Month: July 2024

Continuing from yesterday.

The other side of the coin is that What you get for all of this limitless power is not at all the same thing as what you get by doing it the old-fashioned way.

There is no actual human intelligence inside that magic box. Yes, it can endlessly reconstitute human knowledge and know-how, but it does so with zero judgment.

This is all perfectly fine when simulating tornadoes. But it’s something else altogether when simulating a person that you would like to get help from.

In the latter case, you get what you pay for. Free advice from a realistic but judgment-free bot is one thing. The actual thoughts of a caring human being are another thing entirely.

What I realized, after thinking about the statement “AI doesn’t care where it is trained,” is that modern generative AI is essentially a kind of magic box to store up know-how. It can take a tremendous amount of energy to get know-how into that box. But once that has been done, new applications of that know-how can emerge from that box an infinite number of times — all at low cost.

Another time that this kind of thing happened was the creation between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s of desktop publishing. Before then, if you wanted to produce a document with high quality type-setting, you needed to hire a professional to do it for you.

But starting with TeX in 1978, and software that followed, the knowledge of experts could be encapsulated in software that you could run at home on your personal computer. Essentially, that was the beginning of “expertise in a box.”

We are now entering an era in which all sorts of expertise can be stuffed into that box, given enough prior examples, after which it can be cheaply accessed anywhere and everywhere.

More tomorrow.

Today at Siggraph, Jensen Huang, during his keynote address, said “AI doesn’t care where it is trained.”

And all of a sudden I got it, what generative AI really is about, why it is actually eco-friendly, and so much more.

I’m still working it through in my head. More tomorrow.

I am at the Denver Convention Center, sitting the very from row. About 2000 of us are about to experience the Siggraph Fast Forward.

Everyone who is presenting a technical paper this year will be giving a short synopsis of their work. There are several hundred papers this year, so I think each presenter will be getting less than half a minute.

I was a participant in the very first ever Siggraph Fast Forward in 2002. So I know how thrilling and nerve wracking this brief but critical live performance will be for this year’s presenters.

I look forward to the next few hours of having my head filled with wonderful new ideas. Wishing everyone good luck!!!

For some reason I have a new-found fondness for coconut trees.

I realize now, more than ever, that I exist in the context of all in which I live and what came before me.

Today I showed a demo to somebody, and right afterward, I realized things that I wanted to improve. Some of this was due to the reaction of the person I was demoing to, and some of it came out of thinking “Gosh, I wish I also could have shown …”

And I realized, for the first time, that all of my years of showing demos has not been just to show demos. It has also been to learn from the experience. And then to use that knowledge to make the demo better.

It turns out that giving demos is an iterative experience: Learn from doing it, make it better, repeat.

Which means, in essence, that a good demo is something that is organically grown, not from one person, but from an entire community. I kind of like that.

As the days go by I have noticed that life seems to teeter back and forth between order and chaos. This is true not just on the national and world stage (we are all experiencing that together) but in my personal life as well.

I suspect that this is a very common experience. One moment is calm, and the very next is crisis, and on any given day we are not sure which will come next.

What I am wondering is whether there is a word for this experience. It seems to common and universal that surely by now someone has coined a term for this particular kind of ping-ponging of reality.

If there is no such word, maybe we need to invent one. I am open to suggestions.

Today in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to hand over the White House tapes to a special prosecutor. Fast forward 50 years.

If Nixon had instead been facing today’s Supreme Court, the outcome might have been very different. Based on their rulings to date, the current Court might well have decided that it was perfectly ok for Nixon to cover up a crime intended to influence a presidential election.

Because, after all, he was doing it in his official capacity of president of the United States.

I find myself feeling cautiously optimistic.

To be more specific: I’m getting used to the idea that our world may not. after all, be about to go totally insane.

I recently walked past the Empire Diner on 10th Avenue in Manhattan, and a memory came floating back from many years ago. When I was in my twenties, my colleagues and I once went there after a long day working on computer graphics.

We had never been there before, and back then their menu was more, um, eccentric than it is now. We noticed that “Soup of the day” was listed for $3.00. And right below that, “Soup du jour” was listed for $3.50.

When the waitress came over, we asked her what the difference was. “Well,” she said, “here’s the difference. If you order the soup of the day, we charge you $3.00. If you order the soup du jour, we charge you $3.50.”

I ordered the soup of the day. And to this day, I have no regrets.