Mercurial > hg > BCS
changeset 6:abb1b1e2f6fc
trying alternative sources of free speech-to-text
| author | Henry S Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> |
|---|---|
| date | Wed, 21 Aug 2024 19:34:07 +0100 |
| parents | f3b043032519 |
| children | 631ccc289640 |
| files | BCS_HST_2024-06-19/notta.txt BCS_HST_2024-06-19/otter_ai.txt BCS_HST_2024-06-19/transcribeme.txt |
| diffstat | 3 files changed, 929 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) [+] |
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--- /dev/null Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000 +++ b/BCS_HST_2024-06-19/notta.txt Wed Aug 21 19:34:07 2024 +0100 @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +HST: +core. +BCS: +Says recording here. +HST: +Yeah, it just I clicked it as you spoke or just before or something like that. +s3: +All right. +HST: +How are you doing? Well, I said this last time, and you disagreed with me, but you look OK. +BCS: +Yes, no, I actually think I am okay this time. I'm a little... +s3: +Um, +BCS: +compromised in various ways, which I'm going to tell you about. +HST: +Sure, well. +s3: +Um. +BCS: +One of them being that I haven't done my homework for a reason. I want to try to explain actually, but +HST: +Well, I mean, it was a short, it was short notice, but I figure we do this. Well, I don't know, it's like going, this is a comparison I use too often in too many ways. It's like we used to do with the kids, which was that we would go to the west coast of Scotland for the Maybank holiday weekend every year. +HST: +And without paying any attention to what the weather forecast was, because you needed to book in advance to get a cheap place, and so on. And sometimes that meant famously, and, you know, family history is a good thing. +HST: +Eating our sandwiches in a phone booth on the ferry pier between Sky and Razi. Because it was raining too hard. Didn't want to sit in the car to have our picnic. But sometimes it meant, you know, swimming off white sand beaches in Eriseg in 20 degree weather and it looked and felt like the Caribbean. +HST: +So you win some and you lose some and if this is not well prepared as you'd like, then we'll talk anyway. +BCS: +talk anyway. And I have a question about substance. So here's the problem. I have to get the final draft of the reflections book to the press by July 8. Which deadline I'm not going to make. But I need to make it enough that my good standing with the press remains. +BCS: +Such that I can get an extension. And I think given the uncertainty about my lifespan, to say nothing of maybe just efficiency overall, I just need to do that. So this morning, I kind of thought, look, I might get to[am i gonna] spend the morning reading old versions of God approximately, which I would like to do. +BCS: +And I slapped myself on the other wrist. Is that a well founded construction? Probably not. But anyway, I mean, I'm and have been working on it. +HST: +Actually, that's that I mean, you, you're the only person who can correctly set your priorities. [BCS]Right. So I.[BCS] +BCS: +I think I have to do that. Now, July 8th is not very far away. +HST: +No, it's not. +BCS: +So that might mean delaying our project by a rather short amount of time, but realism, the aforementioned realism, means it'll probably mean deferring it for longer than that.
--- /dev/null Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000 +++ b/BCS_HST_2024-06-19/otter_ai.txt Wed Aug 21 19:34:07 2024 +0100 @@ -0,0 +1,520 @@ +BCS 0:00 +Record says recording here, + +HST 0:03 +yep, it just I clicked it as you spoke, or just before or something like that, right? How are you doing? You? Do you Well, I said this last time, and you disagreed with me, but you look okay, yes, oh, I [mixed up] + +BCS 0:17 +actually think I am okay this time. + +BCS 0:22 +I I'm a little + +BCS 0:32 +compromised in various ways which I'm going to tell you about, + +BCS 0:35 +sure, well, + +Speaker 2 0:38 +one of them being that I haven't done my homework for a reason. I want to try to explain, actually, but, + +HST 0:45 +well, I mean, it was a short it was short notice, but I figure we do this, oh, I don't know. It's like going, this is a comparison I use too often in too many ways. It's like we used to do with the kids, which was that we would go to the west coast of Scotland for the Maybank holiday weekend every year, and without paying any attention to what the weather forecast was, because you needed to book in advance to get a cheap place and so on. And sometimes that meant famously. And you know, family history is a good thing eating our sandwiches in a phone booth on the ferry pier between sky and Razi because it was raining too hard, didn't want to sit in the car to have our picnic. But sometimes it meant, you know, swimming off white sand beaches in arise in 20 degree weather, and it looked and felt like the Caribbean. So you win some and you lose some. Then if this is not, well, they're not as well prepared as you'd like, then we'll talk anyway. We'll talk + +Speaker 2 1:51 +anyway. And I have a question about substance. So here's the problem. + +BCS 2:00 +I have to get [should continue as BCS] + +Speaker 2 2:02 +the final draft of the reflections book to the press by July 8, right[HST] which, which deadline I'm not going to make, but I need to make