On the Nature of Things

Typhoon wrote: ↑20 Feb 2025 04:17 HPCWire |
Microsoft’s Big Bet on Majorana Pays Off with New Topological Quantum Chip

Majorana fermion

We'll see. Claims of observing a Majorana fermion have been made before and later retracted.

First off,
(1) the huge majority of what people are calling AI these days is in fact machine learning. Nothing wrong with that - machine learning can be great stuff, when you have a large enough and well-curated-enough data set to feed into such systems, and when the problems you're trying to work on have well-defined boundaries. But I would like to add that in my opinion

(2) machine learning does not create any new knowledge. It rearranges information you have already obtained and combs through it looking for correlations and rules and patterns, and it can do a far, far better job at this than any human could. If the problem space you are working in has few enough degrees of freedom in it, it can use these patterns to make extremely useful analogies and predictions - the protein structure work that Hassabis references is a shining example of this.

But (3) I strongly believe that all machine learning is done by looking for patterns in some sort of language (be it a native human language (or a coding language) as with chatbots, mathematical symbols, the language of protein sequence and structure as with AlphaFold et al., and so on. The analogies between letters, words, sentences, and grammar hold up quite well across such systems. And I believe that Wittgenstein was right when he said that in any language there are things that cannot be said.

noddy wrote: ↑22 Apr 2025 07:55 The big IT vendors and government are all in now, its only going to get worse, not better.

doesnt matter what we think.

they are perfectly happy for creatives to slip through the cracks - the perfectly statistically average , predictable , automated idiot, on current "best data" is the dream worker.

innovation is so rare, its best not to worry about - the person who comes in second with a big business behind them will be the one that makes it happen.

Typhoon wrote: ↑27 Apr 2025 02:17

noddy wrote: ↑22 Apr 2025 07:55 The big IT vendors and government are all in now, its only going to get worse, not better.

doesnt matter what we think.

they are perfectly happy for creatives to slip through the cracks - the perfectly statistically average , predictable , automated idiot, on current "best data" is the dream worker.

innovation is so rare, its best not to worry about - the person who comes in second with a big business behind them will be the one that makes it happen.

Perhaps.

On the other hand, machine learning [AI] has a long track record of overpromising and underdelivering.