Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Book Review: "Quantum Supremacy" by Michio Kaku (tl;dr DO NOT BUY)

  Scott Aaronson, #1 quantum computing blogger on the planet.

  In the spirit, perhaps, of the TikTokkers who eat live cockroaches or whatever to satisfy their viewers, I decided to oblige loyal Shtetl-Optimized fans by buying Quantum Supremacy and reading it. So I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word "about," that I've ever encountered.

• AI machines aren't 'hallucinating'. But their makers are

  Naomi Klein in The Guardian

  Warped hallucinations are indeed afoot in the world of AI, however -- but it's not the bots that are having them; it's the tech CEOs who unleashed them, along with a phalanx of their fans, who are in the grips of wild hallucinations, both individually and collectively.
  ...
  Altman, like many creatures of Silicon Valley, is himself a prepper: back in 2016, he boasted:
  "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."
  

• Conjecture

  We are a team of researchers dedicated to applied, scalable AI alignment research.

  We believe we will see transformative artificial intelligence within our lifetime. We also expect that powerful, advanced AI will be derived from modern machine learning architectures and techniques like gradient descent. We look to build a more bounded, controllable model architecture to help speed up alignment progress.

• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

  Long explanation with many technical details by Stephen Wolfram.

  My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what's going on inside ChatGPT-and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text. I should say at the outset that I'm going to focus on the big picture of what's going on-and while I'll mention some engineering details, I won't get deeply into them.

• Google brings dark web monitoring to all U.S. Gmail users

  Once enabled, it will allow Gmail users to scan the dark web for their email addresses and take action to protect their data based on guidance provided by Google.

• War for Profit: A Short History

  Ninety years after the original Merchants of Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time be the last time. We may not have another chance.

• The people turning time into a currency

  Time banking is in essence a more sophisticated form of bartering. You don't pay someone in money for a job that they do for you. Instead you give that person time credits that they can then use to get a service without financial payment from someone else.

  See TimeRepublik.