it enough that my good standing with the press remains such that I can get an extension, and I think even the uncertainty about my lifespan, to say nothing of maybe just efficiency overall, I just need to do that. So this morning, I kind of thought, Look, am I going to spend the morning reading old versions of God, approximately which I would like to do? And I slapped myself on the other wrist. + +BCS 2:54 +Is that a well founded instruction? + +BCS 2:56 +Probably not. But anyway, I mean, + +BCS 3:04 +and have been working on it. + +HST 3:08 +That's that, I mean, you, you are the only person who can correctly set your priorities + +BCS 3:13 +right. So I think I have to do that now. July 8 is not very far away. [HST]No, it's not[HST]. So that might mean delaying our project by rather short amount of time. But realism, the aforementioned realism, means it'll probably mean deferring it for longer than that. But + +HST 3:34 +understood, but we can, we can reduce, at the very least, reduce the frequency, but I may try to keep it ticking over one way or + +BCS 3:41 +another. Yeah? Sure, sure. Well, + +Speaker 2 3:42 +so here's a question, if I can just plunge in. Maybe there are other of + +BCS 3:46 +course, yeah, go. So + +BCS 3:51 +I was struck when I wrote the + +BCS 3:56 +postscript note to our last meeting + +BCS 4:00 +by how I was framing everything + +BCS 4:04 +in terms of, + +BCS 4:09 +well, actually, I don't even remember the last note. + +Speaker 2 4:12 +Hang on a second. Maybe I should take a look at it. I should was it email? Probably, I + +HST 4:18 +believe. Well, I'm sorry if it wasn't emailed, then I don't have it. But that doesn't mean that it's not worth looking at. So + +BCS 4:31 +I'm desperately + +HST 4:41 +waiting I gather from Jim that some progress has been made on the map project, + +BCS 4:52 +on which project the + +HST 4:53 +Save Brian's Mac project? + +Speaker 2 4:57 +Oh, yes. I. Not enough to have the Mac saved. + +HST 5:05 +Well, he was hopeful of his next meeting with you, but maybe it didn't happen that way. So when did I Okay? Here we are. Call this week. No, that was quick. Thought it says, Oh, + +BCS 5:23 +that's it, okay, right, + +BCS 5:26 +all right, sorry, yeah, I've got it. I + +BCS 5:43 +uh, right? + +BCS 5:46 +So, as in the first paragraph, I say + +Speaker 2 5:50 +call these two historical and metaphysical approaches, right? And what I have not done is read any so what you think you have, or what you know that you have, is something like version 11. Is that + +HST 6:08 +right? That's That's correct. 2009 version 11, which I would say in terms of this dichotomy, is entirely the historical approach, okay? And I think that's consistent with the note at the top, which says, In previous versions of this, I tried to produce a metaphysics which would underpin what I'm talking about, but didn't get far enough to make it worth reproducing, or something like that. + +BCS 6:38 +And I did say in previous versions of this, + +HST 6:41 +I believe, so let me just get the fact of the matter in front of me, which it nearly is. + +BCS 6:55 +Right. Wait a minute, I'm just Looking at the wrong place. I + +HST 7:37 +Okay, I think it's this one. Yes, it is. + +HST 7:46 +A number of manuscripts have been circulated under this title over the last 15 years. Right? This one lacks any sketch of a worldview exhibiting the characteristics described, I presume that means described below, as it were, somewhat in response to the first version, which tried to provide such a view without explanation of what was interesting or mattered about it. If it seems worthwhile, I may someday incorporate all the various versions into a single, long, it says short monograph, + +BCS 8:27 +stereograph, + +BCS 8:28 +yes, something like that, + +Speaker 2 8:33 +right? Okay, well, that's very helpful, actually, to me, Bob, thank you for finding that. Yes, I think that longer monograph yet to be produced, longer monograph is what I feel as if we're aiming it. + +BCS 8:52 +And I don't actually know + +BCS 8:56 +whether I + +Speaker 2 8:58 +made any attempt to say that these lead to the same view. + +BCS 9:10 +I have actually thought about that. + +Speaker 2 9:17 +So let me actually recite from memory four or five sentences, and tell me if they ring a bell. If you were Have you ever read them + +BCS 9:29 +go something like this? Start at the beginning. + +BCS 9:33 +That is, + +Speaker 2 9:36 +start at what those who'd like to start at the beginning. Start with + +BCS 9:46 +bosons, fermions, + +BCS 9:49 +quarks, + +BCS 9:53 +assemblages, + +BCS 9:57 +pressed into atoms and molecules and I. + +BCS 10:01 +DNA and so on, as it were. And + +BCS 10:04 +then the second paragraph, saying, + +BCS 10:13 +of course, something like that's i + +BCS 10:23 +is not a beginning. Many will argue, whatever, + +BCS 10:34 +and and + +Speaker 2 10:35 +then something like but actually, it doesn't matter where we start, we'll end up in the same place. + +BCS 10:46 +So in the media there, there would be something like + +BCS 10:51 +other people would say, start with stories + +BCS 10:56 +or something like that. Anyway, + +HST 10:58 +I see what you're saying. Okay. I mean, I think it's important that you well, it changes the where you go next to have something like the stories line, because otherwise it's all just