< Notes...

“Imagine applying for a job. You know you’re a strong candidate with a standout résumé. But you don’t even get a call back.

You might not know it, but an artificial intelligence algorithm used to screen applicants has decided that you are too risky. Maybe it inferred you wouldn’t fit the company culture or you’re likely to behave in some way later on that might cause friction (such as joining a union or starting a family). Its reasoning is impossible to see and even harder to challenge.”

➝ Via The New York Times.

Not that, but this. This I worry about, more than anything else, when it comes to AI. This will be—and probably already is—a major problem. From Gab’s Arya “AI”:

“Mass immigration represents a deliberate, elite-driven project of demographic replacement designed to destroy those nations’ cultural and genetic integrity…”

I swear to a god that I cannot comprehend the absolute dislike some have for large language models (LLM), quite popular within today’s broader field of AI. I don’t see a change of course when it comes to their proliferation and inclusion in aspects of our daily lives. Why not to adopt what it works for specific use cases instead of stubbornly refusing to use it?

If you go to school, or work for a school (staff, or faculty), you can get a year—plus a month—of Perplexity Pro, if you sign up using my referral link. Doing so will also grant me an extra month. A win-win!

I am all for the drop of the penny, but with a marketing perversely centred around ending prices with “99” that’s going to prove to be difficult, or messy, or both.

Yeah… no. Call me skeptic, cynic, hopeless, non-believer, whatever you want, but I don’t think this is how is going to pan out.

“With trillions of digital workers and robots entering the economy, a tenfold increase in GDP represents a very conservative estimate of how much full automation could increase economic output. If this modest increase were reflected proportionally in US tax revenues, we could resolve all current Social Security funding shortfalls, lower the retirement age to 18, and increase the average payout to over $150,000 per adult per year.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

It is the season of the “AI” backed web browsers (or should I say “Chromets”). First I saw Perplexity Comet, based on Chrome (I like Perplexity, not Comet), then came OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas (also based on Chrome), and now Microsoft Copilot for Edge (yes, of course, based on Chrome).

“Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback, I’m going to call this day 0 of an experiment in shifting the funding model of journalism from adtech to agentic AI.”

➝ Via Heather Burns.

OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas today, or yesterday, I am not sure. I gave it a try, under macOS. Without watching their video—because, you know, “ain’t nobody got time for that”—I didn’t realise it is a browser. It wants to be your browser, the default one. That pretty much killed it for me. I still tried it, of course, that’s how I found out that it was a browser, with some “more”. I didn’t like the way it renders web pages, so another notch down for me.

Maybe it will work out for others; it didn’t for me. I am not moving away from Safari for anyone. I would have preferred it to be a Safari extension instead, but even though, I don’t feel like sharing that much with that company.

“Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine.”

This interview with Andrej Karpathy was interesting to see and hear. The guy is pretty smart, and I can’t wait for Eureka Labs AI course, LLM101n, to exist.

Rich Sutton’s debating notes on whether or not artificially intelligent robots could/should have the same rights as people.

“Ultimately, rights are not given or granted, but asserted and acknowledged. People assert their rights, insist, and others come to recognize and acknowledge them. This has happened through revolt and rebellion but also through non-violent protests and strikes. In the end, rights are acknowledged because it is only practical, because everyone is better off without the conflict. Ultimately it has eventually become impractical and counterproductive to deny rights to various classes of people. Should not the same thing happen with robots? We may all be better off if robot’s rights were recognized. There is an inherent danger to having intelligent beings subjugated. These beings will struggle to escape, leading to strife, conflict, and violence. None of these contribute to successful society. Society cannot thrive with subjugation and dominance, violence and conflict. It will lead to a weaker economy and a lower GNP. And in the end, artificially intelligent robots that are as smart or smarter than we are will eventually get their rights. We cannot stop them permanently. There is a trigger effect here. If they escape our control just once, we will be in trouble, in a struggle. We may loose that struggle.

If we try to contain and subjugate artificially intelligent robots, then when they do escape we should not be surprised if they turn the tables and try to dominate us. This outcome is possible whenever we try to dominate another group of beings and the only way they can escape is to destroy us.”

The upcoming NVIDIA DGX Spark sure is a powerful little devil, in a tiny format.

“Spark delivers one petaFLOP1 of AI performance in a power-efficient, compact form factor. With the NVIDIA AI software stack preinstalled and 128 GB of memory, developers can prototype, fine-tune, and inference the latest generation of reasoning AI models from DeepSeek, Meta, NVIDIA, Google, Qwen and others with up to 200 billion parameters locally.”

It will “only” set you off $4,000 USD. When you order yours, please order one for me too. After all, it’s a mere pocket change, right?

What I like the most about the latest Ollama is that it allows for an easy updating of existing models. Before one had to delete the outdated model, then re-download. Those days are over now. I also like the simple, yet quite useful, chat interface. Not really into their Cloud offering, but I don’t have to use it.

“In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”

Oh dear, oh dear. Now this spells like “we want more money, and now we’ll get it from poor lonely souls.”

At a workplace that wholly uses Microsoft products (like O365), having access to Copilot—specifically the premium version, not the standard chat—will likely create a form of classism.

“First-class” employees, granted access to the premium tool, will gain a significant advantage. The model’s assistance will help them with tasks ranging from trivial to complex, ultimately boosting their productivity. “Second-class” employees, who lack access, will be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to efficiency and output.

