Because foundation models are used to build many other models that are trained to new, more specific tasks, it can be hard to evaluate models consistently. The one-model-many-models paradigm attempts to study interpretability of foundation models by looking for similarities and differences across the foundation model and its downstream models to try and understand which behaviors were likely emergent from the foundation model itself, and which come from the derivative models.
Read moreToday I read about the five stages of foundation model development. The paper breaks foundation models down into these stages in order to specify the unique challenges and ethical considerations at each step of the process. The five stages are: data creation, data curation, training, adaptation, and deployment. Having this vocabulary for explaining the process of building AI models is a helpful way to emphasize the different challenges that face builders at each step.
Read moreWhile LLAMA 2 is certainly interesting, and more openly licensed than some other AI language models, it’s definitely not open source. Open source is a term that is defined by a non-profit called the Open Source Initiative. The OSI explicitly calls out that it is not sufficient for code to be open for something to be called open source. The actual definition of open source includes provisions that must be true for the licensing of the software. LLAMA 2’s “permissive” license doesn’t apply.
Read moreI turned to Bard to help brainstorm ideas for how I can replace the OpenAI Completions API in a project that a former colleague worked on, and it helpfully recommended me three alternatives. It turns out that the Bard API doesn’t exist – at least, it doesn’t exist yet.
Read moreI’m on exchange at London Business School this week to study Strategic Innovation. Today, we covered a lot of ground, starting with why it is challenging for established organizations to truly innovate, as well as the individual thought patterns that challenge us in thinking “outside of the box”. And speaking of thinking outside the box, we also touched on communication (and why it’s so freaking hard to do it well). As it turns out, resistance to change is often a lack of clarity, more than it is an actual resistance to trying something new, and the ambiguity that begets creative thinking – and subsequently, innovation – often comes from a number of conflicts between alignment at an organizational and individual level.
Read moreI often joke that it is impossible to work on emerging technologies without also adopting the mindset of an existentialist philosopher. Perhaps it is a defense mechanism; a way that I call out into the collective intelligence of human knowledge to find others who question what it means to build our realities and exist within them.
Read moreToday, I’m sharing the slides that I prepared for my talk at the 2023 XR Access Symposium. In building this presentation, I had a few goals – the first was to establish my own new paradigm for talking about XR and AI. I found that “multidimensional computing” encompassed both of those characteristics nicely, especially when we think through the vast amount of information that is built into each of those types of technology. Is it a bit wordy, as far as terminology goes? Absolutely, and frankly, I love it even more for that.
Read moreI decided to ask both ChatGPT and Google Bard to provide three arguments about why this particular exclusivity deal was in violation with the Sherman Act.
Completely in alignment with my expectations, ChatGPT immediately announced that it was unable to answer such a question, but it happily explained some generics about the Sherman Act. Bard, on the other hand, gave a seemingly quite convincing breakdown of the reasons for and against an anti-competitive ruling.
Read moreI wanted to build Firefox from source in order to implement the changes found in the patch stack linked above. That’s the beauty of open source – I was able to be sent a patch that someone wrote last summer, and even though it hasn’t been made production-ready and merged, I can start working with it immediately.
Read moreThe open source movement gives me hope. It’s how I’m able to run multiple different interfaces to local language models that can be fine-tuned on my computers with my own data, and know that it’s not leaving my own environment. It’s how I can build the Firefox web browser locally, and add custom patches so that I can run experiments with my browsing history safely. It’s how I can picture re-imagined fair value exchange systems working.
The commercial software stack is collapsing, locking users into increasingly tightly controlled environments where customization is locked away, abstracted because of its complexity. This is not the way.
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