about where you cut the physics. And that, I think, is, is is not enough. That's just what I think of as I had this version of this conversation last week with my redder, my regular Quaker interlocutor, right there. There are these two questions, which I believe I which I tend to attribute to Kant, but I may get wrong. Why is there something rather than nothing, and how would I live my life? Most you know, and if you talk to Dominicans, for instance, they will happily talk about one or the other, but usually find it challenging to see what the relationship is between likely answers to the first and likely answers to the second, right? That's another way of saying what the what it is you're trying to bring together. I think, right? I + +BCS 12:12 +think so. Yeah, I think so. And + +Speaker 2 12:19 +I think what I put in the note after the historical approach + +BCS 12:26 +is sort of a story about + +BCS 12:32 +how Our understanding of + +BCS 12:38 +framions and bosons as it were, I has + +Speaker 2 12:40 +been + +BCS 12:49 +pressed into + +BCS 12:50 +service as a grounds for normativity and + +BCS 12:57 +maybe objectivity and so on and so forth. + +BCS 13:01 +I don't think successfully, but + +HST 13:06 +there is that's, that's, that's really the, that's the, the first large paragraph in the email right, + +BCS 13:15 +which I've now buried under lots of windows. Well, I deep, + +HST 13:23 +the pure mechanism of classical science, then rationality, with reference to frigate logic, then normativity, and the current paradigm of deriving it from evolutionary field, + +BCS 13:31 +etc, right? + +BCS 13:42 +Yeah. So then + +BCS 13:52 +the argument would go something like this, That + +BCS 14:02 +the only tenable version of + +BCS 14:18 +the well, either + +BCS 14:26 +the only tenable version of + +BCS 14:28 +the metaphysical approach, + +BCS 14:36 +well, sorry, + +BCS 14:38 +The only tenable version of both approaches + +BCS 14:42 +ends up being + +BCS 14:45 +indistinguishable from the tenable version of the other. + +BCS 14:56 +And + +BCS 14:58 +one is. + +BCS 15:01 +A crucial + +BCS 15:06 +factor in that, I believe, is that + +BCS 15:13 +both stories + +BCS 15:16 +have to do justice to our being here. + +HST 15:22 +Yeah, I mean, I've been thinking, you know, the phrase, the thing, which, I think is very bizarrely labeled, the anthropic principle, right? Which says, which attempts to dissolve the first of the Kantian questions by saying, because if there weren't something, we wouldn't be here to ask the question, get over it. + +Speaker 2 15:45 +Yes, but I think that the instruction is misapplied radically because they try to understand what the world needs to be like in order to support + +BCS 16:01 +life or inquiry or something like that. + +HST 16:05 +Yeah. I mean, yeah, certainly. The the what little I remember of the time I heard somebody talk about this at length was Planck's constant is what it is. And the fact that if you varied it by not very much in either direction, nothing would work. Isn't something that needs explanation, because it evidently is the case, right? And I mean, yes, exactly you, you, you know it is at least a minor theoretical interest to establish what the what the bounding box is, right, in which we would still be here to ask that question. But having done that, there's nothing more to be said, right? But I think you're so, I mean, I don't think that just that that changes the the availability of of both projects, essentially, I + +Speaker 2 17:06 +think that's right. And I I actually think, you know, this is, well, I'm going to have to agree to the long rather than short, um, assuming if I go down this pathway, but, um, I actually think the fact well as I've, as I put it, which is transparent to nobody, the ontological warrant for the epistemic fact that we Use differential equations + +BCS 17:36 +to express physical laws + +BCS 17:39 +is actually, I mean, + +Speaker 2 17:43 +I don't know if I said this in the objects, but, but anyway, underlies the Diocese of the world, which I think is fundamental to + +BCS 17:50 +consciousness and self and various things like + +HST 17:55 +that. But because of the uncertainty. No, not the uncertainty because, I mean, is this what I remember from the objects book, which I've already apologized for, is very little is about the importance of sloth. + +BCS 18:09 +Yeah, no, that's a different thing. + +HST 18:11 +That is a different thing. Okay, never mind then, wrestleman, what's the + +Speaker 2 18:24 +press on regardless? Yeah, I'm not sure I should accept it regardless just now, but, + +BCS 18:37 +yeah, the Dyches stuff is, I think, important to + +BCS 18:41 +to self + +Speaker 2 18:44 +and something else that's interesting. This is going to sound a little bit like a non sequitur, but, + +BCS 18:52 +but I think it's not for obvious reasons. + +BCS 18:54 +The + +BCS 18:57 +fact that + +BCS 19:00 +llms And + +BCS 19:05 +the fact that llms are based on language + +BCS 19:10 +is, I think, + +Speaker 2 19:13 +possibly consequential, but possibly not, the reason for their success. Because, I think the power of them stems from the fact that the + +Speaker 2 19:34 +relationality that they encode + +BCS 19:39 +is so stupefyingly huge that + +Speaker 2 19:45 +all the content of the state of the network is bizarrely non