Burden of Knowledge
Do LLMs understand? Machine scale beats the Web, and Knowledge is a mountain
šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuffā”ļø
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely āE.O. Wilson
š Reading
"Do LLM understand?"
"Do LLM understand?" is a question that yields passionate answers. As for me and my house: no, LLMs do not reason and in fact are architectural incapable of reasoning [ā¦] understanding involves the creation of a theory that can be tested; one consequence of this position is that it requires an understanding (the recursion is intentional) of the limits of that theory [ā¦] LLMs give us the feeling of understanding. Sometimes, that is enough.
Grady BoockāTwitter | 3 minutes
AIĀ is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born:
Many of the webās most successful sites are those that leverage scale to their advantage, either by multiplying social connections or product choice, or by sorting the huge conglomeration of information that constitutes the internet itself. But this scale relies on masses of humans to create the underlying value, and humans canāt beat AI when it comes to mass production [ā¦] Machine scale beats human curation. And the same might be true of the web.
James VincentāThe Verge | 12 minutes
AI and The Burden of Knowledge:
Humans are not born at the āfrontierā of knowledge; it takes us time to reach it. As we push the frontier further out, reaching it takes successive generations longer [ā¦] The more we know, the more the next generation must learn to contribute at the cutting edge [ā¦] Artificial intelligence, writ-large, does not suffer from the burden of knowledge. This technology does not die or degrade, it simply improves.
Mario GabrieleāThe Generalist | 12 minutes
š§ Listening
Future of the Internet:
[M]aybe what the browser is; maybe it's just the escape hatch. Most of what you do is inside a social network, or inside a search engine, or inside somebody's app or inside some controlled experience. But then every once in a while, there's something where you actually want to jailbreak, you want to actually get free. And you want to always, I think, leave the escape hatch for the next kid or the next Stanford grad student to have the breakthrough idea and be able to get it up and running before anybody notices.
Marc AndreessenāLex Fridman
Future of Technology:
Basically, from 1940 through to about 2010, almost all the big successful companies were picks and shovels companies. So PC, database, smartphone, some tool that somebody else would pick up and use. Since 2010, most of the big wins have been in applications. So a company that starts in an existing industry and goes directly to the customer in that industry [ā¦] The AI thing is actually a reversion on that for now, because most of the AI business right now is actually in cloud provision of APIs for other people to build on.
Marc AndreessenāLex Fridman
Future of AI:
[W]hat if everybody has an assistant, and the assistant is 140 IQ, and you happen to be 110 IQ, and you've got something that basically is infinitely patient, and knows everything about you, and is pulling for you in every possible way, wants you to be successful. Anytime you find anything confusing, or want to learn anything, or have trouble understanding something, or want to figure out what to do in a situation, want to figure out how to prepare for a job interview, like any of these things, it will help you do it. The combination will effectively raise your IQ.
Marc AndreessenāLex Fridman