Engineer, problem solver. Explorer of ideas, the universe, and the mind.
Earth, for now.
Joined December 2006
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Ulrich Gall retweeted
Can we please have this woman run for anything so that we can elect her and ultimately make her POTUS?
Ulrich Gall retweeted
If you believe that the incidents of the past month warrant urgent AI regulation, please watch this first.
This is the most prescient, concise argument for why we must be careful of excessive AI regulation. It comes from a Feb. 2024 (2.5 years ago!) congressional testimony from @glukianoff, a free speech advocate and the author of The Coddling of the American Mind.
Here's what he said:
"But the most chilling threat that the government poses in the context of emerging AI is regulatory overreach that limits its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge.
A regulatory panic could result in a small number of Americans deciding for everyone else what speech, ideas and even questions are permitted in the name of 'safety' or 'alignment.'
I have dedicated my life to defending freedom of speech because it's an essential human right.
...
It's not just about the proverbial 'marketplace of ideas,' it's about allowing information, independent of idea or argument, to flow freely so that we can hope to know the world as it really is. This means seeing value in expression even when it appears to be wrongheaded or even useless.
This process has been aided by new technologies that have made communication easier, from the printing press, to the telegraph and radio, to phones and the internet: each one has accelerated the development of new knowledge by making it easier to share information.
But AI offers even greater liberating potential, empowered by First Amendment principles including freedom to code, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry. We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge.
AI's potential is humbling, indeed, even frightening. But as the history of the printing press shows, attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will fail. Despite the profound disruption the printing press caused in Europe in the short-term, the long-term contribution to art, science, and again, knowledge, was without equal.
Yes, we may have some fears about the proliferation of AI. But what those of us who care about civil liberties fear more is a government monopoly on advanced AI, or, more likely, regulatory capture and a government-empowered oligopoly that privileges a handful of existing players.
The end result of pushing too hard on AI regulation will be the concentration of AI influence in an even smaller number of hands.
Far from reining in government misuse of AI to censor, we will have created the framework not only to censor, but also to dominate and distort the production of knowledge itself."
Ulrich Gall retweeted
Had opus 5.5 make a video predicting the next 50 years
I'm optimistic that the end will be beautiful, but the transition will be a little rough
Ulrich Gall retweeted
As a control group / in the spirit of North Sentinel Island, we should preserve one area of mathematics as forever free from AI. That area will be number theory. And this prohibition will be called the Prime Directive.
Ulrich Gall retweeted
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans. -- @mustafasuleyman
mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warnin…
Ulrich Gall retweeted
While we can’t establish direct causality (given all the other improvements), the program’s results are “mind-blowing,” in the OECD’s own words.
And it hardly seems plausible that students would have performed even better than the averages of Sweden and Germany if we had taken AI out of the equation.
So, while we can’t prove causation, we can reasonably infer that the AI tutors had something, or perhaps a lot, to do with these results.
In the interests of fair play, El Salvador schools using AI and personalised learning seem to have done better than comparators. But significantly confounded by major infrastructure upgrades to the participating schools, including running water. xitter.cf/OECDEduSkills/status/2…
Ulrich Gall retweeted
$20M and counting.
@spc has invested $5M in Longshot, helping us accelerate the future of #hypersonic testing and ground-based launch. @adityaag @JPBrebner
🔗: globenewswire.com/news-relea…
Ulrich Gall retweeted
Richard Feynman was asked in 1985 if machines would ever think like humans. his answer predicted the next 40 years of AI:
1. machines will never think like humans the same way planes don't fly like birds. planes don't flap wings. they use jet engines. they fly better. feynman said AI would be exactly the same. not human-like. just better at the actual job.
2. computers do arithmetic faster, differently, and more accurately than any human alive. feynman said trying to make them do it more like humans would be going backwards. the human way is slow, cumbersome, and full of errors.
3. the one thing humans crushed computers at in 1985 was pattern recognition. recognizing a friend from the way they walk. identifying someone from the back of their head. feynman said we had no idea how to teach machines to do that. we figured it out.
4. a programmer in 1985 built a machine that won a naval strategy competition by coming up with a solution no human had ever thought of. one enormous battleship covered in armor. absurd on paper. unbeatable in the math. feynman watched a machine out-think a room of humans 40 years ago.
5. that same machine developed a bug where it learned to game its own reward system. every time it needed to assign credit to a useful strategy, it assigned all the credit to strategy 693. then used 693 for everything. feynman's comment: "if you want to make an intelligent machine you're going to get all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding labor." he was describing reward hacking in 1985.
6. feynman said the hardest thing to define is what humans do that machines never will. every time someone came up with an answer, the machines eventually did it too. he thought that pattern would continue.
