cooking, dialog, photography, science, terms, & technology.
Austin, Texas
Joined June 2010
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Majascule retweeted
House leaders are considering a dangerous backroom deal to secretly reauthorize Section 702, a law the government uses to conduct mass warrantless surveillance of Americans.
Congress has only held a secret session 4 times in all of U.S. history.
wired.com/story/section-702-…
Majascule retweeted
The City of Austin is in court today over a case I wrote about in 2021.
The city’s been trying to build an affordable house on a piece of land it owns in West Austin. A neighbor sued: kut.org/austin/2021-09-10/we…
Majascule retweeted
An infinite happiness prompt in Midjourney good for endless rerolls.
35 mm film still shot on Kodachrome capturing a group of people gathered together, their faces wreathed in smiles and laughter. Bright and cheerful lighting, with the sun casting a warm glow on the subject's faces. Joyful, convivial energy. A warm and loving moment. --ar 16:9
🧵Selects in thread
Majascule retweeted
If it’s not clear yet, this is what I think will happen soon.
Every major tech company except Apple has announced their own LLM.
Apple have spent years perfecting their on-device neural engine. Capable of some absolute insane operations. Loads of compute in a small and energy efficient form factor.
With M1, M2 & soon M3 the neural engine is even more powerful than their A series mobile chipsets.
While we currently need the cloud to run ChatGPT and it’s clunky, I think Apple is going to blow everyone out of the water here. Both on desktop class hardware and mobile.
I think Apple will be launching their own secure and private LLM that runs on device (edge compute). And when necessary it offloads more heavy workloads to a cloud based LLM that’s optimized for heavier tasks. So we will initially have some hybrid.
Personal, with tight hardware and software integration this AI will be omnipresent. Apple will probably use this to sell a lot of new hardware that they claim is needed to run this. They will make a lot of moneys.
For me the LLM’s will form the new protocol level technology upon which most new software will be built. We will have to re-wire our core understanding about what an application is.
Single-use apps will be a huge thing. If you need to solve a unique problem, and nobody has ever done software for that because not enough market. With an LLM even a problem with only one user, will be doable, enter your ask, and code gets written, problem gets solved. Runtime ends, app dies. Done. Single use apps are born.
It’s hard to predict or try to understand how the world will look just 10 years from today. It will be very different, we have passed the inflection point, the rocket engines have been lit. We’ve taken off.
Add to all the above that every single field, category and market will be disrupted at the same time. And not only with text/coding but with any multi-media we have. Images, video & audio. Anything we can come up with can and will be enhanced or disrupted by AI.
Once we got more people that will have their AI A-ha moment the rate of change and adoption will continue to increase. This will continue until we have global access and coverage.
People will get left behind, and this will be one of the most important things to try to combat. Having a 0% left behind policy. We need to make sure AI benefits all.
We’re living through a paradigm shift, and we’re witness a new protocol level technology. We’re seeing it arrive in real-time and most people have no clue about what’s about to happen.
I’m not an AI alarmist, I’m an AI gardener, and optimist.
We will have time to adapt. Not as long as we had during the Industrial Revolution, but enough time to make sure we have a chance at a positive outcome.
We’re moving away from the Information Age into the Age of Intelligence. With unlimited access to intelligence anywhere, anytime.
18th Mars 2023 - Linus Ekenstam
Majascule retweeted
Midjourney v5 is here! (for real this time, lol)
Here are some side-by-sides of my prompts, v4 vs v5, as well as some new prompts and crowd shots. I'll add more to this as I experiment.
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Majascule retweeted
I don't think people realize what a big deal it is that Stanford retrained a LLaMA model, into an instruction-following form, by **cheaply** fine-tuning it on inputs and outputs **from text-davinci-003**.
It means: If you allow any sufficiently wide-ranging access to your AI model, even by paid API, you're giving away your business crown jewels to competitors that can then nearly-clone your model without all the hard work you did to build up your own fine-tuning dataset. If you successfully enforce a restriction against commercializing an imitation trained on your I/O - a legal prospect that's never been tested, at this point - that means the competing checkpoints go up on bittorrent.
I'm not sure I can convey how much this is a brand new idiom of AI as a technology. Let's put it this way:
If you put a lot of work into tweaking the mask of the shoggoth, but then expose your masked shoggoth's API - or possibly just let anyone build up a big-enough database of Qs and As from your shoggoth - then anybody who's brute-forced a *core* *unmasked* shoggoth can gesture to *your* shoggoth and say to *their* shoggoth "look like that one", and poof you no longer have a competitive moat.
It's like the thing where if you let an unscrupulous potential competitor get a glimpse of your factory floor, they'll suddenly start producing a similar good - except that they just need a glimpse of the *inputs and outputs* of your factory. Because the kind of good you're producing is a kind of pseudointelligent gloop that gets sculpted; and it costs money and a simple process to produce the gloop, and separately more money and a complicated process to sculpt the gloop; but the raw gloop has enough pseudointelligence that it can stare at other gloop and imitate it.
In other words: The AI companies that make profits will be ones that either have a competitive moat not based on the capabilities of their model, OR those which don't expose the underlying inputs and outputs of their model to customers, OR can successfully sue any competitor that engages in shoggoth mask cloning.
Majascule retweeted
For those who are unaware: the FDIC is brutally efficient, vastly more than almost any other government agency I can name. On Monday morning, the former Silicon Valley Bank branches will re-open under the name of another bank.
Majascule retweeted
As I teach my students, when asymmetric information leads to adverse selection, the customer you get is often not the customer you want. And creeper guy is unlikely to be the customer I want.
There’s lotsa creepy stuff in his thread. My point is that there’s also bad economics.
Majascule retweeted
Crazy day. After 22 years between SVB and FRB, I'm still at shock. My wife also works at SVB right now.
The news today was huge, and here is what I've pieced together across 100's of conversations yesterday/today.
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Majascule retweeted
How did every single major bank think it was a good idea to put all of their customer deposits into long duration bonds yielding 1%?
Majascule retweeted
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that allows private citizens to bring civil action against anyone who manufactures, distributes, transports or imports assault weapons or ghost guns, which are banned in the state.
