Unmaking Sense

Why interest-driven education is everything.

AI will not just alter our world by taking our jobs: it will force a rethink of the basis of how we regard ourselves, our motives, our values, and what we think matters. A central feature of that re-evaluation will involve the relationship between “is” and “ought”, and it’s coming more quickly than we think.

As a further preparation for our discussion of what matters we explore the legacies of religion and metaphysics that insist we defer to sources of truth and meaning that lie “beyond the world”.

The AI wars are hotting up with much current disparagement of OpenAI, competition from Google Deepmind’s Gemini, and now a new version of the Mistral model based on MoE technology called “Mixtral” because it mixes experts. The pace of development is extraordinary and that before the AIs themselves get in on the act.

“Unmaking Sense” means freeing ourselves from the illusory senses we make of the world in order to see more clearly what better sense we could make of it.

This week Google announced the newest AI tool called “Gemini”. It is an integrated multimodal platform that doesn’t stitch together AIs that were originally trained on separate areas, such as video and audio and text and image. It starts from an integrated base and can therefore deal with all of these things straight out of the box. It can mark homework, correct it, and suggest new things ways to approach it, new ways to process it and it can provide new problems to solve to practise the same skills. The teacher as traditionally conceived is redundant. But what about motivation, about the question why it’s worth anyone ever learning this at all?

The problem with chess is that searching beyond a few moves ahead causes a combinatorial explosion: the number of possibilities overwhelms us. So how does Q-learning overcome this problem?

A footnote to the OpenAI saga involving trying to improve the AIs’ mathematical reasoning.

A continuation of 11.19.

The twitterati (exorati doesn’t quite do it) are speculating that what the board were concerned about over Altman’s alleged “lack of candour” concerned undisclosed research into an amalgamation of GPT technology with Q-learning that could give (or in some versions already has given) rise to an AI capable of cracking the top encryption algorithm in use: AES 192. Nobody knows for sure, but the speculation is rife.