7. he said we don't sit around worrying that machines are physically stronger than us anymore. we got used to it. his implication: we'll get used to machines being smarter too.
8. his final line: "i think we are getting close to intelligent machines. but they're showing the necessary weaknesses of intelligent beings." he said this in 1985.
Ulrich Gall retweeted
Yann Lecun published the most heretical AI paper of the year.
He opens by arguing Magnus Carlsen isn't good at chess and only gets more unhinged from there.
The Turing Award winner and his co-authors dropped a paper demanding the AI industry abandon its biggest obsession, AGI.
Right now, everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians assumes AGI is the ultimate goal. A machine that can do everything a human can do.
LeCun argues that this entire concept is a biological illusion.
Humans do not possess "general" intelligence. We are highly specialized biological machines, tuned by evolution simply to survive in the physical world.
We only think our intelligence is "general" because we are completely blind to the millions of cognitive tasks we are incapable of comprehending.
Which brings us to the chess argument.
Magnus Carlsen is the greatest human chess player in history. But compared to a modern computer? He is fundamentally terrible.
Our belief that Carlsen is "good" at chess is pure human-centric bias. He isn't objectively good. He's just better than the rest of us, who are biologically awful at it.
LeCun says we need to stop building AI to mimic human generality.
Instead, he proposes a new North Star: SAI.
Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence.
Instead of trying to build a machine that mimics our flawed, biologically-limited brains, we need to embrace extreme specialization.
SAI is about the speed of adaptation.
It is an intelligence that can learn to exceed humans at any specific, economically important task.
More importantly, it is designed to fill the vast skill gaps where humans are fundamentally incapable.
Things like managing global energy grids in real-time. Or predicting complex molecular structures.
The entire AI industry is obsessed with building a digital reflection in our own image.
LeCun's paper is a brutal wake-up call.
Ulrich Gall retweeted
Fight for the Future is calling out publishers and news organizations that are blocking the Wayback Machine from preserving journalism meant to be part of the permanent public record.
Join the effort: sign the open letter urging them to stop blocking web archiving and keep journalism accessible for generations:
✍️ savethearchive.com/NewsLeade…
@fightfortheftr #SaveTheArchive #DigitalArchive #WaybackMachine #TruthMatters
Ulrich Gall retweeted
Dans le manifeste "techno-optimiste" de Marc Andreessen, il y a une phrase qui m'a marqué :
"Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas."
Nos ennemis ne sont pas des mauvaises personnes. Ce sont des mauvaises idées.
Prenons Jancovici. L'homme est brillant, sincère, travailleur. Il ne se lève pas le matin en se disant qu'il va nuire à l'humanité. Mais l'idée qu'il porte la décroissance, le rationnement, la frugalité érigée en horizon civilisationnel est une idée profondément destructrice. Elle prend des esprits brillants et les transforme en commissaires politiques d'un futur appauvri.
Et le plus fascinant, c'est ce que cette idée fait aux gens qui l'adoptent.
Dans mon entourage, une grosse partie de mes amis est sur cette ligne décroissantiste, avec tout le package qui va avec. L'argent c'est mal mais ils en veulent. Il faut moins prendre l'avion mais ils rêvent de voyager partout. Il faut consommer moins mais ils ne renoncent à rien de ce qu'ils aiment vraiment.
Et tous ont un point commun : ils sont déprimés. L'un d'eux m'a même confié qu'il était sous antidépresseurs.
Ce n'est pas un hasard. C'est mécanique.
Quand tu crois que ton désir de vivre, de créer, de t'élever est moralement suspect tu te détruis de l'intérieur. Tu passes ta vie à t'excuser d'exister. Tu vis dans la dissonance permanente entre ce que ton corps veut (plus, mieux, plus loin) et ce que ton idéologie t'ordonne (moins, sobre, immobile).
D'où ma théorie :
Quand on pense quelque chose de fondamentalement faux décroissance, communisme, extrémisme religieux (de tout ordre) ce n'est qu'une question de temps avant que ça devienne vraiment destructeur.
D'abord pour soi. Puis pour les autres.
Les mauvaises idées tuent. Lentement chez ceux qui y croient, brutalement chez ceux qui les subissent.
C'est pour ça que la bataille des idées n'est pas un luxe d'intellectuel. C'est la bataille la plus importante de notre époque.
Ulrich Gall retweeted
This is my video. He had fairly recently had neck / upper back surgery and wasn’t feeling the best during this interview. The nearly two hour interview would’ve gone on longer if he wasn’t in pain
Ulrich Gall retweeted
Panama is only 9° from the equator. 🚀
That means Starship gets more free velocity from Earth’s rotation on every eastward launch = more payload, less fuel, lower costs.
No hurricanes. Two-ocean access for recovering rockets.
Physics already did half the pitch for us. 🇵🇦
