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Elliot Smith

The Frontiers of Knowledge - Book Review

Author: A. C. Grayling Format: Audible Category: Science - General I am currently looking to move house and in preparation I've been trying to read books that have been on my shelf too long. These are books I have been meaning to get to for years. Often gifts or books

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars - Book Review

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars - Book Review

Format: Audible 32 Hours Author: Christopher Paolini Genre: Science Fiction Christopher Paolini, famous for the Eragon series, has taken a step into science fiction with the novel To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. The story follows a story of humanity expanding beyond the bounds of earth and coming face

Findings #10

This week has been all about AI sentience. This begs some deeper posts but I will touch on the high-level ideas here. It all started when a Google employee made a call that LaMDA was sentient. LaMDA is an AI that creates chatbots. After several conversations, the employee felt the

Findings #9

From The Web This week, there was an interesting look at how DALLE-2 handles internal representation. This thread from Giannis Daras looked at what he called DALLE-2's secret language. DALLE-2 has a secret language. "Apoploe vesrreaitais" means birds. "Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons" means bugs or pests. The prompt: "Apoploe vesrreaitais

A look back at twenty years of writing code

In one way or another, I have been writing code for the last two decades. If I am being honest with you, dear reader, I can't pinpoint the exact time I wrote my first software, but it is close enough to twenty years to take some poetic license with this.

Findings #8

🍅 From the Web The world seems to be on a little bit of rocky footing right now, especially when it comes to the economy. That does little to stop some amazing breakthroughs in science. This week I came across this paper from Nature Plants. Biofortified tomatoes provide a new route

Findings #7

From the web Some of the bigger news in the AI world this last week has been the release of DeepMind's new Gato model. Borrowing from the original post (linked below): The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network

Findings #6

Another week, another collection of interesting things from around the internet. This week has been a little wild across stock markets and general sentiment. I hope you're not being hit too hard. If you enjoy this, consider subscribing or sending it to a friend. From Around the Web After an

We are linear minds in an exponential world

I remember reading about an experiment long ago. Participants were shown a bar. This bar was supposed to represent the numbers 1 to 1,000,000. The researchers asked each participant to mark where 1,000 would appear on the line. Have a go yourself, gut feeling only. Take a

Findings #5

Hello again. Another edition of findings. I hope you're enjoying these. If you are, consider subscribing to get them straight to your inbox. From the Web First, is an article that has been on my to-read list for a while. The recent string of long weekends gave me time to

Findings #4

Welcome back to another week. There was a lot happening this past week, including the much-discussed purchase of Twitter. One of the promises I found particularly interesting was the promise to open source the timeline algorithm. More on that later. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From the web I found myself back on a

Collaborative AI as a path to AGI

Let's say you made a time machine, and the catch is you can only bring people forward from the past. You turn it on and zap a dozen people into the room from 1800. Given enough time to catch up on the language and the latest in education, are these

Findings #3

Hello again. This one is coming a day later than usual as I took a little time to unwind over the long weekend. I hope you all had some time to relax as well. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This week I was sent some interesting news on a new AI system that has

Findings #2

Welcome back to the second edition of Findings. A short collection of interesting things I found last week. If you found this interesting, consider subscribing. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From around the web The first article for this week is a post from a patient undergoing a clinical trial for a new device

Little by little, then all at once

When I was a kid, I played a lot of Age of Empires. My favourite moment was gathering enough resources to move to the next 'age'. When I did, suddenly, dozens of new upgrades were available that transformed my city and its citizens. Within a few clicks, I went from

Findings #1

Hey, I'm adding something new to my roster of content. Once a week I'll post a quick update on interesting articles, videos, and general content from last week. It will be in theme for the rest of my content so you should find it interesting. If you know anyone who

Will we mourn for Siri?

Will we mourn for Siri?

I remember the first time I said "thank you" to Siri. I wasn't paying attention and had asked for a timer to be set. Nothing particularly difficult, but without much thought, out slipped "thank you". To be clear, I don't think Siri is doing what I ask out of politeness

Unbundling health on the path to value-based care

Unbundling health on the path to value-based care

Introduction Live long enough, and you're bound to see familiar businesses unbundle and bundle back up. Jim Barksdale famously said that these are the only two ways to make money in business. Different factors drive these processes, but they often come at a time of technological innovation. There has long

Can AI help when it's "more of an art than a science"?

Even within technical fields, people describe specific tasks as "more of an art than a science". Within the context of AI, many will claim that AI can do the 'science' but not the 'art'. This begs the question of what art and science entail. With useful definitions of the two,

Personalisation and Curation

Personalisation and Curation

When I'm out of town and looking for somewhere to eat I open maps and pick somewhere near by with enough stars to lessen fears of food poisoning. These ratings come from humans that have been there and wanted to voice their opinion. Ignoring selection bias, the star rating is

AI will come for knowledge work, 3 ways we might respond.

AI will eat the world Given enough time and compute resources, AI will replace 90% of the knowledge work we do today. At the current rate of automation that time may be shorter than we think. The 90% that is replaced by AI will be the simpler things, repetitive well

The importance of picking the right loss function

I don't know if Drucker thought a lot about artificial intelligence but he could have been when he said, 'what gets measured, gets managed. AI models learn through a repeated effort to minimise error. How we define error can wildly change how an AI learns and how useful it is

Debaters, Inflaters and the polarisation of online discussion.

The foundation of good science is debate decoupled from people. Debaters take data, present conclusions and discuss their meaning in the real world. Debaters don't tie their ego to outcomes when the discussion happens in a trusted environment. An idea can be bad, wrong or invalid without saying anything about

things-ive-done

Things I've Done: My PhD

In contrast to my post about Pepster [https://www.elliotcsmith.com/things-pepster/], this isn't going to be a year-by-year timeline for my research. Anyone who has done a Ph.D. can probably attest to the sporadic nature of getting from start to finish. Instead, this will be a breakdown of

AI and Helmer's 7 Powers

Artificial Intelligence has made its way past the hype and into a lot of products. I've been working on AI in healthcare since 2016 as a founder of Maxwell Plus [https://maxwellplus.com]. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly but still believe that AI will speed up