conceptual in the sense of that, + +HST 19:58 +absolutely I. Mean they got somewhere by not being representational. Well, not sorry, but not being explicitly representational that no amount of additional funding to Doug Leonard and company would ever have gotten to Right, right. Exactly + +BCS 20:21 +how to say that? Well, is not trivial, but, but I completely agree, + +HST 20:26 +yeah. I mean, it was, it was, you know, I just it would be useful in the, in the indefinitely, in foreseeable future, to have a conversation involving Fernando Pereira about this. Because, + +BCS 20:41 +have you ever met Fernando? Not clear. Oh, yeah, + +BCS 20:44 +I knew him. + +BCS 20:48 +God knows if he was a student. But anyway, 100 years ago, + +HST 20:51 +no, he was our student. So because I did his PhD oral, no, but I think he was, he was in California at the time of the oral so it's possible it doesn't matter. Anyway, he was here six months ago for a guest talk during our 60th anniversary celebrations. And the talk was interesting, but not great and not recorded, but lunch beforehand, which was just me and him and one other person, was hugely more valuable because he was expanding to a to an audience that could hear of the two of us on his anger about the fact about the impact of his own company's work. You know, indirectly in terms of open AI, but, but, you know, in chat, GPT and so on, because he's, he's recently changed within Google being responsible for the the natural language work to being responsible for the sort of theory practice interface within Google, and he's very angry about + +BCS 22:09 +the way in which + +HST 22:12 +people are treating the natural language problem as having now been solved and or being soluble by only by the technologies of llms and but what he did for us in that conversation, and I wish I had recorded it, was give me a much clearer sense of the scale of the the base model, and also the scale of the priming that it gets in order to make it a question. Answer, yeah. What's + +BCS 22:51 +that? Called + +HST 22:53 +the prompt? It's not the prompt, but it's something prompt engineering, yeah, prompted, yeah, the prompt engineering is, there are three aspects of this. I think there's, there is the base model, + +BCS 23:05 +right, which is, which is something like + +BCS 23:11 +100 billion gigabytes or something, + +HST 23:12 +yeah, it's, well, it's, it's certainly that many dimensions. And I don't know, you know, there's this whole business about projecting to lower dimensionalities for use + +BCS 23:24 +that I don't understand, but + +HST 23:27 +there's the base model. There is the make this a question answer. You know, make a question answer from this base model, right? And there's what do. What do we add to the to the to the conjunction of those two, from your from your question, from their question, right? + +BCS 23:48 +And is it a third of those, what's called proptening? + +HST 23:51 +I think so. Okay, but I could be wrong. + +BCS 23:58 +Doesn't matter anyway, no + +BCS 24:00 +more than, yeah, anyway, + +BCS 24:02 +and you know, the, + +HST 24:04 +even though, the the the it's the interesting part, in a way, is, in a sense, from from the performance point of view, is not the base model, but it's the the thing you make a question answer out of it with, right, right? Um, because that's what you that's what the people who don't have any money scrimp on, skimp on, right? And why you then get things which lie and fabulate and contradict themselves, and in general, or, you know, start imitating witty ticky Ray rather than a human being, or whatever it might be. Because actually, there's another kind of farm, rather than the GPU farm, that you need to build some. Thing like, as successful as it is, that's chat GPT, which is a huge farm of ordinary human beings asking questions and feeding back to the engineers the wrong answers and saying, you know, this is you've got to, you've got to stop this kind of answer. All right. + +BCS 25:21 +Yeah, that's not a trivial and + +HST 25:23 +that's an open, ended and in principle, impossible task, + +BCS 25:28 +right? Interesting. + +Speaker 2 25:32 +Anyway, that was all a total footnote. You could have expressed your thought at the beginning of your + +BCS 25:40 +what you just said that + +BCS 25:42 +that's what people who scrimp skimp on, yes, + +HST 25:48 +something like that, anyway, but, but so I think, from your perspective, it's really, it's really GPT three that you're interested in, which is the base model. It's now GPT four, and they won't tell you anything about that. The only thing we have any information about is GPT three, right? Well, that's the only thing I've seen published information about from Google Anyway, + +Speaker 2 26:15 +yes, I mean, I think that's open. AI, sorry, yeah, from open. Ai, yeah. I think that's what I was just talking about. I mean, it doesn't prove that I'm not interested in the other ones. + +HST 26:27 +But, I mean, it's there, for instance, that we come back to the thing that you said, which I think is why I think Dyches is certainly in there is not only do they not know that there's a world that not only does that, does that 100 million gigabytes, whatever it is, million gigabytes, what it doesn't have is any obligation to the World about which right that is some kind of