Some observers, including analysts for Goldman Sachs, say that the growth of AI since the height of the pandemic is now proving to be a bubble, like dotcom stocks in the late Clinton years or mortgage based derivatives in 2006-07. What is a bubble? By standard definition it is a growth in value of an asset that occurs after the speculative demand has surpassed the operational demand for same. If I buy X as a speculator at a price higher than the operational value of X can support I may be willing to make an operationally foolish deal in the expectation (on the speculation) that there will be a "greater fool" to whom I can then sell it. In such a situation, sooner or later the biggest fools ARE the ones who are holding X. What happens to its value then you can fill in for yourself. Clearly there is money still entering the field. The Peoples Republic of China is incubating a group of companies that it proudly calls the "little AI dragons," with seed money of...
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Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original. Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct. After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently, “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." The models as they consume their own work will self-degrade and become useless over time. One of the members of the group of scholars involved is Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor. He has put the problem this way, in a blog post, “ Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with bla...
Somebody very clever fed 1,000 hours of Trump rallies into a computer and had it algorithmically generate an artificial Trump rally. This is part of the result. PRESIDENT: Foreign powers cheat us! Canada steals our milk! China steals our milk! We only had one glass of milk left: Obama drank it. Not fair. Crowd boos. They wanted that milk. PRESIDENT: But like President Ronald Rogaine: I will bring back the milk! Crowd roars. They still want that milk. PRESIDENT: A wall of milk. No criminals get through. Democrats want criminals to have the milk. No way. Milk comes from coal. We'll dig it up.
I've written about the Voynich manuscript here only once, years ago. Here's a quick review: Wilfred Voynich was an early 20th century ms dealer, and the manuscript that bears his name was a mysterious book he bought from the Jesuits, a book that originated in the 15th century (something carbon dating has confirmed). In the century since Voynich made its existence known to the world, nobody has been able to make hide nor hair of it, except for the guess -- based on the illustrations -- that its a medical or pharmacological text. The usual guess has been that the author performed some sort of cryptographical trickery upon Hebrew, although even that still isn't a matter of consensus. And, even if it were, that wouldn't get the job done. What trickery? Now some new information. A team of Canadian scientists think their algorithm has worked it out. Or at least parts of it. They derive this as the first sentence of the text, translated and decoded, " She made...
You’ll remember that in earlier posts I've discussed a hypothetical widget-making company, XYZ, and said that we could enter various reasonable assumptions about this company’s stock in a calculator available in any of several websites, and receive for our troubles the value of a proposed put or call. How does the calculator do that? A skeptic may sneer at the whole idea and say, “only supply and demand determine the value of a financial instrument. The demand for an option on a particular stock may change from day to day – as may the supply, as new writers enter or leave the market – so surely no formula or algorithm can tell us in advance what the value is.” That’s a plausible response, but it is in error. The value of stock options can be defined mathematically in ways that the value of the underlying stocks cannot. After all, we know intuitively what the value of a stock option is on the expiration date. If it has expired worthless, we know the value i...