Here are a few assorted short takes that are on my mind right now. They are worth exactly what you paid for them.
Is Donald Trump losing his edge? Kamala Harris has been the Democratic nominee for a week now, and she's hardly immune from criticism. But so far Trump has called her a "bum" and "the most liberal person ever in US history"—not exactly biting attacks. What's going on?
I just finished a biography of John von Neumann, and it prompts a question: Is game theory actually useful for anything? It got famous in the '60s as the foundation of Cold War nuclear planning, but it never really told us anything we didn't already know without the math. I gather it's had some useful things to say about the design of auctions, but what else? There are some things like kin selection that you can explain in a game theoretic way, but you can usually explain them in other ways too. So what is its real-world value?
Why do so many people object to their content being used for AI training? I understand copyright infringement, if that's going on, but it generally isn't. The words and images are just used as part of an ocean of input that makes AI better. Why would I care, for example, if Google or OpenAI trawled my blog and turned it into tokens for use in AI training? Am I losing anything?
Am I the only one who didn't care much for the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies? My main complaint is that, until the very end, it was essentially a pure TV event. You couldn't really watch it in person since it was so spread out, and it included video snippets that only made sense (barely) as part of a TV show. That didn't sit right with me. (My other complaint is that so much of it seemed amateurish. How can that be with the kind of budget they have to work with?)
By the way, I'm now done with four weeks of radiation therapy (two to go) and so far I've had no big side effects to speak of. Hooray. I've been getting more and more tired, though, but I'm not sure if that's because of the radiation or the hormone therapy.
I think the concern with AI is the sheer scale, speed, and specificity with which it can incorporate "inspiration." Sure, humans take inspiration from those that came before them, but the fruits of that inspiration will never be produced as quickly, as faithfully, or in the quantities that AI can do so. I think there's also a distinction to be made between dumping a bunch of information into an AI for, say, LLM or search engine purposes, versus for creative/production purposes. One is just trying to create a better Wikipedia or Google, an index of existing knowledge. The other is looking to create "original" works of literature, art, music, etc. on the backs of those that came before without compensation or create. The latter is Vanilla Ice.
but robert van winkle, late of the commission to design the donold j. trump, sr., presidential library (seriously), claimed on that very song he was "back, with a brand new invention".
I think that it's also fair for creative types to wonder why their material should be consumed, generally license-free and without payment, to build somebody else's lucrative business. Especially when said lucrative business is, at least in significant part, being developed to compete with said creative types.
Kevin's argument about copyright misses the point--the issue generally isn't LLM's generating content that infringes on the copyrights of existing works, it's that the human people who build an LLM make copies of existing works in the process of feeding them into the LLM, and that copying may or may not be licensed or fair use.
It's like if you built an android, gave it a stack of books on contemporary art, and locked it in a room full of art supplies and told it to learn how to paint by practicing recreating all the paintings in the books; then, once the android got really good at it, you give it instructions to never paint exact replicas and then you copy its brain into a million android bodies make a pile of money selling them.
In that scenario, do the artists whose works were in the books (or the editors/publishers of the books) have a claim for copyright violation? I'm not sure that the answer is clearly "no."
the opening ceremonies were very weird, and had some aspects that seemed a little amateurish and cheap, but overall i liked them a lot because they were weird and broke the mold of traditional opening ceremonies which i've come to find pretty damn boring and repetitive over the years. the 3-some scene was def strange though. like....wut? why?
does anyone else remember kevin drum's apoplexy at danny boyle's nod to the nhs in the london 2012 opening ceremony?
at least the french weren't so gauche as to inject partisan rancor onto their opener.
I assumed that the French were 1) Saving $$$ because the extravaganza olympics are no longer affordable 2) Trolling rightists worldwide who are trying to shut libertine ways of life down.
The Olympics are supposed to be amateurish. They're not a professional sports competition.
"Why do so many people object to their content being used for AI training?"
Are you fucking for real? Because they will use your own work to make stupid amounts of money and put you out of a job. A retiree might not care, but plenty of people who want to eat do.
as a retiree who puts in stupid amounts of hours researching and writing and maintaining a website, i care. you're literally talking about stealing my work.
