March 11, 2024
The Sloot Digital Coding System is an alleged data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — violating Shannon’s source coding theorem (which establishes the statistical limits to data compression) by many orders of magnitude. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (1945-1999), a Dutch electronics engineer.
In 1999, just days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, and the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified.
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January 11, 2024
According to a false conspiracy theory, medbeds (an abbreviation of ‘medical bed’ or ‘meditation bed’) are secret beds that can miraculously heal humans and extend life. The plausibility of such devices is pseudoscience. Medbed conspiracy theories often involve claims that the devices are utilized by members of a ‘deep state’ and billionaires and that the former President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, is still alive, lying on a medbed.
Belief in these devices is popular among QAnon influencers such as Michael Protzman, Romana Didulo, and YamatoQ. Various companies sell devices or access to beds that supposedly heal ailments via imaginary technologies while also including fine print on their websites disclaiming that no diagnoses, treatment, or cures are provided.
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January 6, 2024
EleutherAI is a grass-roots non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research group. The group, considered an open-source version of OpenAI, was formed in a Discord server in July 2020 to organize a replication of GPT-3. In early 2023, it formally incorporated as the EleutherAI Foundation, a non-profit research institute. EleutherAI began as a Discord server on July 7, 2020 under the tentative name ‘LibreAI’ before rebranding to ‘EleutherAI’ later that month, in reference to eleutheria, an ancient greek term for liberty.
On December 30, 2020, EleutherAI released The Pile, a curated dataset of diverse text for training large language models.
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December 13, 2023
Muda [moo-duh] is a Japanese word meaning ‘futility,’ ‘uselessness,’ or ‘wastefulness,’ and is a key concept in lean process thinking such as in the Toyota Production System (TPS), denoting one of three types of deviation from optimal allocation of resources. The other types are known by the Japanese terms ‘mura’ (‘unevenness’) and ‘muri’ (‘overload’). Waste in this context refers to the wasting of time or resources rather than wasteful by-products.
From an end-customer’s point of view, value-added work is any activity that produces goods or provides a service for which a customer is willing to pay; muda is any constraint or impediment that causes waste to occur.
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November 30, 2023
Q* (pronounced ‘Q-star’) is an alleged internal project by OpenAI dedicated to the application of artificial intelligence in logical and mathematical reasoning. In November 2023, certain employees of OpenAI reportedly raised concerns with the company’s board, suggesting that Q* might signify the imminent emergence of artificial general intelligence. The reported work involves performing math on the level of grade-school students.
Math requires abstract reasoning and a firm grasp of logical principles. It’s not just about recognizing patterns or processing language, but about understanding and applying mathematical concepts and rules. Mathematics also demands precision and consistent application of rules, unlike many language tasks where approximations or multiple interpretations can be acceptable. An AI model that can reliably perform grade-school level math marks a significant advancement in the field, indicating progress towards more sophisticated and logically rigorous AI systems.
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November 26, 2023
Roko’s basilisk [bas-uh-lisk] is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.
It originated in a 2010 post at discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry. The thought experiment’s name derives from the poster of the article (Roko) and the basilisk, a mythical creature capable of destroying enemies with its stare.
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September 23, 2023
A tachyonic [tak-ee-on-ik] antitelephone is a hypothetical device in theoretical physics that could be used to send signals into one’s own past. Albert Einstein in 1907 presented a thought experiment of how faster-than-light signals can lead to a paradox of causality, which was described by Einstein and Arnold Sommerfeld in 1910 as a means ‘to telegraph into the past.’ The same thought experiment was described by physicist Richard Chace Tolman in 1917; thus, it is also known as Tolman’s paradox.
A device capable of ‘telegraphing into the past’ was later also called a ‘tachyonic antitelephone’ by science fiction writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford. According to current understanding of physics, no such faster-than-light transfer of information is actually possible.
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August 13, 2023
The Dead Internet Theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity.
These intelligent bots are assumed to have been made, in part, to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Further, proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception. The date given for this ‘death’ is generally around 2016 or 2017.
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July 9, 2023
Muntzing is reducing the components inside an electronic appliance to the minimum required for it to function in most operating conditions, reducing design margins above minimum requirements toward zero.
The term is named after Earl “Madman” Muntz, a car and electronics salesman, who was not formally educated or trained in any science or engineering discipline. Muntz built a low part TV in the 1950s.
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July 5, 2023
In machine learning, a stochastic [stuh-kas-tik] parrot is a large language model (LLM) that is good at generating convincing language, but does not actually understand the meaning of the language it is processing. The term was coined by computational linguistics professor Emily M. Bender in the 2021 artificial intelligence research paper ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’
Stochastic means ‘random and involving chance or probability.’ A stochastic parrot,’ according to Bender, is an entity ‘for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms … according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.’ Less formally, the term refers to ‘large language models that are impressive in their ability to generate realistic-sounding language but ultimately do not truly understand the meaning of the language they are processing.’
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May 15, 2023
In machine learning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a method of training AI models by learning from responses by humans about its performance. If an AI model makes a prediction or takes an action that is incorrect or suboptimal, human feedback can be used to correct the error or suggest a better response.
Over time, this helps the model to learn and improve its responses. RLHF is used in tasks where it’s difficult to define a clear, algorithmic solution but where humans can easily judge the quality of the AI’s output (e.g. if the task is to generate a compelling story, humans can rate different AI-generated stories on their quality, and the AI can use their feedback to improve its story generation skills).
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April 25, 2023
The clear craze was a marketing fad from the late 1980s to early 2000s, often equating transparency with purity. Inspired by Ivory’s ’99 and 44/100 percent pure’ campaign for bath soap, and by low-calorie or ‘light’ beverages, sodas were redesigned in the 1980s and 1990s as being free of artificial dyes, such as the caffeine-free and preservative-free Crystal Pepsi. Personal hygiene products were then relaunched as clear dye-free gels, and many electronics had transparent cases.
Gillette released versions of its existing deodorants and shaving creams in a clear gel form, which have continued indefinitely. Through the 1990s, the clear trend included transparent watches, staplers, calculators, handheld gaming devices such as the Nintendo Game Boy, and computers such as Apple’s iMac G3.
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