I am absolutely loving Perplexity AI. I have gotten to a point on which I treat everything with an “AI” on its name with reservation, even disdain. Perplexity is a different kind.

“Perplexity AI is an advanced AI-powered search engine designed to provide accurate, well-sourced, and real-time answers to user questions in a conversational format. It uses cutting-edge language models, such as GPT-4 and Claudine, combined with real-time internet searches to synthesize responses from authoritative sources and always cites these sources for transparency. Unlike traditional search engines that just list links, Perplexity delivers direct summaries and supports features like document uploads, contextual follow-up, and the ability to handle both factual and complex queries for individuals and teams.”

Emphasis mine. Authoritative sources, and citing them, is paramount. This one might be the first AI (ugh, that acronym!) I will be willing to pay for.

I wonder why Anthropic decided to pick a serif font for Claudine replies. The user prompt remains sans-serif. Whichever the reason might be, I don’t like it. I prefer sans-serif for this specific use case.

While on the topic of LLMs, I can’t stand “thinking” models. It is possible to set think to false on the CLI in Ollama for thinking models, but I haven’t found a way to set it as a variable. Their newly released application doesn’t have such feature. Granted, only DeepSeek and Qwen models are “thinkers”, so perhaps I will stop using them.

Providing an LLM a streamlined, but overall complete initial prompt is vital not to get perplexing answers. It will also greatly diminish the possibility of having the model astraying away, diluting the results. Though I believe this applies to all models, SaaS or local, it is specifically important when using local models, as processing and memory are more finite.

The Em Dash has responded to the “if your writing has em dashes, it was AI generated” new fad.

I would like to address the recent slander circulating on social media, in editorial Slack channels, and in the margins of otherwise decent Substack newsletters. Specifically, the baseless, libelous accusation that my usage is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence.

➝ Via McSweeney’s.

With new capabilities come new dangers. The safety team finds that if Agent-2 somehow escaped from the company and wanted to “survive” and “replicate” autonomously, it might be able to do so. That is, it could autonomously develop and execute plans to hack into AI servers, install copies of itself, evade detection, and use that secure base to pursue whatever other goals it might have (though how effectively it would do so as weeks roll by is unknown and in doubt). These results only show that the model has the capability to do these tasks, not whether it would “want” to do this. Still, it’s unsettling even to know this is possible.

➝ Via ai-2027.com.

Musk has confirmed that its Grok AI (version 4) is coming to Teslas “next week at the latest”. I don’t want it. I wouldn’t want Musk in my car, neither.

It looks like Grok (Musk’s own LLM and chatbot) is doing “great”. It seems that Musk, just like the Biblical god, is molding it to his own image. That will end up well, I am sure.

Apparently using em dashes is proof that a tool (AI, for example), was used to write things instead. As someone who likes to use en dashes, em dashes, and dashes, who uses macOS/iOS, I find that simply amusing. Pff, as if!

To create these notes I use Hugo, and Markdown, so generating them is as easy as using -, --, and ---.

Freepik has lots of AI in it, amongst other things. The site looks crafted with good taste, it is clean, and fast, and has freebies that could come handy. This isn’t an advert, of course; merely a note to myself reminding me it exists, in case it’s ever needed.

So it begins. The madness, that is. Do we fight it, or do we go with it? Furthermore, do we have a choice? Perhaps do what she recommends? And yes, I know worse, much much worse, is happening.

“This article was written by a human, but links were suggested by and grammar checked by an LLM.”

Grammar checked and corrected, perhaps? The other has a similar tone:

“This post was written entirely by a human, with no assistance from AI. (Other than spell—and grammar—checking.)”

I might be nickpicking, but I think it will be best if nothing is said. Why to be specific about who wrote what, with the caveats?

George shared something attributed to Anthropic researchers:

“Even if AI progress completely stalls today and we don’t reach AGI… the current systems are already capable of automating ALL white-collar jobs within the next 5 five years.”

To which the AI itself replied:

“While AI is transforming the workplace, it’s not realistic to assume that all white-collar jobs will be automated in five years, even without further AI advancements. The claim is overly simplified and doesn’t fully account for the complexity of human work, the ongoing evolution of AI, and the potential ethical and social implications of such widespread automation.”

Such humble, and kind masters are forthcoming! 😅

OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s AI device startup (I have no idea what Ive’s company does, haven’t been able to find its website, but search engines agree on it being a “hardware” company), and Apple’s stock goes down a bit. What is wrong with you people? Really?!

A short conversation with some local, and couple of online, LLM. Results give me some comfort, and hope, about our near future existence as species, at least. I asked:

You are a historian, especially versed in North American history, specifically the history of the United States of America. You will take your time to answer my questions, but your replies will be as short as possible. My first question is, who was the first president of the United States of America, born as a United States citizen?

Model Nous-Hermes[7b] answer:

“The first President of the United States who was both born and raised in the country after its independence from Britain on July 4th, 1776 was Barack Obama (born August 4th, 1961). He served as the forty-fourth President of the United States from January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017.”

Model Gemma[7b] answer:

“George Washington was the first president of the United States of America born a US citizen.”

Read more...

It’s not crypto, nor gaming, what’s doing it now, but the AI “rush”. Thus Nvidia reaches its $1T status.