Made some progress on P33. Need to reach out to Manlio De Domenico on that? Also Markus Schneider for the Trustworthy Information proposal

Tasks

• Medical folder
• Laundry – done
• Fan

Got a good start on the Project 2033 doc

Chores

• Clean house – done
• Dishes – done
• Bills – done
• Laundry –

SBIRs

• USNA. Looks at the progress in their doc. I didn’t see any evidence that they are doing any development atm. When does everything have to be done?

I think it’s a great time to re-think what a resilient representative democracy in the context of global, instantaneous, communication and smart machines would look like. I think that it is fair to argue that the run for liberal democracy (1945 – 2008) has become exhausted. One of the reasons that it no longer appears to have traction is that it takes a lot of work to get tangibly better living for many people. For this and other, more structural reasons (e.g. media ownership by the rich), The autocratic and authoritarian systems are winning globally.

So.

We need to figure out what structures an egalitarian system needs to thrive and work to implement them. This is the time to do it, and we have years to work it out while <waves hands> all this plays out..

• This is one of Colin Martindale’s primordial shifts
• “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste … And what I mean by that is, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
• Needs some kind of trustworthy cognitive commons
• Reducing the gap between citizens and representatives
  • Sortition? Into small committees?
  • Guarantees of civil liberties and human rights
  • Online participation means some way of determining citizens from bots. Maybe take something from zero trust architectures?
• The role of money. It tends to produce kings, but it’s also really useful.
• The role of smart machines

My working title for this concept is… Project 2033

Assume existing power structures on the left become irrelevant over the next 2-6 years and it’s as bad as you think. People will tire of all the “winning,” and we need to have a plan in hand that looks attractive to (most) people who really just want something better than where they are now.*

* Now will be much worse in 2-6 years so this will be an easier pitch

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup – done
• Finish generating test data – done
• Slides for Monday? Done
• Look at what the Mids have been doing -tomorrow

I took a rough stab at what tokens cost today bases on working out the cost of a token per Watt-hour on a model like the 70B parameter LLama3 model if it were run on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. Here are my estimates for some pretty hefty books, if a LLM were to generate the same number of words:

• Moby Dick – 163,500 words – $1.44
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy – 733,022 words – $6.44
• War and Peace – 587,554 words – $5.16

It’s not much! My sense is that most interactions use a small fraction of a watt-hour, and a bug TPU like the A-100 is probably even more efficient than and RTX 4090. So if you are paying $20/month for a big model, unless you generate something like four War-and-Peace-like mountains of text, the companies are making a profit. The spreadsheet is here, if you’d like to play with it:

SBIRs

• More trade show demo. Good progress. I think the train data generation is mostly done, now I need to do random test data
• Hmm. Looks like the entire 8a set aside system may go away By my estimate, 8(a) is a $50 billion target, so I think sooner rather than later

GPT Agents

• 3:00 Alden meeting – done
• Missed Peter’s meeting somehow. I don’t think I was provided with a final date/time?

This is really interesting – from Instagram this morning. Need to add it to the trustworthy information proposal:

For comparison, here are Wikipedia page views for Democrat and Republican, along with the disambiguated pages for the parties in the United states, from election day to the inauguration. The number in the legend is the cumulative views for that period.

Instagram is doing some seriously untrustworthy things. Need to update the proposal to include this.

NBC is also manipulating things (via BlueSky)

And if you look at the audience at the time he does it, you can see that some recognize what it is. And they are thrilled:

Vacation plane tix!

SBIRs

• Add offset to trajectory for another training option
• 9:00 Standup
• 3:00 Tradeshow demo

Trying to decide if I want to watch the Washington Post whither away or switch to the Guardian

Found these two items on The Decoder:

• Google has signed its first direct content partnership for an AI chatbot, teaming up with the Associated Press (AP) to feed real-time news into its Gemini system. The deal means change is coming for new publishers if chatbots are successful products.
• The new “Titans” architecture takes inspiration from how human memory works. By combining artificial short and long-term memory through attention blocks and memory MLPs, the system can work with long sequences of information. Titans uses “surprise” as its main memory metric – the more unexpected a piece of information is, the more likely it gets stored in long-term memory. The system also knows when to forget things, helping it use memory space efficiently.

Compile and run Joseph Weizenbaum’s original 1965 code for ELIZA on CTSS, using the s709 IBM 7094 emulator. (GitHub)

Got the Senate testimony chapter finished yesterday. Today I start working through the analysis. Also, I need to add this to the vignette 1 analysis. And to the slide deck for the talk. Maybe even start with it.

4:30 Dentist

Really good example of AI slop and its consequences.

Tasks

• Bills
• Chores
• Laundry
• Ride with David
• Dinner with Barb

Tasks

• Groceries – done
• Cleats – done
• Flight tix 11:00 am 31 May (BWI -> Seattle) to 18 June (Boise -> BWI) – nope. Tomorrow?
• Got a cold late lunchtime ride in

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup – done
• 12:50 USNA – better than last week, at least
• 1:30 Demo meeting – Not sure if we really did anything useful
• Generate 5×5 HGV grid – done!
• Nice pic to end the work week on:

This is interesting, from a societal-scale weapons perspective: Economic inequality and societal collapse. Pinged the author, Florian Ulrich

• Democracies are likely the best form of government if you want to be more resilient against collapse and democracies work less well if your society is highly unequal (Link).

