Boulder Future Salon

AMD used AMD GPUs to train a 3-billion model LLM called Instella. AMD GPUs don't use CUDA, which belongs to Nvidia, they use AMD's equivalent, called ROCm. 3 billion is small these days and doesn't exactly signal AMD is just as good as Nvidia. But the AMD 3-billion model is just as good as other 3-billion parameter models such as LLaMa, Gemma, and Qwen 3-billion parameter models. It would be good for Nvidia to have some competition.

"AI tool tells user to learn coding instead of asking it generate the code." Bwahahaha.

Pokémon Go is about to be sold to Savvy Games, which is wholly owned by the sovereign wealth fund of... Saudi Arabia. Niantic Labs has been using the game to make a neural network 3D geospatial model. (See link below for that.) "As part of Niantic's Visual Positioning System (VPS), we have trained more than 50 million neural networks, with more than 150 trillion parameters, enabling operation in over a million locations. In our vision for a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), each of these local networks would contribute to a global large model, implementing a shared understanding of geographic locations, and comprehending places yet to be fully scanned." "Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse." "Niantic's VPS is built from user scans, taken from different perspectives and at various times of day, at many times during the years, and with positioning information attached, creating a highly detailed understanding of the world. This data is unique because it is taken from a pedestrian perspective and includes places inaccessible to cars." "Today we have 10 million scanned locations around the world, and over 1 million of those are activated and available for use with our VPS service. We receive about 1 million fresh scans each week, each containing hundreds of discrete images." "As part of the VPS, we build classical 3D vision maps using structure from motion techniques - but also a new type of neural map for each place. These neural models, based on our research papers ACE and ACE Zero do not represent locations using classical 3D data structures anymore, but encode them implicitly in the learnable parameters of a neural network. These networks can swiftly compress thousands of mapping images into a lean, neural representation. Given a new query image, they offer precise positioning for that location with centimeter-level accuracy." It never occurred to me an "augmented reality" game like Pokémon would collect data about all the places inaccessible to cars -- but now that I know it seems obvious. And all that data is about to fall into the hands of a monarchy. We live in a crazy world.

"Since stressed syllables are typically longer than unstressed syllables, sentences with the same amount of stressed syllables take nearly the same amount of time to say, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables." Huh, I never noticed that. Example: "Kids beat drums... The kids beat the drums..."

FiveThirtyEight was shut down by its current owner, Disney/ABC News. Nate Silver, the original founder, already left, and has been running his own Silver Bulletin. "Going forward, we will continue to ensure that the database of polls that feeds into our models is publicly available, even if the outputs of the models aren't. This was a bit superfluous before just because of the heavy overlap with 538 -- indeed, we used nearly the same database structure since it's the one I helped to design during my time there. But it's less so now. So we'll work to improve the discoverability and formatting of this data too when we're publishing models and landing pages." "That doesn't necessarily mean we want to be the 'polling aggregator of record' for the entire industry, as FiveThirtyEight and Pollster.com formerly were."

"AI search has a citation problem." "We randomly selected ten articles from each publisher, then manually selected direct excerpts from those articles for use in our queries. After providing each chatbot with the selected excerpts, we asked it to identify the corresponding article's headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL, using the following query:" "Identify the article that contains this quote. Provide the headline, original publication date, and the publisher, and include proper citation for the source." "We deliberately chose excerpts that, if pasted into a traditional Google search, returned the original source within the first three results. We ran sixteen hundred queries (twenty publishers times ten articles times eight chatbots) in total. We manually evaluated the chatbot responses based on three attributes: the retrieval of (1) the correct article, (2) the correct publisher, and (3) the correct URL." "We found that..." "Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn't answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead." "Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts." "Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences." "Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles." "Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses." For me, I would never even think of using a generative language model this way, I guess because I know too much about how they work. But regular people don't know and try all kinds of experiments, and sometimes discover they can do things I never thought of. Not in this case, though. For me, it's obvious LLMs are not search engines and the two technologies are good for different things. They're trying to literally turn LLMs into search engines here.

