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Lovely project, I've given it a skim and I quite like the presentation.
The only thing that I would work on would be to rewrite a lot of the website copy since it's a bit heavy with the llm-isms, which gives it an unfortunate sheen.
If theres a repo link, I'd be happy to contribute, since I realize it's no small task.
Completely a fair point. Definitely was heavily, heavily AI built (including the copy) - there is no way I could have justified putting in the time it would have taken to build this for a "pro-bono" project pre AI! Even with AI, I've spent a considerable amount of time steering, editing, and revising (including some of the most egregious AI adds).
Would absolutely appreciate edits and revisions. Repository here:
Really hugely appreciated. I'm doing an AI pass at removing some more of the AI-ism's. It came up with some good suggestions. I'm reviewing and should have those in before long. I'm sure it won't be complete, but might give a better starting point.
This is very similar to last week with that mind reading startup thing. Please read the paper before commenting.
This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”.
The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all sorts of things, and then feeding that to a model that will then build its own representation of said data and try different things on it until it’s found what makes a certain part sing in the model.
The purpose is a generalized understanding of brain function, more or less the same way we’ve been doing it all these years. Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.
>Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.
It also helps companies like Moonbug Entertainment (Candle Media) understand how to build better Distractatrons.
It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.
“It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”
> p8: "A child watching television under normal conditions is subject to frequent interruptions and distractions. The TV must vie for his attention. In order to simulate this condition, we decided to program distractions into the laboratory situation... Slides could be used to fill the slide tray and they could be projected automatically, at regular intervals, onto a screen similar to that of the television set. The carousel projector allows the viewer to choose three exposure times. The 7.45 second interval proved most satisfactory with the preschool children.
And nowadays we think of Sesame Street as wholesome compared to today's content. They may have optimised attention but they were delivering positive-value content. That's not the case any more.
the same year as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, featuring computer generated characters, brainwashing television commercials, a light pulse gun that causes absence seizures, gun battles inside a plastic surgery clinic and an AR simulation environment, a sadistic computer, a physician who doubles as an action hero, and James Coburn giving a lecture explaining the enemy's evil plans in the opposite role that he played in the (excellent) The President's Analyst.
This time I was not so dazzled and saw it for as atrocious everyone else things it is. The minions of "Digital Matrix, Inc." manage several assassinations with the light-pulse L.O.O.K.E.R. gun but when they use real firearms they outdo Vader's stormtroopers by shooting each other. (Want to see the scene where somebody from E.Y. tells them to stick to the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun) The bad guys explain the penultimate secret to the protagonist early on but the ultimate secret is revealed in the L.O.O.K.E.R. lab which doesn't feel like a lab at all but rather a rather good room in a theme park experience where you're supposed to uncover the secret. (Contrast that to the lab Doug Trumbull outfitted in the Brainstorms movie a few years later which is packed with real surplus equipment... I've been to that lab!)
I can see it now.. The Distractatrons: a new chapter of protagonists in Transformers! The modern equivalent of evil in this day and age of ADHD and low attention span!
What is a "purpose"? Something people wish something would only be used for, right? How does it relate to, what influence does it have on what something will end up being used for?
> The synthesized clips line up with what each region is known to care about, faces for FFA, places for PPA, bodies for EBA, motion for MT, patterns for V1 / V3A, and lively social scenes for pSTS / aSTS
Explain the potential to exploit strong stimulation of specific visual regions for evil. "Oh, I very much detect a face/place/body/motion/pattern/human", says the subject. What are you going to do with that, startle them?
Do you know that strongly triggering these regions at the same time/repeatedly/in various patterns doesn't have any effect on your mood, wants, needs and so on due to experience in the field? Or why are you just discounting the idea?
IMO it's terrifying to imagine that adtech companies could plug this stuff into their optimizers and just run an experiment on broad swaths of the population to figure out if there's any effects.
Apply the same technology several layers deeper. Stimulate the novelty or sexual attraction or general reward neurons. Stimulate the thirst center in a Pepsi ad.
Oh you are right. Let's just end neuroscience altogether. Also computer science, aerospace, and biology in general. In fact, let's go full Amish. Wait, no. Someone might use a buggy cart to run people over.
This isn't about "might", this is about "obviously will", and the sheer fact that questions that were 101 of scientific discussion now lead to instant freaking out and accusations, i.e. stupid cultish bullshit, show me we need to be more serious about it, not less. If that's not to your liking, is it okay for you if other people ponder such questions? Can you maybe stim your brain into believing they don't?
This specific research may not be morally corrupt in itself, nor may his intentions be bad, but it could absolutely lead to something horrific. Nuclear technology was also initially developed with good intentions and provided much good for humanity. But of course it ended with biggest bad actors having a lot of nuclear weapons.
I want to bring some attention to a spectacular sleight of hand that occurs at minute 4 of this podcast:
"The way that I formulate the argument, just to get us started here, is that acts, the things we do, have ends. We act for an end. They have a purpose.