representation, right? + +BCS 27:05 +But that + +HST 27:08 +you know that there are that that that responsibility can be + +BCS 27:19 +decomposed in any particular instance, + +BCS 27:23 +to being only about a certain small part of + +HST 27:30 +which amounts, I guess in many cases, to some kind of story about Reference and dices. And it does. It does. I am tempted to bring Jonathan back into this again, Jonathan Reese, because of his, what, you know, what he's been spending the last two or three years on, is trying to articulate a story about reference which is simply defined in terms of + +BCS 28:01 +of of propositions + +HST 28:05 +that include this are vulnerable to changes in that, that is that include this referring expression are vulnerable to changes in that bit of the world as a way of talking about, what does that referring expression refer to? Well, because he's a radical empiricist. Basically, he wants right anyway. Sorry, that is taking us away now. + +BCS 28:35 +No, no, not entirely, because the I + +BCS 28:47 +there was a title of a talk I was thinking of putting together, sort of + +BCS 28:53 +something like the nonverbal meaning of words, + +BCS 29:00 +if we talk about, + +BCS 29:07 +not only about Sussman, but let's say + +BCS 29:12 +and what he meant by + +BCS 29:20 +empirical or something. + +BCS 29:23 +But just we talk about, + +BCS 29:32 +well, the things we're talking about, the three, the three parts, + +Speaker 2 29:38 +the base model, the delta that turns it into a question answering machine and the prompt engineering that turns a particular prompt into a particular prompt, basically particular question into a particular prompt. Say it's. + +Transcribed by https://otter.ai
--- /dev/null Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000 +++ b/BCS_HST_2024-06-19/transcribeme.txt Wed Aug 21 19:34:07 2024 +0100 @@ -0,0 +1,365 @@ +(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) + +[Speaker 1] (0:00 - 0:00) +Record. + +[Speaker 2] (0:02 - 0:04) +It says recording here. + +[Speaker 1] (0:04 - 0:16) +Yep, and it just, I clicked it as you spoke or just before or something like that. How are you doing? Well, I said this last time and you disagreed with me, but you look okay. + +[Speaker 2] (0:16 - 0:35) +Yes, so I actually think I am okay this time. Good, good, good. I'm a little compromised in various ways, which I'm going to tell you about. + +[Speaker 1] (0:36 - 0:37) +Sure, well. + +[Speaker 2] (0:40 - 0:44) +One of them being that I haven't done my homework for a reason I want to try to explain, actually. + +[Speaker 1] (0:46 - 1:50) +Well, I mean, it was short notice, but I figure we do this, well, I don't know, it's like going, this is a comparison I use too often in too many ways. It's like we used to do with the kids, which was that we would go to the West Coast of Scotland for the Maybank holiday weekend every year. And without paying any attention to what the weather forecast was, because you needed to book in advance to get a cheap place and so on. + +And sometimes that meant famously, and family history is a good thing, eating our sandwiches in a phone booth on the ferry pier between Skye and Rase, because it was raining too hard. Didn't want to sit in the car to have our picnic. But sometimes it meant swimming off white sand beaches in Ariseg in 20 degree weather, and it looked and felt like the Caribbean. + +So you win some and you lose some. And if this is not as well prepared as you'd like, then we'll talk anyway. + +[Speaker 2] (1:51 - 2:57) +We'll talk anyway. And I have a question about substance. So here's the problem. + +I have to get the final draft of the Reflections book to the press by July 8th, which deadline I'm not going to make. But I need to make it enough that my good standing with the press remains such that I can get an extension. And I think given the uncertainty about my lifespan, to say nothing of maybe just efficiency overall, I just need to do that. + +So this morning, I kind of thought, look, am I going to spend the morning reading old versions of God Approximately, which I would like to do? And I slapped myself on the other wrist. Is that a well founded instructional? + +[Speaker 1] (2:57 - 2:59) +Probably not. But anyway. + +[Speaker 2] (3:01 - 3:08) +And have been working on that. + +[Speaker 1] (3:08 - 3:13) +That's that. I mean, you you're the only person who can correctly set your priorities. + +[Speaker 2] (3:14 - 3:19) +Right. So I think I have to do that. Now, July 8th is not very far away. + +[Speaker 1] (3:20 - 3:20) +No, it's not. + +[Speaker 2] (3:21 - 3:34) +So that might mean delaying our project by a rather short amount of time. But realism, the aforementioned realism means it'll probably mean deferring it for longer than that. + +[Speaker 1] (3:34 - 3:42) +But understood. But we can we can reduce, at the very least, reduce the frequency. But I may try to keep it ticking over one way or another. + +[Speaker 2] (3:42 - 3:46) +Yeah, sure, sure. Well, so here's a question, if I can just plunge in. Maybe there are other. + +[Speaker 1] (3:46 - 3:46) +Of course. + +[Speaker 2] (3:47 - 4:15) +Yeah, go. So I was struck when I wrote the postscript note to our last meeting. By how I was framing everything. + +In terms of. Well, actually, I don't even remember the last note. Hang on a second. + +Maybe I