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Elliot Smith

What makes a model a Foundation Model?

Major tech companies like Google, Meta and OpenAI have spent a large part of this year releasing what they call new foundation models. The world seems to be in a race to be the go to model to build new models and products. Despite all of the hype (or perhaps

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

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

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

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

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

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