And that it is wrong to deliberately frustrate an act from attaining its end, from attaining its purpose."
I will draw your attention to the three instances of "end", first we have the noble, tautological, "have ends", actions have ends; then, following close behind we see "an end", we act for an end, those ends have been made into one now, singular end; and finally, "its end", the act, as an entity unto itself, has an end you mustn't interrupt.
The imaging stuff is cool but the homepage is making me wince.
There's a compelling argument to be made that the level of detail in "mind reading" they are gesturing at is plain unrecoverable with hemodynamics. There's an irreversible loss of dimensions that occurs the instant you start recording blood instead of spikes on the neural circuits themselves, and it's not at all clear that what a VC reading the words "telepathy" is imagining even survives that transformation.
What you have is food delivery data for a neighborhood, this can tell you a surprising amount, including when they might throw a party. What it can't tell you, however, is who wore the best outfit and what was talked about over dinner. The information simply does not survive across the interface.
There is a spectacular canyon between "informed interpretation" and "mind reading"
I think that’s part of the point. Execution at its core is mastering the art of projection onto a lower dimensional space.
Taking anything from up in the mind out into the real world, be it a physical action, a speech, an artwork, requires you to make decisions about what’s load bearing and what’s not.
So the more practice you get translating your thoughts into words (or another medium), the better you get at executing.
The "another medium" is doing a lot there, I think the translation between my understanding and expressing it in words is the weakest aspect of software development at the moment, in addition to the entire physical world. Dancing about architecture, if you like.
If you read the thinking you can quite literally see it say "I can't just agree with all they are saying, I should find something for a constructive response". I wager that the anti-sycophancy sections in the system prompt have gotten unbalanced with the "helpful agent" parts.
I imagine that the right balance will be hard to strike well given that at the end of the day we're asking the machine to have tact, and we don't quite know how to put that into an instruction yet. "Please push back when it feels right but in other cases read the room and be less rigorous" is something that plenty of humans struggle with as it is.
Articles like this should approach topics on consciousness with more humility than is displayed here.
We don’t even agree on a good definition of what’s going on inside our own heads yet, what gives you the confidence to say that what goes on inside an LLM can’t be conscious?
Obviously, the LLMs lack the divine spark, so they can't be conscious. Same as clones, IVF babies, or half of all the twins.
Jest aside, I do agree. If you list out every prominent theory of consciousness, you'd find that about a quarter rules out LLMs, a quarter tentatively rules LLMs in, and what remains is "uncertain about LLMs". And, of course, we don't know which theory of consciousness is correct - or if any of them is.
With LLMs, materialists have got a silicone idol to worship. They believe that they know everything about this idol because they've created it, and at the same time they believe that LLMs have a secret sauce that makes it intelligent. Looking at how they are trying to extract intelligence from it reminds me of alchemists of the past who tried to extract gold from lead.
I have a pet peeve with the concept of "a genuinely novel discovery or invention", what do you imagine this to be? Can you point me towards a discovery or invention that was "genuinely novel", ever?
I don't think it makes sense conceptually unless you're literally referring to discovering new physical things like elements or something.
Humans are remixers of ideas. That's all we do all the time. Our thoughts and actions are dictated by our environment and memories; everything must necessarily be built up from pre-existing parts.
W Brian Arthur's book "The Nature of Technology" provides a framework for classifying new technology as elemental vs innovative that I find helpful. For example the Huntley-Mcllroy diff operates on the phenomenon that ordered correspondence survives editing. That was an invention (discovery of a natural phenomenon and a means to harness it). Myers diff improves the performance by exploiting the fact that text changes are sparse. That's innovation. A python app using libdiff, that's engineering.
And then you might say in terms of "descendants": invention > innovation > engineering. But it's just a perspective.
Suno is transformer-based; in a way it's a heavily modified LLM.
You can't get Suno to do anything that's not in its training data. It is physically incapable of inventing a new musical genre. No matter how detailed the instructions you give it, and even if you cheat and provide it with actual MP3 examples of what you want it to create, it is impossible.
The same goes for LLMs and invention generally, which is why they've made no important scientific discoveries.
I don't see how this is an architectural problem though. The problem is that music datasets are highly multimodal, and the training process is relying almost entirely on this dataset instead of incorporating basic musical knowledge to allow it to explore a bit further. That's what happens when computer scientists aim to "upset" a field without consulting with experts in said field.
Einstein’s theory of relativity springs to mind, which is deeply counter-intuitive and relies on the interaction of forces unknowable to our basic Newtonian senses.
There’s an argument that it’s all turtles (someone told him about universes, he read about gravity, etc), but there are novel maths and novel types of math that arise around and for such theories which would indicate an objective positive expansion of understanding and concept volume.
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when I try and visit the demo