Formal Informal Languages
We’ve all been impressed by the generative art models: DALL-E, Imagen, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and now Facebook’s generative video model, Make-A-Video. They’re easy to use, and the results are impressive.…
The Collaborative Metaverse
We want to congratulate Dylan Field on his startup Figma, which Adobe recently purchased for $20B. Dylan started his career with O’Reilly Media when he was in high school—not that…
The Problem with Intelligence
Projects like OpenAI’s DALL-E and DeepMind’s Gato and LaMDA have stirred up many discussions of artificial general intelligence (AGI). These discussions tend not to go anywhere, largely because we don’t…
On Technique
In a previous article, I wrote about how models like DALL-E and Imagen disassociate ideas from technique. In the past, if you had a good idea in any field, you…
Scaling False Peaks
Humans are notoriously poor at judging distances. There’s a tendency to underestimate, whether it’s the distance along a straight road with a clear run to the horizon or the distance…
Artificial Creativity?
There’s a puzzling disconnect in the many articles I read about DALL-E 2, Imagen, and the other increasingly powerful tools I see for generating images from textual descriptions. It’s common…
Closer to AGI?
DeepMind’s new model, Gato, has sparked a debate on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) is nearer–almost at hand–just a matter of scale. Gato is a model that can solve multiple…
Quantum Computing without the Hype
Several weeks ago, I had a great conversation with Sebastian Hassinger about the state of quantum computing. It’s exciting–but also, not what a lot of people are expecting. I’ve seen…
The General Purpose Pendulum
Pendulums do what they do: they swing one way, then they swing back the other way. Some oscillate quickly; some slowly; and some so slowly you can watch the earth…
D-Day in Kyiv
My experience working with Ukraine’s Offensive Cyber Team By Jeffrey CarrMarch 22, 2022 When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, I had been working with two offensive cyber operators from…