should take a look at it. + +[Speaker 1] (4:16 - 4:16) +I should too. + +[Speaker 2] (4:17 - 4:18) +Was it email? Probably. + +[Speaker 1] (4:18 - 4:27) +I believe. Well, I'm sorry. If it was an email, then I don't have it. + +But that doesn't mean that it's not worth looking at. All right. + +[Speaker 2] (4:28 - 4:39) +So I'm desperately waiting. + +[Speaker 1] (4:45 - 4:50) +I gather from Jim that some progress has been made on the map project. + +[Speaker 2] (4:52 - 4:53) +On which project? + +[Speaker 1] (4:54 - 4:57) +The Save Brian's Mac project. + +[Speaker 2] (4:58 - 5:02) +Oh, yes. But not enough to have the Mac saved. + +[Speaker 1] (5:05 - 5:11) +Well, he was hopeful of his next meeting with you, but maybe it didn't happen that way. + +[Speaker 2] (5:15 - 5:16) +So when did I? + +[Speaker 1] (5:16 - 5:23) +Okay, here we are. Call this week. No, that was quick thought. + +It says here. + +[Speaker 2] (5:23 - 5:24) +Oh, that's it. Okay. + +[Speaker 1] (5:25 - 5:25) +Right. + +[Speaker 2] (5:26 - 5:53) +All right. So yeah, I've got it. Right. + +So as in the first paragraph, I say, call these the historical and metaphysical approaches. + +[Speaker 1] (5:54 - 5:54) +Right. + +[Speaker 2] (5:55 - 6:09) +And what I have not done is read any. So what you think you have or what you know that you have is something like version 11. Is that right? + +[Speaker 1] (6:09 - 6:18) +That's correct. 2009 version 11, which I would say in terms of this dichotomy is entirely the historical approach. + +[Speaker 2] (6:19 - 6:19) +Okay. + +[Speaker 1] (6:19 - 6:37) +And I think that's consistent with the note at the top, which says, in previous versions of this, I tried to produce a metaphysics, which would underpin what I'm talking about, but didn't get far enough to make it worth reproducing or something like that. + +[Speaker 2] (6:38 - 6:41) +And I did say in previous versions of this. + +[Speaker 1] (6:41 - 8:23) +I believe so. Let me just get the fact of the matter in front of me, which it nearly is. In fact, wait a minute. + +I'm just looking at the wrong place. This one. Yes, it is. + +A number of manuscripts have been circulated under this title over the last 15 years. Right. This one lacks any sketch of a worldview exhibiting the characteristics described. + +I presume that means described below as it were. Somewhat in response to the first version, which tried to provide such a view without explanation of what was interesting or mattered about it. If it seems worthwhile, I may someday incorporate all the various versions into a single long, it says short, monograph. + +[Speaker 2] (8:27 - 8:28) +Stereograph. + +[Speaker 1] (8:29 - 8:31) +Yes, something like that. + +[Speaker 2] (8:34 - 10:57) +Right. Okay. Well, that's very helpful actually to me. + +Bob, thank you for finding that. Yes, I think that longer monograph, the yet to be produced longer monograph is what I feel as if we're aiming at. And I don't actually know whether I made any attempt to say that these lead to the same view. + +I have actually thought about that. Okay. So, let me actually recite from memory four or five sentences and tell me if they ring a bell. + +Have you ever read them? Goes something like this. Start at the beginning. + +That is, start at what those who'd like to start at the beginning start with. Bosons, fermions, quarks, assemblages pressed into atoms and molecules and DNA and so on and so forth. And then the second paragraph saying, of course, something like that's not a beginning. + +Many will argue, whatever. And then something like, but actually it doesn't matter where we start. We'll end up in the same place. + +So, in the media there would be something like other people would say start with stories or something like that. Anyway. + +[Speaker 1] (10:58 - 12:12) +I see what you're saying. Okay. I mean, I think it's important that you, well, it changes where you go next to have something like the storyline, because otherwise it's all just about where you cut the physics. + +And that I think is not enough. That's just what I think of as, I had a version of this conversation last week with my regular Quaker interlocutor. There are these two questions, which I believe, which I tend to attribute to Kant, but I may get wrong. + +Why is there something rather than nothing? And how would I live my life? And if you talk to Dominicans, for instance, they will happily talk about one or the other, but usually find it challenging to see what the relationship is between likely answers to the first and likely answers to the second. + +That's another way of saying what it is you're trying to bring together, I think. Right. + +[Speaker 2] (12:12 - 13:08) +I think so. Yeah, I think so. And I think what I put in the note after the historical approach is sort of a story about how our understanding of Rameans and Bosons, as it were, has been pressed into service as a grounds for normativity and maybe objectivity and so on and so forth. + +I don't think successfully, but there is... + +[Speaker 1] (13:08 - 13:13) +That's really the first large paragraph in the email. + +[Speaker 2] (13:14 - 13:19) +Right. Which I've now buried under lots of windows. + +[Speaker 1] (13:20 - 13:32) +Well, the pure mechanism of classical science, then rationality with reference to Friggen logic, then normativity, and the current