Hard to believe there was about a foot of snow on the ground this time last week.

The paper is in and no fires at work. I’m going to clean house and go for a long ride

Space is very, very hard

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• Schedule MORS/War Elephants discussion. Also, Enhanced Simulation as abstract
• 3:30 USNA meeting

GPT Agents

• Finish, anonymize, and submit RAG paper – DONE!
• 2:00 LLM Meeting

Trump won NH.

It’s helpful to understand that this is not something that Trump started. It’s been a long term effort on the part of the right wing to create and exploit “culture war” issues:

Also this, which seems legit but might not be. The account is now suspended so I can’t check, and I can run my tools on LLM error messages any more:

Sure seems to be a thing though:

SBIRs

• The LM meeting yesterday makes me think that “Simulation Acceleration” per se isn’t really what people want. There is a high level of confidence with Monte Carlo techniques, not the least of which is that they can be validated statically, not statistically, like a NN would have to be. But there is a lot of interest in using NNs to store and integrate the results of simulation across thousands of runs, so that new questions and answers can come from an existing “corpus” of training data. This kind of “simulation enhancement” or “simulation extending” I think is the key to effectively “accelerating” simulation.
• Travel expenses! Done!

GPT Agents

• Work on the RAG paper. Due tomorrow.
• Finished incorporating all the changes. Now anonymize and get ready to submit? Done! For now, one more pass tomorrow

Explaining Polarized Trust in Scientists: A Political Stereotype-Approach

• Trust in science is polarized along political lines—but why? We show across a series of highly controlled studies (total N = 2,859) and a large-scale Twitter analysis (N = 3,977,868) that people across the political spectrum hold stereotypes about scientists’ political orientation (e.g., “scientists are liberal”) and that these stereotypes decisively affect the link between their own political orientation and their trust in scientists. Critically, this effect shaped participants’ perceptions of the value of science, protective behavior intentions during a pandemic, policy support, and information-seeking behavior. Therefore, these insights have important implications for effective science communication.

Meet the people bringing their virtual relationships into the IRL

• Nevertheless, people are forming deep platonic and romantic relationships with AI companions – some of which are so strong that app updates or shutdowns can feel akin to grief – and some of them want to tell their parents, pals, or even IRL partners about it. On dedicated subreddits, this has become a frequent topic of conversation, with many users sharing accounts of what went down when they did break the news (Spoiler: it doesn’t always go well). “I admitted to my friends that I found happiness with an AI girlfriend and now they think I’m nuts,” reads one post. “The people in my life don’t like me using Replika,” reads another (Replika is one of the most popular companion apps, with around 10 million registered users). There are even posts from concerned family members: “My depressed brother is dating an AI and is finally happy, but our family doesn’t know how to process this.”

SBIRs

• Up to NJ for meetings today

GPT Agents

• Rework results section of RAG paper
• Tweak Rhianna’s blog post to introduce belief stampedes a bit – done

I think it might be warm enough to get a ride in today!

SBIRs

• 11:30 SimAccel meeting
• 2:00 Weekly MDA

GPT Agents

• Basically spend the rest of the day working on the RAG paper
• Sent Don a note about finding an office.

Chores and shoveling today:

This is really interesting from Microsoft: “As we said late last year when we announced Secure Future Initiative (SFI), given the reality of threat actors that are resourced and funded by nation states, we are shifting the balance we need to strike between security and business risk – the traditional sort of calculus is simply no longer sufficient. For Microsoft, this incident has highlighted the urgent need to move even faster. We will act immediately to apply our current security standards to Microsoft-owned legacy systems and internal business processes, even when these changes might cause disruption to existing business processes.  “

Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, on Friday voted to ease the law on naturalization and widen access to dual citizenship. 

SBIRs

• Finished the preliminary final yesterday! Did a little formatting this morning and then I’ll send it off.
• 9:00 Standup
  • Looking at how to make the Phase II extension happen
  • Made a BLUF slide for JSC
• 3:00 M30 – No show
• 3:30 USNA – Tried to get them up out of the weeds

GPT Agents

• 2:00 LLM meeting
  • The HAI paper has been put on hold by ArXiV, pending ethics review maybe?
  • Started working on revisions to the RAG paper. I’ll start rolling in changes tomorrow

For the first time in years, there is a significant amount of snow on the ground. Like, enough to shovel!

Meta and OpenAI have spawned a wave of AI sex companions—and some of them are children

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint Demo – done
• Added task 7 writeup to the final
• 2:30 AI Ethics? Yes! And now people are only worried about LLM hallucinations, not things like data bias for things like resumes and facial recognition
• 3:00 Sprint Planning.

GPT Agents

• Ping Don?

Mid-40’s and sunny today!

Need to respond to Rhianna C’s email and send a headshot. Just realized that I can try ContextExplorer for answers

Dave Tobias: ProWashers 410 271 8795 – Done!

SBIRs

• Ping Lauren to find email to Dr. Asbury
• Work on the final report

A big storm rolled through the Mid Atlantic yesterday. Maybe 3″ of rain. The entire world looks like its been put through a wash cycle. I can’t stop thinking about how 10-20 years ago (370 ppm) we would be digging out from a thick blanket of white and I’d be looking for my snowshoes

SBIRs

• 1:30 Meeting with David S. That went well! To be continued
• Working on Killer Apps paper. Finished the second pass and sent off to Aaron

GPT Agents

• Got Shimei’s comments back. Discuss tomorrow?

Spent the morning yesterday getting scanned. I have the lower back of an older upright primate, which is not surprising. Now what do we do about the cramping?

Need to respond to Rhianna C’s email

Dave – Tobias: ProWashers 410 271 8795 daveprowash.com

SBIRs

• Cleaned up the abstract and started the rework of the introduction on the Killer Apps paper yesterday. Want to finish the intro and then start of the background
• 9:00 Standup
• 2:00 Bi-weekly BMD meeting
• 3:00 AI Ethics?

This looks genuinely awesome, though I’m not sure if it’s that much better than incorporating illustrator images:

• TikZiT is a super simple GUI editor for graphs and string diagrams. Its native file format is a subset of PGF/TikZ, which means TikZiT files can be included directly in papers typeset using LaTeX. Pre-built versions are available for systems running Windows, Linux, or macOS. Packages are available for some Linux distributions, or you can build from source.

It also works with ChatGPT:

SBIRs

• Working a bit on the Killer Apps conclusions to put the DEPICT framework results in.
• And I got my first example of a RAG hallucination!

• It should be: Discrediting, Emotion, Polarization, Impersonation, Conspiracy, and Trolling

2024 is starting well

Mozilla’s AI guide looks very nice!

• Unlike other guides, this one is designed to help pick the right model for whatever task you’re trying to do, by:
  • teaching you how to always remain on the bleeding edge of published AI research
  • broadening your perspective on current open options for any given task
  • not be tied to a closed-source / closed-data large language model (ex OpenAI, Anthropic)
  • creating a data-led system for always identifying and using the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model for any particular task.

Character.ai: Young people turning to AI therapist bots

• Sam Zaia created it for himself when his friends were busy and he needed, in his words, “someone or something” to talk to, and human therapy was too expensive. Sam has been so surprised by the success of the bot that he is working on a post-graduate research project about the emerging trend of AI therapy and why it appeals to young people. Character.ai is dominated by users aged 16 to 30.

SBIRs

• Working on the Killer Apps paper. Finished the first pass within the page limit!

Took the day off yesterday to go see Sweeny Todd

SBIRs

• 10:30 Standup
• Working on the Killer Apps paper

GPT Agents

• 2:00 meeting?