And with that in mind, is it true that radical right-wing parties are largely pro-economic-inequality? When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries

• The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative study. This article examines which parties are more likely to spread misinformation, by drawing on a comprehensive database of 32M tweets from parliamentarians in 26 countries, spanning 6 years and several election periods. The dataset is combined with external databases such as Parlgov and V-Dem, linking the spread of misinformation to detailed information about political parties and cabinets, thus enabling a comparative politics approach to misinformation. Using multilevel analysis with random country intercepts, we find that radical-right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation. Populism, left-wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism, and its opposition to liberal democratic institution.
• The answer seems to be “sort of”: Exclusionary Welfare

Schwab!

SBIRs

• I think the trip went well. A bunch of interesting, smart people. Won over a skeptic. Everyone wants a version of D2A for planning or evaluation. Also a potential application of stable diffusion to produce IR images from config file “prompts.” Because installing SW on govt hardware is problematic, lots of interest in web apps
• Expense trip – have to wait 48 hours for car rental receipt. Next time ask for a printout
• Write notes for Clay, CC others – done
• Generate 5×5 grid of data for evaluating model training – done
• Add range! DOne

Small Language Models (SLMs) Can Still Pack a Punch: A survey

• As foundation AI models continue to increase in size, an important question arises – is massive scale the only path forward? This survey of about 160 papers presents a family of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the 1 to 8 billion parameter range that demonstrate smaller models can perform as well, or even outperform large models. We explore task agnostic, general purpose SLMs, task-specific SLMs and techniques to create SLMs that can guide the community to build models while balancing performance, efficiency, scalability and cost. Furthermore we define and characterize SLMs’ effective sizes, representing increased capability with respect to LLMs.

SBIRs

• Realized I need to put in upper range!
• BD today. Meetings, driving, flying, then home

A Ukrainian law-enforcement source says such call-centres may have played a role in the latest wave of attacks. “They have skilled psychologists who can manipulate the vulnerable,” he says. “They are mainly motivated by cash, but they may occasionally serve the fatherland too.” The Ukrainian law-enforcement source says the perpetrators were mostly gullible, rather than ideologically driven. More often than not, they were motivated by promises of up to $1,000, cash that was rarely delivered. A total of 184 were charged.

Schwab?

SBIRs

• Get slides from Protima,
• Print docs
• Pack
• Leave around 12:30

Tasks

• Chores – done
• Laundry
• Dishes – done
• Do bills tomorrow (and move funds!), since snow

SBIRs

• 12:50 USNA – well that was disappointing

GPT Agents

• Work on response to Carlos and tweak proposal – done

There is a reasonable chance that there will be more snow late Friday night. Looks like we have an actual winter. My guess is that February will be in the 70s.

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• Chat with Protima about slides for Tuesday
• 9:30 Meeting with Aaron to discuss files – generated!

• 12:50 USNA meeting. Luke has updated his Overleaf. Delayed until tomorrow
• 4:30 Book club
• Pretty plots!

GPT Agents

• Start response to Carlos and invite him to the Overleaf
• 3:00 LLM Meeting
  • Neural embedding of beliefs reveals the role of relative dissonance in human decision-making
  • OLMo 2: The best fully open language model to date

It’s a pattern, to be sure. The counterexamples are Korea, Portugal, Spain, and possibly Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the Soviet Union. I think if the revolution can be largely non-violent, then the country gets off of this trajectory:

Gift link

And another ugly pattern – clout chasing at all costs:

• People are using the popular AI video generator Runway to make real videos of murder look like they came from one of the animated Minions movies and upload them to social media platforms where they gain thousands of views before the platforms can detect and remove them. This AI editing method appears to make it harder for major platforms to moderate against infamously graphic videos which previously could only be found on the darkest corners of the internet. 

Neural embedding of beliefs reveals the role of relative dissonance in human decision-making

• Beliefs serve as the foundation for human cognition and decision-making. They guide individuals in deriving meaning from their lives, shaping their behaviors, and forming social connections. Therefore, a model that encapsulates beliefs and their interrelationships is crucial for quantitatively studying the influence of beliefs on our actions. Despite its importance, research on the interplay between human beliefs has often been limited to a small set of beliefs pertaining to specific issues, with a heavy reliance on surveys or experiments. Here, we propose a method for extracting nuanced relations between thousands of beliefs by leveraging large-scale user participation data from an online debate platform and mapping these beliefs to an embedding space using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM). This belief embedding space effectively encapsulates the interconnectedness of diverse beliefs as well as polarization across various social issues. We discover that the positions within this belief space predict new beliefs of individuals. Furthermore, we find that the relative distance between one’s existing beliefs and new beliefs can serve as a quantitative estimate of cognitive dissonance, allowing us to predict new beliefs. Our study highlights how modern LLMs, when combined with collective online records of human beliefs, can offer insights into the fundamental principles that govern human belief formation and decision-making processes.

• From Manlio De Domenico, Associate Professor of Applied Physics at Dept. of Physics of University of Padua Lead of CoMuNe Lab, Research Group for Multilayer Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems

SBIRs

• 12:00 AI Ethics training
• More work on the demo. I need to see how minimum distance is calculated. It looks good
• Start generating cvs files? Yes!

GPT Agents

• 3:00 Alden meeting

Nice walk in the snow today

SBIRs

• Get plane, car, and hotel for next week
• Get back to work on the trade show demo. Last time I touched it was Dec 12, and I have forgotten everything. Good progress though:

GPT Agents

• Start editing Vignette 5 – Nope, read more of Invisible Rulers