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#36 - Twitter and TechCrunch Mashup

Publish date: Feb 15, 2022
Last updated: Nov 1, 2022
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Consciousness and Paradigm Shifts

Yann Lecun is Chief AI Scientist at Facebook (Meta) and one of the so-called fathers of deep-learning 🧠, the tech that powers the most cutting edge technologies on your phone, among many other things (face recoginition, translation, etc).

Ilya Sutskever is co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI and also a highly respected deep learning researcher.

Here they disagree on whether the current large neural networks display any kind of consciousness:

Yann is basically arguing that consciousness, the way we experience it as human beings, is not a qualitative improvement away from the current neural network architectures. Rather, it require a paradigm shift.

It reminded me of Buffett saying that “You either get value investing instantly, or you never will” - I’m paraphrasing. The current neural networks we have will never display consciousness, no matter how big they get, at least according to Yann Lecun.

Moderating Conversations

Twitter launches beta test of anti-abuse tool ‘Safety Mode’:

As a public social platform, Twitter faces a continual struggle with conversation health. Over the years, it’s rolled out a number of tweaks and updates in an attempt to address this issue — including features that would automatically hide unpleasant and insulting replies behind an extra click; allow users to limit who could reply to their tweets; let users hide themselves from search; and warn users about conversations that are starting to go off the rails, among other things.

Moderating conversations between (sometimes anonymous) strangers online is a hard problem for current day AI. How do you enforce civility without stifling freedom of expression? Even the wisest amongst us humans would have a hard time achieving such a delicate balance…

Creating Communities

It’s strange how the same patterns appear in different places. Nextdoor is a neighborhood social network, at least that was the goal. It went public under the ticker “KIND”. It’s fighting hard to make its users understand that the goal is ro promote better relationships:

The original idea with Nextdoor was to create a hyperlocal social network where people living in the same area could share neighborhood information, get recommendations, learn about local businesses and more. But Nextdoor often became known instead as a place where people go to air their grievances, report crime, get into heavy political discussions or engage in other less-than-neighborly behavior.

Why do humans have a tendency to turn everything into shit?

Doc Jones and Emerita

Like so many others, I learned about Emerita through Doc Jones. He kept averaging up as late as last week (I’ve stopped a long time ago).

Why I like EMO: downside is seems limited. The value is there in the ground and not going anywhere, management seems honest, juridisction is favorable. Plus, the potential for upside is decent.

Crypto or No Crypto?

Crypto is looking for its Robinhood, and it might be called Rainbow, a sexier-looking app that hides away the complexity of interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, buying and selling NFTs, etc.

Rainbow’s goal is to abstract away as much of the technical know-how from the process and make things like buying or selling a multithousand-dollar NFT as straightforward as tasks like ordering an Uber.

But in another corner of the world, India’s Central Bank is calling crypto a ‘Pnzo scheme’ that should be banned:

A top official of India’s central bank has compared cryptocurrency to a “Ponzi scheme” and suggested an outright ban

Techcrunch

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