ai

26
Jan

DeepSeek-R1 Initial Notes

While I've been traveling, little-known Chinese research lab Deepseek released an open-source model that can compete with the best closed-source products OpenAI and Anthropic have to offer. Everyone appears to be freaking out about it.

The reason for this is its astonishingly low training cost compared to performance (it reportedly cost $5 million dollars to train), the fact that it's open-source, and even if you choose to pay for its API, it's about 90% cheaper than its American competitors. The model is also available to try for free immediately. This is all possible because of how much cheaper the

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5 min read
21
Jan

AR Is Definitely Happening This Time

I don't know what I expected from a VentureBeat opinion piece, but it looks like AR is five minutes away again:

I refer to this new technological discipline as augmented mentality and it will emerge from the convergence of AI, conversational computing and augmented reality. And, in 2025 it will kick off an arms race among the largest companies in the world to sell us superhuman abilities.
These new superpowers will be unleashed by context-aware AI agents that are loaded into body-worn devices (like AI glasses) that travel with us throughout our lives, seeing what we see, hearing what we hear, experiencing what we experience and providing us with enhanced abilities to perceive and interpret our world. In fact, by 2030, I predict that a majority of us will live our lives with the aid of context-aware AI agents that bring digital superpowers into our normal daily experiences.  

People have been trying to sell me this bridge since I can remember, and beyond, like, a few games and Snapchat filters, AR never ends up being anything more than a novelty. I'm sure some wild AI stuff is going to happen in the next five years, but any wearable/embodied version of it that's likely to have a chance will probably be closer to an Apple watch or even the goofy Humane pin. People just don't like wearing computer screens over their eyes! I don't know if we'll ever get past that!

I think there's probably a place for AR as the technology continues to develop, but there are some intractable challenges in interface design and ease-of-use that I have yet to see a convincing solution for in the wearable space. Continued integration of low-key AR features into our phones and less-invasive peripherals like smartwatches seem much more likely to me than the idea everyone is going to have a HUD or their own personal Jarvis anytime soon. So far, smartphones remain the only place tech like this seems to get any traction.

Model-wise I'm more interested in the projector/room computer version of augmented reality that Bret Victor and my friends at Folk Computer are building - more holodeck than HoloLens. Guess I'll have to check back in five years and see how this turned out. In the meantime I will continue to die on the hill that physical inputs are still the best way of interfacing with technology.

17
Jan

1/17 Link Roundup & Screenshot Dump

I've reached day 3 of my hundred days and I'm already out of ideas. A new record! However, I accounted for this inevitability in the goal I set for myself, which was just to "write something on my blog every day". I'd like to add some functionality to the blog to display shorter posts in the main feed - things like til or links with short notes attached - which will then basically allow me to do a hundred days of tweets but on my personal site if I so wish. In the meantime, though, I'm stuck with the blog

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6 min read
15
Jan

AI Inferno: Making A Reverse Roko's Basilisk With AI Agents

For those who weren't in some of the more toxic corners of the tech internet in the late aughts and early teens, Roko's Basilisk is an old thought experiment to the effect that, should a benevolent superintelligence come to exist in the future, it would be incentivized to punish people who were aware of its possibility and did nothing to help it come to exist. This is the type of pretty dumb thought experiment that really hits for a certain type of Online Tech Guy: it originated on LessWrong (more like More Wrong imo), made its way across the Slatestar

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11 min read