science
Sam Altman plans to be a benevolent dictator
Sam Altman thinks he will stay at the front of the AI race, suck up the world’s wealth, and redistribute it for the good of humanity. What could go wrong?
YouTube: ChatGPT + Wolfram: The Future of AI is Here!
I can’t say I understood all of this, but it was pretty fascinating nonetheless.
Real Engineering: Helion (Nuclear Fusion)
A different way to achieve nuclear fusion that avoids some of the pitfalls of Tokamak reactors (fuel cost, byproducts). Looks promising! Fusion is coming along, slowly.
Verge: Interview with Midjourney founder
I love this: “Right now, people totally misunderstand what AI is. They see it as a tiger. A tiger is dangerous. It might eat me. It’s an adversary. And there’s danger in water, too — you can drown in it — but the danger of a flowing river of water is very different to the […]
Current State of Fusion Tech
Interesting to see the number of privately funded fusion startups in the works.
VICE: Invasive Species Are Riding Plastics Across Oceans
The debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan went all around the world, carrying invasive species with it in a “mass rafting event”.
How to Cook That: A.I. Wrote an Oreo Cake Recipe…Is it any good?
This is a great illustration of just how un-intelligent “AI” is right now. It’s basically a sophisticated regurgitation algorithm…when you try to get it to write something like a recipe, it has no mechanism for making sure you actually use the ingredients it called for, or that the end result is any good. Your robot overlords, these ain’t.
RI with Anil Seth: Is Reality a Controlled Hallucination?
Rather than interpreting reality from sensory perception in a bottom-up way, apparently our brain is constantly making predictions about the world and just using sensory input to “error correct” its predictions. So we are all hallucinating, it’s just that most of us are checking our hallucinations so they stay relatively in line with reality.