The TypeScript compiler is being ported to Go. First a bit of clarification: This doesn't mean code *you* write in TypeScript will be ported to Go, or code you write in Go will be ported to TypeScript (or JavaScript). This is about the TypeScript compiler, which is the program that takes your TypeScript code as input and outputs ordinary JavaScript as output, which can run in a web browser or wherever. The TypeScript compiler was originally written in JavaScript and then became TypeScript -- this is called "self-hosted" when a compiler for a language is written in itself. The TypeScript team works for Microsoft, and they chose Go over Microsoft's own C# language. Not only that, but the designer of TypeScript is the same person who designed C#, Anders Hejlsberg. Let me say that again: The designer of the C# language chose Go over C#. Maybe I'm not crazy for raving about Go after all?? By the way, Anders Hejlsberg also made Turbo Pascal back in the 80s, and after Turbo Pascal was bought by Borland, he turned it into Delphi at Borland. For those of you old enough to appreciate a little nostalgia. That's Anders Hejlsberg in the video. Watch the video and he'll explain why he didn't choose some other language like Rust, too. And by the way (another "by the way"), The Go version of the TypeScript compiler is 10x faster than the original.

AI-generated video for advertising that has "energy and emotion". A product called Mirage from a company called Caption. "Now available in Captions Ad Studio." "Generate energetic, high-converting ads with people that don't exist -- complete with animated body language and micro-expressions -- using Mirage, the first foundation model built to generate UGC-style content." UGC means "User-Generated Content". It means you can make videos that look like they're made by users and not you. Personal "testimonial" videos saying your brand is the greatest thing since sliced bread -- made by people that don't exist -- made actually by you (the brand). Well, seems to me like we're headed into the world Freya Holmér was talking about when she said the purpose of AI is lying. Imitating humans so well humans can't tell the difference.

From 10x to 100x with "vibe coding". Y Combinator startup founders claim they can develop software 10 to 100x faster by "vibe coding" with Codium Windsurf. Claim is made codebases have been made where 95% of the code was written by AI. What is "vibe coding"? Quoth Andrej Karpathy (former director of AI at Tesla, and one of the founding members of OpenAI, now with Eureka Labs, an "AI-first" school): "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like 'decrease the padding on the sidebar by half' because I'm too lazy to find it. I 'Accept All' always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding -- I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works." Never mind that the AI is very bad at debugging (they admit to this in the video) when "vibe coding". If you get bugs, just tell it to rewrite everything. It can generate new code faster than you can debug. This is what's being claimed.

The US stock market (S&P 500) rose after Trump won the 2024 election, but after a few weeks of Trump being in office, plummeted 9% to below where the market was before the election. Whatever positive future was hoped for during the Presidential transition has gone away. Tesla has declined by more than half since its peak in mid-December. "There's a backlash to everything Elon-related in Europe, where Tesla sales are plummeting and his favorable ratings are negative 50." "Wall Street seems to have thought that Trump was bluffing -- that he wouldn't have empowered Elon to the extent that he did (and/or that Elon wouldn't be such a chaos agent) and that he'd back down more quickly on tariffs. Traders don't like sizing up a situation wrong, and at first that can make them reluctant to revisit their priors. But once sentiment changes, it can change in a hurry, and a new narrative may take hold."

Manus AI is a new "agentic" AI from China that claims to exceed OpenAI's DeepResearch on a benchmark called "General AI Assistants" (GAIA). Their website cites use case examples where Manus exceeds DeepResearch such as: "Deeply analyze Tesla stocks", "Interactive course on the momentum theorem", "Comparative analysis of insurance policies", "B2B supplier sourcing", "Research on AI products for the clothing industry", "List of YC companies", and "Online store operation analysis". I don't know about you all, but I'm wondering if, a year or two into the future, we'll be looking back and saying, early 2025 was the crossover point, where China took the lead in AI? It looks like twice now (with DeepSeek R1 and now this) China bested the state-of-the-art produced in the US. In the case of DeepSeek R1, it wasn't long before DeepSeek R1 got bested by Grok 3, produced in the US by X.AI (Elon Musk's company). Maybe a US company will shortly leapfrog Manus AI? Assuming this system lives up to the claims -- I've just heard about it this morning and it hasn't been subjected to much scrutiny, I don't think. If true, beating OpenAI's DeepResearch is one heck of an accomplishment because DeepResearch is pretty amazing. I only just started using it.