I highly recommend Kevin and other AI cheerleaders read sources other than OpenAI and other industry mouthpiece press releases. Here's a good one to get you going: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
And I think AI training models off of the works of other people, making money by selling those models and not compensating the people who's content you trained on is the point. None of the people who contributed to open source projects over decades won't see a dime from Microsoft for it's Co-pilot sales, to name one example. I suppose that there is nothing illegal about it, but it's pretty crappy nonetheless.
With that said, I am one of the folks who think that AI is a gargantuan bubble, quite possibly the biggest tech bubble ever. So, I don't think MS is going to make as much money as they are forecasting.
are you questioning our robot future?
I used to lurk on the ProgrammerHumor subreddit, and I often saw jokes and memes about programmers trawling GitHub code to incorporate into their own projects. "My Code" vs "Our Code" with the communist Bugs Bunny meme, "I stole your code"/"It's not my code", etc. Given the dominance of the open source ethos in tech circles, I'm not surprised the AI people are just blind to the concerns of the people having their works thrown into the black box.
I appreciated the effort to try something different with the Olympics opening ceremony.
Nevertheless, it felt disconnected. I prefer a live event in which I see people enjoying the ceremony and the accompanying entertainment. A big part of my enjoyment is vicariously living through the attendee's enjoyment.
Not the most important thing in the world, but game theory is extremely useful in poker: https://www.vox.com/culture/359966/poker-world-series-wsop-gto-solver
Game theory gets used all over the place. It's used in search algorithms, optimization, computer security, disaster planning and a host of other areas. The classic medical false-positive Bayesian analysis was straight from game theory. You've probably run into this.
In high school, I read the school library copy of the Rand Corporation's Compleat Strategist. It covered game theory up to a certain point but had trouble with mixed strategies. My senior year, they got the next edition which included the newly developed Simplex Algorithm which reliably handled them.
I gather that a lot of this stuff has been replaced with improved methods over the last sixty years, but game theory is still with us. A lot of the math in modern LLMs is basically game theory being used to predict the next token.
You asked: "Why would I care, for example, if Google or OpenAI trawled my blog and turned it into tokens for use in AI training? Am I losing anything?"
What you theoretically lost was a business/licensing opportunity. Many authors care deeply about this.
The problem is that individually a blog post is not all that valuable. According to my back of the envelope calculations Reddit licensed their billion posts for less than a dollar per thousand words.
What you theoretically lost was a business/licensing opportunity. Many authors care deeply about this.
Well, that's it in a nutshell. Any author would obviously prefer to be paid than not paid. However, it's not clear they're not being paid. Let's imagine that, say, Anthropic (one of the big LLM firms) accesses non-fiction books to train its model. Unless they're hacking into Amazon or using archive/piracy sites, aren't they likely to be purchasing copies of the material they're using? Same thing if they're using the New York Times. Can these big Silicon Valley firms not afford subscriptions to newspapers, and so have to resort to hacking?
Seems unlikely.
It sounds to me like providers of printed IP just want to charge LLMs a lot more than they charge other customers. And I don't blame them for wanting this. I'm not sure they'll be able to do so in the end, though. But I suppose it's worth a try. And maybe there's some justification for it, although I can't think of one off the top of my head.
I'm not a game theory expert, but at the very least game theory enables analysis of the strategy.
Kind of like the Drake equation, a good game model can help narrow the discussion to a few key factors that are individually tractable.
It gives a mathematical basis to attempts to reshape the "game" so that continued peace is a stable strategy for all sides.
As to IA / property rights here is my 509 cents: The tech industry has changed copyright law. When I was young it was applied with common sense. Now the techies want ALL of their property rights and fines for violations have increased massively as has the number of small scale violators who have been punished.
I say if they are so keen to enforce the law by the letter they must obey it by the letter. What goes around comes around.
No free pastures for AI!
Damned right!
I think the notion of a "spy proof" strategy is a useful concept that came out of game theory.
Also, how often are opening ceremonies to the Olympics (or to anything) memorable? The only exception I can think of is the opening ceremonies for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics where Muhammad Ali -- already suffering severely from Parkinson's disease -- was the surprise last person in the torch relay and lit the torch.
Game Theory succinctly proves why term limits are a bad idea.