“You know what truth is? It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, “Yeah, yeah – ain’t it the truth?”

  • The Airplane Economic Model

    I’ve never been completely satisfied with terms like wealthy, rich, middle class, poor or working class. They seem to be amorphous and ill defined to me, and mostly just get politicized for various purposes. It is hard to define groups based on income numbers because of variations in cost of living or other factors such…

  • Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 6 – The Dark Side)

    Part 1 of the series is here. AI like any new technology brings with it both promises of great benefits and also many concerns about how it might cause bad outcomes. Since there’s plenty of people who are already trying to get rich by selling the idea that AI will solve all our problems, I think…

  • Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 5 – Text to Image)

    Part 1 of the series is here. After spending time talking about LLMs and what they can do with text, Let’s go back to looking at images. Text to image generators allow you to just type something like: “create an image of a cat wearing a blue baseball cap” And you get: There are several tools…

  • Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 4 – GPT to ChatGPT)

    Part 1 of the series is here. In our last post we saw how an LLM when given some text to start with could generate more text. This idea forms the basis of a tool like ChatGPT but there are still a few steps to get there. GPT3 by OpenAI was maybe the most powerful model…

  • Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 3 – LLMs)

    Part 1 of the series is here. Machine learning and neural network systems have been around for a while but it seems like everything has really exploded in the last few years. We’ve gone pretty quickly from computers using AI to understand  “Alexa, set a timer for 5 mins” most of the time,  to worrying…

  • Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 2 – Neural Nets)

    Part 1 of the series is here. Many different techniques have been used for Machine Learning over the years, but since all of the most exciting recent advances have been made using neural network systems that’s what we will focus on in this series. So let’s start from the basics. A neural network is a…

  • Explaining What’s up with AI (Part 1 – What is Machine Learning?)

    A friend of mine asked me to explain to him what’s going on with all this AI stuff. What should they know about it? etc. This person is very smart but not technical in all the ways we computer people like to use that word so I wanted to try to create an explanation which…

  • LLMs w/o Supervision

    It’s pretty amazing what these LLMs can do in a role as an assistant to a human user. As long as a human is there to check the results, we will see more and more places where LLMs and systems built on top of them will improve the productivity of users. What’s harder to think…

  • Good Process

    Every functioning software development team or organization has a process. It might be formal or informal, functional or dysfunctional, chaotic or stable, but their is some way to describe how things get done. I don’t think there is any one best process, but I do think there’s some markers of what makes a good one.…

  • AGI and SuperIntelligence

    How should we think about the timeline for AI and the prospects for Super Intelligence