Author: admin

You have been texting with a friend. At some point. Your friend is no longer available, but does not want you to know that.

So your friend switches into bot mode. You are now texting with an entity that says all the things your friend would say, but is actually an AI mirror of that person.

This is not quite possible now. We can tell pretty quickly when we are talking with a fake intelligence. But at some point this scenario will start to enter the realm of everyday reality.

Of course this won’t happen all at once. Rather, as the years go on, the length of time it will take to detect such a fraud will gradually lengthen. But then, at some point, a line will be crossed, just as a line was eventually crossed with chess playing computers.

And from then on we will look back with nostalgia upon an earlier and more innocent time, when you knew for sure that the person you were talking to was actually a person.

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights

We place our sacred moments up on shelves
And say a prayer before we dim the lights

So please don’t speak to me of fate and night
Or dreams that never know the light of day

The souls that never learn to see the light
Their fate will be to dream this life away

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights

We place our sacred moments up on shelves
And say a prayer before we dim the lights

So please don’t speak to me of fate and night
Or dreams that never know the light of day

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights

We place our sacred moments up on shelves
And say a prayer before we dim the lights

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

Today is, appropriately enough, Steve Jobs’ birthday. And so it is a fine day to talk about the long arc of technological causality.

Jobs would have appreciated how long the journey has been from my first shaders back in 1984 to Nvidia’s ever faster line of graphics processors to the use of those processors to train AI models — an exciting development which probably won’t reach maturity until at least 2034.

Which leads to an interesting question: What algorithms might somebody be developing right now, in 2024, which could eventually lead to a new kind of computer processor, which in turn could lead to a surprising and world-changing new use case? I wonder whether we would recognize the significance of such an algorithm if we were to see it today.

A.I. is having quite a moment. Convolutional Neural Nets have led to large data models based on General Purpose Transformers, and the results seem astonishing.

A mere eight days ago, OpenAI unveiled Sora, and we are now starting to see text prompts turn into richly detailed and nearly realistic 3D animations. And in the coming years the technology will only grow more impressive.

Within another decade, talented creators will be able to create compelling feature length animations simply by properly describing them. It will still take great human talent and visual judgement to make a great movie, but the work of applying that human talent and judgement will have shifted from manual labor to higher level cognitive and linguistic skill.

By 2034 there will be another animated movie as compelling and groundbreaking in its own way as Fantasia was in 1940. But unlike the original, the brilliant and highly skilled people who make this new movie will do so by talking to a computer.

To recap:

In 1974 I first saw Fantasia. Inspired by that, in 1984 I created the first procedural shader language, with user-specified matrix operations at every pixel. By 1994, animated feature films were incorporating procedural shaders as standard practice.

By 2004 hardware accelerated shaders powered by graphics processors from Nvidia had become standard in computer games. Around 2014, those Nvidia processors began to be repurposed to train the convolutional neural nets of A.I.

Now in 2024, general purpose transformers are starting to create the first believable short A.I. movies. In another ten years from now, in 2034, it will be possible to create new A.I.-enabled versions of Fantasia simply by talking to a computer.

And we will have come full circle.

Over the years, the ability of graphics processors to multiply matrices continued to grow at an exponential rate. This development allowed game designers to create ever more realistic scenes, with better animation, larger numbers of polygons and more realistic textures and lighting effects.

It would already have been interesting if this is all that ended up happening. But meanwhile, something else was happening. There was another application for all of those matrix operations which would become even more important than graphics.

Because in order to train the Convolutional Neural Nets that had been invented by pioneers such as Yann LeCun, as well as successive generations of A.I., you needed matrix math — lots and lots of matrix math. So that Nvidia hardware ended up finding a new purpose.

You have only to look at the history of Nvidia stock prices to see what happened next. A little less than a decade ago, A.I. began to undergo a revolution. It turned out that all of those graphics processors turned out to be the perfect devices for training ever more complex A.I. models.

And that leads us to where we are today. But the story doesn’t end there. More tomorrow.