paradigm of deriving it from the evolutionary field, etc. Right. + +[Speaker 2] (13:42 - 15:20) +Yeah. So then the argument would go something like this, that the only tenable version of the metaphysical approach, well, sorry, the only tenable version of both approaches ends up being indistinguishable from the tenable version of the other. And one crucial factor in that, I believe, is that both stories have to do justice to our being here. + +[Speaker 1] (15:22 - 15:31) +Yeah. I mean, I've been thinking... You know the phrase, the thing, which I think is very bizarrely labeled, the anthropic principle. + +[Speaker 2] (15:31 - 15:32) +Right. + +[Speaker 1] (15:32 - 15:42) +Which attempts to dissolve the first of the Kantian questions by saying, because if there weren't something, we wouldn't be here to ask the question, get over it. + +[Speaker 2] (15:45 - 16:03) +Yes, but I think that the anthropic principle is misapplied radically because they try to understand what the world needs to be like in order to support life or inquiry or something like that. + +[Speaker 1] (16:05 - 16:31) +Yeah. I mean, yeah, certainly. Yeah. + +What little I remember of the time I heard somebody talk about this at length was Planck's constant is what it is. And the fact that if you varied it by not very much in either direction, nothing would work isn't something that needs explanation because it evidently is the case. + +[Speaker 2] (16:31 - 16:31) +Right. + +[Speaker 1] (16:32 - 16:52) +And if it weren't the case, I mean, yes, exactly. It is at least of minor theoretical interest to establish what the bounding box is within which we would still be here to ask that question. But having done that, there's nothing more to be said. + +[Speaker 2] (16:53 - 16:53) +Right. + +[Speaker 1] (16:55 - 17:06) +But I think you're... So, I mean, I don't think that changes the availability of both projects, essentially. + +[Speaker 2] (17:06 - 17:53) +I think that's right. And I actually think, you know, this is... Well, I'm going to have to agree to the long rather than short. + +I'm assuming if I go down this pathway, but I actually think the fact... Well, as I put it, which is transparent to nobody, the ontological warrant for the epistemic fact that we use differential equations to express physical laws is actually... I mean, I don't know if I said this in the objects book, but anyway, underlies the Dysus of the world, which I think is fundamental to consciousness and self and various things like that. + +[Speaker 1] (17:56 - 18:08) +But because of the uncertain... No, not the uncertainty because, I mean, is this... What I remember from the objects book, which I've already apologized for is very little, is about the importance of slop. + +[Speaker 2] (18:09 - 18:11) +Yeah, no, that's a different thing. + +[Speaker 1] (18:11 - 18:14) +That is a different thing. Okay. Nevermind then. + +Rasson. + +[Speaker 2] (18:20 - 18:25) +What's the... Rasson regardless? + +[Speaker 1] (18:26 - 18:26) +Yeah. + +[Speaker 2] (18:27 - 19:54) +I'm not sure I should accept the regardless just now, but yeah, the Dysus stuff is, I think, important to self. And something else that's interesting, this is going to sound a little bit like a non-sequitur, but I think it's not for obvious reasons. The fact that LLMs are based on language is, I think, possibly consequential, but possibly not the reason for their success. + +Because I think the power of them stems from the fact that the relationality that they encode is so stupefyingly huge that all the content of the state of the network is bizarrely non-conceptual in the sense of that. + +[Speaker 1] (19:58 - 20:16) +Absolutely. I mean, they got somewhere by not being representational. Well, not being representational. + +Sorry, but not being explicitly representational. That no amount of additional funding to Doug Lennon and company would ever have gotten to. + +[Speaker 2] (20:17 - 20:25) +Right, right. Exactly. How to say that well is not trivial, but I completely agree. + +[Speaker 1] (20:26 - 20:44) +Yeah, I mean, it would be useful in the indefinitely unforeseeable future to have a conversation involving Fernando Pereira about this, because... Have you ever met Fernando? Not clearly. + +[Speaker 2] (20:44 - 20:51) +Oh, yeah. I knew him. God knows if he was a student, but anyway, 100 years ago. + +[Speaker 1] (20:51 - 22:51) +No, he was our student, because I did his PhD oral. Oh, I see. No, but I think he was in California at the time of the oral, so it's possible. + +It doesn't matter. Anyway, he was here six months ago for a guest talk during our 60th anniversary celebrations. And the talk was interesting, but not great and not recorded. + +But lunch beforehand, which was just me and him and one other person, was hugely more valuable, because he was expanding to an audience that could hear of the two of us on his anger about the fact, about the impact of his own company's work, indirectly in terms of open AI, but in chat GPT and so on. Because he's recently changed within Google, being responsible for the natural language work to being responsible for the sort of theory practice interface within Google. And he's very angry about the way in which people are treating the natural language problem as having now been solved and or being soluble only by the technologies of