Overview: Science&Technology

Via Ross Dawson on LinkedIn: "A core part of human intelligence is the ability to work flexibly with others to achieve both individual and collective goals". Unfortunately, intelligence is usually considered as a property of individual or collective, never both, and so "not in a way that can be used to understand how groups can make…

"Nostr is (among other things) a decentralized social network run over a series of apps and relays, servers that anybody can run to process communications data". It flips the concept of social media platform "on its head: with one private key, you can access multiple apps/interfaces of your choice. However, Nostr is not just social …

My late October 2024 newsletter introduces my ongoing work exploring #AI4Communities, and provides some of the resources going into the next version.

I think I'll call these 'centaur papers' - scientific papers describing how best to combine human and AI.Apparently theory and practice aren't matching up: "While frameworks on augmentation theorize how to best divide work between humans and AI, the empirical literature ... [shows] inconclusive findings. Interaction challe…

According to Mark Zuckerberg, "Consumers no longer control their social-media feeds. Meta’s algorithm... is showing users “a lot of stuff” not posted by people they had connected with... future feeds [will] show you “content that’s generated by an A.I. system.”" Fortunately, "Our legal system is starting to recognize this shift and …

"AI can not only improve short-term productivity of organizations but can also ... increase the organization’s collective intelligence."HBR starts well by pointing out the false dichotomy between thinking "about AI in terms of automation vs. augmentation... Augmentation doesn’t avoid automation, it simply hides it, usually in some l…

"I rarely work for the same client for more than a year or two - generally enough to help them figure out their strategy, pilot and demonstrate it, and set up the team to mainstream it. But I make an exception for the Joint Research Centre"A few slides, repurposed for LinkedIn, setting out "some of the key innovations underpinning t…

Brander with a great intro to the role Nostr could play in tomorrow's online landscape. A choice of architecturesWalled gardens of surveillance capitalismHe starts by walking us through the various architectures, starting with that "of a typical app: a big centralized server in the cloud supporting many clients... grants the server tota…

"How open source projects can balance Makers and Takers: lessons from Drupal's contribution credit system" by the founder of Drupal, in reaction to the Wordpress/WP Engine debacle, tackling "two key challenges that many open source projects face" and which could impede the development of opensource:"The imbalance betw…

As AI drives a flood of new content, "algorithms to help people sort through information must evolve rapidly" - ie, we need AI to solve AI-created problems.Today's algorithms belong to for-profit platforms, mainly social media, and lack transparency: while you can influence it through who you follow, "your ability to truly cust…

"over-reliance on AI... may lead to human deskilling and diminished cognitive engagement... to accept information given by AI without performing critical examinations... misleading users with hallucinated contents... [hence] extraheric AI... conceptual framework that fosters users' higher-order thinking ... creativity, critical thinking,…

The Brave browser project shows that it was ahead of the curve back in late 2023, pointing out:to train an LLM you need training data which is "diverse... span[ning] a wide variety of genres, topics, viewpoints, languages, and more... [to] reduce the errors, biases, and misrepresentations that might be more pronounced in smaller data sets... …

Classic example of a negative view on LinkedIn: "Unlike many others, I don’t think any reinforcement learning or reward algorithm is at play... appears to be a generic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process that breaks tasks into several steps... Subsequent steps ... generated based on context... subsequent interactions concatenated into the context.…

“If you read 1,000 papers and build a powerful representation, humans can interrogate, mine, ask questions, and even get the system to generate new hypotheses...What you will learnAccelerating scientific discovery with generative knowledge extractionUnderstanding ontological knowledge graphs and their creationTransforming information into knowledg…

“About one in four people who began the experiment believing a conspiracy theory came out the other end without that belief... challenges conventional wisdom that evidence and arguments rarely help to change believers’ minds... [as they're] adopting such beliefs to meet various needs – such as a desire for control."The researchers develo…

"examines the impact of AI on human false memories--recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences... through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot" The 200 people…

A Large-Scale Human Study with 100 NLP Researchers

"AI-powered tool designed to assist users in building software ... [from] natural language prompts ... create applications from scratch.

AI is a wider field than LLMs, so "not all the AI use cases are suitable for Generative AI."

"The most common AI-based functionalities in participation tools are toxicity screening, analysis of inputs and translation. The first two in particular are meant to lighten the workload" of community managers."Toxicity screening ... is used to flag hateful or inappropriate inputs." Text is usually flagged and post-moderated, b…

Starts with a basic outline of model collapse and the challenge it faces new AI development, providing several links: "Research has shown that when generative A.I. is trained on a lot of its own output, it can get a lot worse."It then uses scrollytelling to provide a simple example of how "Just as a copy of a copy can drift away fro…

"A deep dive into why RAG doesn’t always work".It should be easy: "install a popular LLM orchestrator like LangChain or LlamaIndex, turn your data into vectors, index those in a vector database, and quickly set up a pipeline with a default prompt."However, while "quick-and-dirty demos are great for understanding the basics…

"As AI-generated content blurs the line between human and machine online, “model collapse” might help us find new value in well-managed human communities."

"See how visible your brand is in AI-powered search engines. Spot where you are doing well and where you can improve to increase brand awareness and sentiment."

AI "can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level white-collar work, raising tough questions about the future of finance". On the one hand the work - "Pulling all-nighters to assemble PowerPoint ... Punching numbers into Excel ... esoteric financial documents that may never be read" - sounds a pretty dismal "rite of passag…

I hope you had a good summer. I stayed and worked from home, and got a lot done thanks to the mercifully fewer meetings. I also read a lot of good stuff, and published one piece. Here's a selection.

"does something like ChatGPT actually display anything like intelligence, reasoning, or thought?" or is it just a stochastic parrot? And "if you’re just making a useful tool – even ... a new general purpose technology – does the distinction matter?"Yes. LLMs have a ‘reversal curse’ which means it will "fail at drawing rela…

The EU "risks falling behind because of incoherent and complex regulation", but there's an opportunity: "open-source AI—models whose weights are released publicly with a permissive licence... ensures power isn’t concentrated among a few large players... creates a level playing field".Europe has more open-source developers…

Ethan Mollick outlines "three fundamental truths about today’s AI" - ubiquity, and both capability and risks which are as enormous as they are unclear - and proposes "a pragmatic way to consider when AI might be helpful, called Best Available Human (BAH) standard... asks the following question: would the best available AI in a parti…

"When we attribute human-like abilities to LLMs, we fall into an anthropomorphic bias ... But are we also showing an anthropocentric bias by failing to recognize" what they can do?