Monday 11/25/2024
Despite steady light rain I took a walk this morning. I cut it a little short (but 2.9 miles for the day). At 11 I met with Alice and Mary R. in the music practice space. We practiced singing RATCT. Mary, former choir director, said we sound pretty good. We set up time for another rehearsal, which will be with John on piano, in the auditorium.
Then off to FOPAL. Only three boxes of donations to process, but several interesting things, including a small book by Steven Wolfram (well known math popularizer and computer scientist), What is ChatGPT Doing and why does it work. Good questions. I’m half way through and he admits that a lot of the things designed into ChatGPT do not have a theoretical or scientific basis, they are just tweaks and design tricks that work better than the alternatives. So the actual answer to “why does it work” is, “it just does.” There is no theoretical basis for why a many-layered neural net should reproduce a good simulation of human speech.
Trying to get through two tough-ish books. I’ve gotten to the point in Harari’s Nexus where he admits, the whole previous half of the book was prologue, establishing that human society is based on information networks. Now he will turn to the advent of computers and AI, and what to do about it, or expect from it.
Codgerville 