LLMs. But what he did for us in that conversation, and I wish I had recorded it, was give me a much clearer sense of the scale of the base model. And also the scale of the priming that it gets in order to make it a question answer. + +[Speaker 2] (22:51 - 22:52) +Yeah. What's that called? + +[Speaker 1] (22:53 - 22:56) +The prompt. It's not the prompt, but it's something. + +[Speaker 2] (22:56 - 22:57) +Prompt engineering. + +[Speaker 1] (22:58 - 23:05) +Yeah. The prompt engineering is, there are three aspects of this, I think. There is the base model. + +[Speaker 2] (23:06 - 23:13) +Right. Which is something like 100 billion gigabytes or something. + +[Speaker 1] (23:13 - 23:46) +Yeah. Well, it's certainly that many dimensions. And I don't know, there's this whole business about projecting to lower dimensionalities for years that I don't understand. + +But there's the base model. There is the make this a question answerer, make a question answerer from this base model. And there's, what do we add to the conjunction of those two from your question? + +[Speaker 2] (23:48 - 23:54) +And is the third of those what's called prompt engineering? I think so. + +[Speaker 1] (23:55 - 23:59) +But I could be wrong. It doesn't matter. + +[Speaker 2] (24:00 - 24:01) +Anyway. Yeah. Anyway. + +[Speaker 1] (24:04 - 24:26) +Even though the interesting part in a way is in a sense from the performance point of view is not the base model, but it's the thing you make a question answerer out of it with. + +[Speaker 2] (24:27 - 24:28) +Right. Right. + +[Speaker 1] (24:29 - 25:19) +Because that's what the people who don't have any money scrimp on, skimp on. Right. And why you then get things which lie and fabulate and contradict themselves and in general, or start imitating Witty Tiki Ray rather than a human being or whatever it might be. + +Because actually, there's another kind of farm rather than the GPU farm that you need to build something like as successful as it is as chat GPT, which is a huge farm of ordinary human beings asking questions and feeding back to the engineers the wrong answers and saying, you've got to stop this kind of answer. + +[Speaker 2] (25:19 - 25:23) +Right. Yeah. That's a lot of trivial. + +[Speaker 1] (25:24 - 25:29) +And that's an open-ended and in principle, impossible task. + +[Speaker 2] (25:29 - 25:31) +Right. Interesting. + +[Speaker 1] (25:32 - 25:34) +Anyway, that was all. + +[Speaker 2] (25:34 - 25:45) +A total footnote. You could have expressed your thought at the beginning of your what you just said that that's what people who scrimp skimp on. + +[Speaker 1] (25:46 - 26:13) +Yes. Something like that. Anyway. + +But so I think from your perspective, it's really GPT-3 that you're interested in, which is the base model. It's now GPT-4 and they won't tell you anything about that. The only thing we have any information about is GPT-3. + +Right. Well, that's the only thing I've seen published information about from Google anyway. Right. + +[Speaker 2] (26:16 - 26:17) +Yes. I mean, I think that's... + +[Speaker 1] (26:18 - 26:19) +Open AI. Sorry. Yeah. + +[Speaker 2] (26:19 - 26:26) +From open AI. Yeah. I think that's what I was just talking about. + +I mean, it doesn't prove that I'm not interested in the other ones. + +[Speaker 1] (26:28 - 26:59) +But I mean, it's there, for instance, that we come back to the thing that you said, which I think is why I think Dijkstra is certainly in there is not only do they not know that there's a world that not only does that 100 million gigabytes, whatever it is, 100 million gigabytes, what it doesn't have is any obligation to the world about which... + +[Speaker 2] (27:00 - 27:01) +Right. + +[Speaker 1] (27:01 - 28:33) +That is some kind of representation. Right. Yeah. + +But that responsibility can be decomposed in any particular instance to being only about a certain small part of the world, which amounts, I guess, in many cases, to some kind of story about reference and Dijkstra's. And it does... I am tempted to bring Jonathan back into this again, Jonathan Rees, because of his... + +What he's been spending the last two or three years on is trying to articulate a story about reference, which is simply defined in terms of propositions that include this are vulnerable to changes in that. That is, they include this referring expression are vulnerable to changes in that bit of the world as a way of talking about what does that referring expression refer to? Well... + +Because he's a radical empiricist, basically, he wants... + +[Speaker 2] (28:33 - 28:33) +Right. + +[Speaker 1] (28:33 - 28:35) +Anyway, sorry, that is taking us away now. + +[Speaker 2] (28:35 - 29:59) +No, not entirely, because there was a title of a talk I was thinking of putting together, something like the nonverbal meaning of words. If we talk about, not only about Sussman, but let's say, and what he meant by empirical or something, but just we talk about... Well, the things we're talking about, the three parts, the base model, the delta that turns it into a question answering machine, and the prompt engineering that turns a particular prompt into a particular prompt, basically, particular question into a particular + +(This file is longer than 30 minutes. Go Unlimited at TurboScribe.ai to transcribe files up to 10 hours long.) \ No newline at end of file