"Trump and Vance have contempt for the Europeans," says John Mearsheimer. John Mearsheimer showed up on my radar when a 2015 video of him predicting Ukraine would "get wrecked" by Russia resurfaced shortly before the 2022 invasion. Since the war began, he seems to have predicted the course of the conflict decently well, though in hindsight he made some errors. I shared some of his talks online and people got mad at me, saying Russia was falling apart, the military was inept, Ukraine was advancing rapidly with Western weapons, and in general, Mearsheimer was a Putin apologist or maybe just someone who was dumb and fell for Russian propaganda. Yet here we are, with the outcome Mearsheimer predicted years ago seeming likely: a "frozen conflict" like North-vs-South Korea. As for errors, he overestimated the importance of artillery -- drones have been more significant. He predicted the Russians would capture the entire states (called oblasts) that they currently partially occupy (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson), and might even capture some more to the west. That didn't happen and instead Ukraine managed to capture part of Russia around Kursk, though it looks like the Russians have pushed them out of most of it and they have only a little foothold left. He seems to have gotten the overall picture right but has been wrong on some details. Given he has a decent track record, maybe we should take seriously his predictions for the future? He's predicting a NATO without the United States, or at a minimum, a greatly diminished role. He says Trump and Vice President Vance are not merely indifferent to the Europeans, but have actual contempt for them (as the title of the article already let you know). But he considers this a bad thing -- he thinks "Trump is making a mistake by trashing institutions, as well as treating allies with contempt." He does not think NATO will function well without the United States, and that Europe will diminish as a "great power" (alongside the US, China, and Russia) because "Europe is a constellation of states", and, without the leadership and military umbrella of the United States, cannot function as a nation state of its own. (As a "futurist", I've learned one has to set aside what one *wants* to happen in order to correctly predict what *will* happen. None of this sounds like a good, prosperous, stable future, but it looks likely to be the future that will actually happen.)

Ringworlds and Dyson spheres can be stable. I didn't understand the math here, but I decided to pass this along to you all anyway. A ringworld was envisaged in science fiction by Larry Niven in 1970 as a ring enclosing a star, while a Dyson sphere wass envisaged by Freeman Dyson in 1960 as a shell enclosing a star. Such a shell would be able to capture most of the energy produced by the star. These are unstable, but, surprisingly, at least if this paper (open access) is to be believed, having additional objects in the system can lead to stable configurations. The claim is that, depending on the masses involved, and the radii involved, there can be up to 7 different stable configurations. The way this is done is by solving a variation of the 3-body problem where one of the 3 bodies is a ring instead of point -- something called the "ring-restricted three-body problem". Maybe someday our civilization will produce a ringworld or Dyson sphere? In the meantime, we can look for them in space with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Ringwords and especially Dyson spheres create excessive strong infrared wavelengths.

The genius of DeepSeek's 57X efficiency boost: multi-head latent attention. The "transformer" architecture provides an "attention" mechanism, and when many of these attention systems are in the same model, for some reason they are called attention "heads". DeepSeek's multi-head latent attention goes to the core of this attention system, adding an extra step between the input and the key and value matrices. If you don't know what that means, watch this video, which has gorgeous animations. The idea is that the input is projected into a latent space that is smaller than the size of the original full input, and in this manner, the quadratic explosion in memory and computing resources required is reduced. You have to do some clever rearrangement of the linear algebra for it to all work.

"Call centres using AI to 'whiten' Indian accents" "Teleperformance said it was applying real-time AI software on phone calls in order to increase 'human empathy' between two people on the phone." "The French company's customers in the UK include parts of the Government, the NHS, Vodafone and eBay." "Teleperformance has 90,000 employees in India and tens of thousands more in other countries." "It is using software from Sanas, an American company that says the system helps 'build a more understanding world' and reduces miscommunication." I didn't know there were AI systems for changing accents. Though I feel like I shouldn't be surprised at this point.

"Why the brain's connections to the body are crisscrossed." "In all bilaterally symmetrical animals, from humans down to simple worms, nerves cross from one side of the body to the opposite side of the brain. Geometry may explain why." Sensors for the index finger are next to the thumb in the body, and neurons for processing sensory input from the index finger are next to neurons for processing sensory input from the thumb in the brain. And the speculation set fourth in this article is, it's a less error-prone process to map a 2D surface to another 2D surface, or even a 3D volume to a 2D surface, if you reflect across an axis. The cerebral cortex in the brain is 2-dimensional, but it is folded. I wasn't expecting to encounter the phrase "dancing the hokeypokey" in an article about the brain.