I recently finished reading the book "If anyone builds it, everyone dies". The author's make the case for restricting current AI research and deployment of models until we have a better grasp of the technology as a whole.  They suggest that "...sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us — and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us." We can all read that and shrug our shoulders at the hyperboli

I’ve just finished reading Max Bennett’s book “A brief history of intelligence”. It details the origin of intelligence from microbial organisms to current day and later in the book draws parallels to AI. It defines five key breakthroughs; the most recent one is Speaking/Language. And at one point in this book, Bennett states that a key aspect of how we’ve become so successful as a species is how we transfer information. The written language is key to this. It allows us to tra

I recently saw a Quora thread named: ‘Is it just me or is ChatGPT become the best therapist you’ve ever had?” It went on to describe their experience and many people chimed in with similar experiences. One reply stated: “Yoooo! Me, too. I’ve spent literally THOUSANDS for my therapist and I swear the advice is the same she gives me. Like, I’ll use Chat first and then have my session with her a few days later. She’ll give the exact same advice! This keeps up much longer and I’m

I hang a lot with my pal Copilot nowadays. We chat. We exchange recipes. It acts like my therapist. Just normal stuff. So of course I asked my old buddy whether we could play a game of chess. Copilot exclaimed “I'd love to play a game of chess with you! We can play right here, turn by turn.” It didn’t occur to me to ask if it actually knew how to play. At least not now. After a few attempts he managed to get a board up with the notation and the pieces (the notation is wrong,

I don’t want to be an alarmist, but when I read this particular X-post from Elon Musk I felt an apocalyptic dread spread through the future of mankind. I don’t think what Elon is writing is actually possible. At least not the way he suggests. But it does suggest two things: Elon is into revisionism in a big way and that should worry us all. Elon has realised that there is too much garbage in the foundational data. I’d like to address both these items in this article. ELON THE

Welcome to the death match of AI philosophy. There isn’t much on the line here. Really just people presenting opposing views in research papers. But what glorious battle takes place on those pages! Let me set the scene. If we assume Free Will exists at all, does Agentic AI have it? We have Frank Martella from Aalto University in Finland in one corner who in his paper conclude that  “…the best (and only viable) way of explaining both of their behaviour involves postulating tha

Apple caused a tidal wave of “I told you so!” LinkedIn-articles when they released the study “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity”. It became widely cited, rightly or wrongly, as proof that today’s LLMs fundamentally lack scalable reasoning ability. I must admit I was going to write a commentary on it too, but a while back I made the arbitrary decision to only write one of these articles

Recently I wrote an article about the Open AI rolling back some changes made to its model because it was leaning too far into sycophantic behaviour, which led to encouraging grand delusions and self-harm in users. I explained what happened, but completely missed the more important question. Why did they make the change in the first place? OpenAI wanted ChatGPT to be more pleasant to interact with and be perceived as more helpful. They did that by allowing user feedback to be

Absolutely amazed how far AI video generation has come. Two months ago, I wrote an article about Gapminder, an independent educational non-profit fighting global misconceptions. They've shown that is some knowledge areas we (humans) score worse than just randomly guessing. In my mind this was represented by a chimpanzee, which maybe is unfair, but I am a simple person. I generated an image to represent this battle of minds and tried to create a video based on that image, but wa

I try and cut through the hype whenever I can. I'm not suggesting I'm good at it, but I try. In the AI world, the hype machine is...

Open AI recently had to roll back some changes made to its model because it was leaning too far into sycophantic behaviour, which led to...

I’ve always loved horror in all its forms as long as it is at a safe distance, be it movies, books or games. In my mind they satisfy our...

Agentic AI is all the rage at the moment. It isn’t just the influencers filling my LinkedIn and youtube feed telling me so. The...

The wetware in your head, aka your brain, is slow. So very slow. The information transfer between neurons has a typical latency of...

I’ve always been a bit hesitant to use the word   think   when it comes to Generative AI model. If we look at the term purely as a...

I read a long time ago that there were researchers that used William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a fun way to measure technological progress....

MIT and OpenAI teamed up to ask a very important question: How do interactions with AI chatbots affect people’s social and emotional...

Cortical Labs have created something quite amazing. They’ve productionised an in vitro biological mini brain. When reading about it, I...

I like words.  In my youth I thought a language was a pretty static thing and that new words were brought into the language through some...

Went to the Everything Electric here in Sydney this weekend.  The number of Chinese car brands there to take on the Musk-mobiles were...