more, SpaceX launched Starship, their almost 40-story-tall heavy lifter rocket, and landed it vertically back at its launch pad and grabbed it by the launch tower. Most of you probably know about this but it's momentous enough that I feel like I shouldn't leave it out. This is SpaceX's system for making the giant rocket reusable.

If you buy a cheap Chinese thermal camera for your smartphone and install the app, the app will request a boatload of security permissions. It will requests permissions to access your location, to act as an Account Authenticator for the Account Manager, to request authorization tokens from the Account Manager, to read access of your phone state, including the current cellular network information, phone number, the status of any ongoing calls, and a list of any Phone Accounts registered on the device, to start automatically when the device boots up, to initiate a phone call without going through the Dialer user interface for the user to confirm the call, to read the low-level system log files, which can contain your private information, to create windows intended for system-level interaction with the user, to mount and unmount file systems for removable storage, to read or write the system settings, to get information about the currently or recently running tasks, to access information about Wi-Fi networks, to change Wi-Fi connectivity state, to receive a broadcast when the screen is on or has been unlocked, to keep processor from sleeping or screen from dimming, to change network connectivity state, to write to external storage, to perform Mobile Device Management tasks, a permission that is typically used by system apps or device policy management apps, and more. You might think that all the app would do is show you what the camera sees, but no. Oh, but this article has more. It shows how this was figured out, using a tool called JADX, a "Dex to Java decompiler", and Ghidra. By "Dex to Java decompiler", they mean it goes from Dalvik bytecode to Java code from APK, dex, aar, aab, and zip files. Dalvik is the virtual machine on Android phones. Well, Dalvik used to be the virtual machine on Android phones, but a newer, better virtual machine has been invented, but Dalvik is still the format used for the files that are used to distribute Android apps (which is what those file extensions mentioned are about). Not everything neatly decompiled with JADX, which is where Ghidra comes in. Ghidra is a full-fledged reverse engineering tool developed by the NSA. Yes, the NSA. Interestingly the device identifies itself as "Cypress Semiconductor Corp Cino FuzzyScan F760-B". Cypress Semiconductor Corporation was acquired by Infineon in 2020 and no longer exists as a separate corporation. I guess that doesn't stop other people from using its device driver. To top it all off, this article even includes a teardown of the device itself.

"Machines of Loving Grace". Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote an essay about what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. "I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I'm the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I'm a pessimist or "doomer" who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don't think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they're the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future." "In terms of pure intelligence, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields -- biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc." "In addition to just being a 'smart thing you talk to', it has all the 'interfaces' available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on." "It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary." "It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use." "The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by ~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10x-100x human speed. It may however be limited by the response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with." "Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated tasks, or if needed can all work together in the same way humans would collaborate, perhaps with different subpopulations fine-tuned to be especially good at particular tasks." Sounds to me like automation of all work, but he doesn't address that until nearly the end. Before that, he talks about all the ways he thinks AI will improve "biology and physical health", "neuroscience and mental health", "economic development and poverty", and "peace and governance". AI will advance CRISPR, microscopy, genome sequencing and synthesis, optogenetic techniques, mRNA vaccines, cell therapies such as CAR-T, and more due to conceptual insights we can't even predict today. AI will prevent or treat nearly all infectious disease, eliminate most cancer, prevent or cure genetic diseases, improve treatments for diabetes, obesity, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, give people "biological freedom" with physical appearance and other biological processes under people's individual control, and double human lifespan (to 150). AI will cure most mental illnesses like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, and addiction. AI will figure out how to alter brain structure in order to change psychopaths into non-psychopaths. "Non-clinical" everyday psychological problems like feeling drowsy or anxious or having trouble focusing will be solved. AI will increase the amount of "extraordinary moments of revelation, creative inspiration, compassion, fulfillment, transcendence, love, beauty, or meditative peace" people experience. Economically, AI will make health interventions cheap and widely available, AI will increase crop yields develop technology like lab grown meat that increases food securty, AI will develop technology to mitigate climate change, AI will reduce inequality within countries, just as how the poor have the same mobile phones as the rich today; there is no such thing as a "luxury" mobile phone. Regarding "peace and governance", he advocates an "entente strategy", "in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries' access to key resources." This would prevent dictatorships from gaining the upper hand. If democracies have the upper hand globally, that helps with "the fight between democracy and autocracy within each country." "Democratic governments can use their superior AI to win the information war: they can counter influence and propaganda operations by autocracies and may even be able to create a globally free information environment by providing channels of information and AI services in a way that autocracies lack the technical ability to block or monitor." Finally he gets to "work and meaning", where he says, "Comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the '10%' expands to continue to employ almost everyone." "However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized. While that might sound crazy, the fact is that civilization has successfully navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism." Wish I could share his optimism that "civilization" will "successfully" "navigate" this "major economic shift". As those of you who've been hanging around me for any length of time know, I think the major effect of technology competing against humans in the labor market is decreased fertility, rather than an immediate drop in the employment rate, like everyone thinks because that seems more intuitive. He makes no mention of fertility in this context (he mentions it in the context of fertility treatments being something AI will advance), so I think it's not on his radar at all. He considers "opt-out" a "problem" whereby "Luddite movements" create a "dystopian underclass" by opt-ing out of the benifits of AI technology, yet it is the "opt-out" people, like the Amish, that today are able to maintain high fertility rates, and as such will make up the majority of the human population living on this planet in the future (something you can confirm for yourself by doing some math). The original essay is some 14,000 words and my commentary above is just 1,000 or so, so you should probably read the original and get his full original unfiltered point of view.

