In 1998, Neil Postman wrote critically about the Age of Information. If there are children starving in the world—and there are—it is not because of insufficient information. [...] If there is violence on our streets, it is not because we have insufficient information. If women are abused, if divorce and pornography and mental illness are increasing, none of it has anything to do with insufficient … [Read more...]
Large Language Models
Stephen Wolfram has written a comprehensive description of how Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, work. … [Read more...]
The company you keep…
Researchers have demonstrated how objects can be hidden by exploiting correlation bias. Computer vision systems, like other machine learning technologies, rely on correlation and context. They learn that certain things often appear together--like mice and keyboards. But you don't expect to see a platypus wielding a chainsaw, for example (...you've no idea how much I wanted to find that splash … [Read more...]
Skin in the game
I tend to listen more to opinions when people have placed money on their espoused outcome---having "skin in the game", as Nicholas Taleb calls it in his latest book. However, this robotics developer seems to have gone one better. He literally has skin in the game. Good scientists aren't supposed to experiment on themselves, but I will feel better if the first people to use autonomous cars are … [Read more...]
Google Dataset Search
Google have created a tool to make it easier to discover datasets---Google Dataset Search. One potential downside is that it requires dataset owners to provide metadata. While the Google brand means that this might get some traction, not all dataset owners are motivated to help the cause. Publication of datasets is now mandated by some funding bodies, but that doesn't mean that the datasets have … [Read more...]