"Introducing the AI-Powered Electronic Component Classifier: The ultimate in intelligent component management." Possibly useful for those of you who work a lot with electronic components. "The Electronic Component Classifier is a project that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the identification and classification of electrical and electronic components." "Features: Component classification: Resistors, capacitors, LEDs, transistors, potentiometers, diodes, and integrated circuits are the seven classes into which electronic and electrical components can be simply categorised, using multilayer categorization. Further details: With only one click, you may find out more details about integrated Circuits, transistors, and capacitors. User-friendly design: The interface is simple to use and navigate, thanks to its clear headings, buttons, and text boxes."

Pyodide + JupyterLite. This is pretty impressive -- check out my screenshot https://earlywarning.news/files/2024-10-11-12-51-02-screenshot-jupyterlite.png Pyodide is Python running in your web browser -- more specifically, it is a port of CPython to WebAssembly, using Emscripten, which is a compiler toolchain based on LLVM (the compiler toolchain used by Apple languages and Rust) that compiles to WebAssembly. JupyterLite, in turn, enables Python Jupyter notebooks to run insider your browser. The "notebook" interface was pioneered by Mathematica in 1988 and is based on the the idea of creating a document that contains explanatory text, software code, and visualizations, all in the same document, in such a way that the computer actually runs the code and produces the visualizations. The document is divided into "cells" where each cell is text or code along with output produced by the code, such as a visualization. As you can see, I imported SymPy (symbolic math system for Python) and asked it to figure out a few integrals. Remember, the ** operator means exponentiation in Python, not ^ like you may be used to. The thing that really amazes me about this is, this is all running in the *browser* -- and not "in the browser" in the sense of, connecting to a server and running Python and Jupyter on the server and displaying the results in a browser -- no, once all the code is downloaded, everything you see is running in the *browser*. Python is running in the browser, SymPy is running in the browser, all the calculations to determine the integrals I asked for are done in the browser, and all the code for the "notebook" display and that generates the nice mathematical notation is running in the browser. Yes, I checked in Chrome developer tools and verified no network requests are being made -- everything really is running in the browser. Try it yourself.

"The Musa Alphabet" "Why would we want another alphabet, when we already have this one? There are three main reasons:" "1. because Musa is a better alphabet for English than the Roman alphabet (and a better alphabet for Hindi than Devanagari, and so on)," "2. because Musa is a universal alphabet that can be used to write all of the world's languages using the same letters for the same sounds, and" "3. because Musa is easier to learn and use than other alphabets." "The Musa Alphabet is a universal alphabet, designed to be shared by many languages. And it has only 10 basic shapes, so it's easy to learn and makes the Musa keyboard (below) much less complicated than, for instance, the one on your phone." "Those shapes pair up to form hundreds of letters, but each language will only use the ones it needs. For instance, English uses only about 50 of the letters. Each letter might be pronounced slightly differently for different languages - an English t sounds subtly different from a Hindi t - but we don't really care: each language just uses the best letter for each of its sounds." "The Musa Alphabet is featural: the shapes represent phonetic features. For example, nasal consonants like m n ng alll feature a triangular top, and retroflex consonants all feature a zigzag bottom. And it's also iconic: letters share features with their sounds. For example, rounded vowels are round, and closed vowels are closed. Sounds made in the front of the mouth face towards the front (left), and sharp sounds are sharp letters. As a result, letters that sound alike look alike." "As you can see at left, the Musa Alphabet can also be written in several different gaits: as an alphabet, as cursive script, as a syllabary or as characters. This helps Musa look familiar all over the world, and adapts it to the needs of each language. But all these gaits still use the same letters, so everybody can read it." It seems to me like this is a lot less likely to replace the Latin alphabet used for English (or any other writing system used for any other language -- especially in this age of unicode and good AI translators) than it is to replace IPA -- the international phonetic alphabet. The IPA is the alphabet for those pronunciations in dictionaries and Wikipedia and so fourth, and it's not intuitive at all.