Knowledge makes the world so much more beautiful. - Andrej Karpathy

I love the expression “food for thought” as a concrete, mysterious cognitive capability humans experience but LLMs have no equivalent for.

Definition: “something worth thinking about or considering, like a mental meal that nourishes your mind with ideas, insights, or issues that require deeper reflection. It's used for topics that challenge your perspective, offer new understanding, or make you ponder important questions, acting as intellectual stimulation.”

So in LLM speak it’s a sequence of tokens such that when used as prompt for chain of thought, the samples are rewarding to attend over, via some yet undiscovered intrinsic reward function. Obsessed with what form it takes. Food for thought.

I am unreasonably excited about self-driving. It will be the first technology in many decades to visibly terraform outdoor physical spaces and way of life. Less parked cars. Less parking lots. Much greater safety for people in and out of cars. Less noise pollution. More space reclaimed for humans. Human brain cycles and attention capital freed up from “lane following” to other pursuits. Cheaper, faster, programmable delivery of physical items and goods. It won’t happen overnight but there will be the era before and the era after.

People have too inflated sense of what it means to "ask an AI" about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of "asking an AI", think of it more as "asking the average data labeler" on the internet.

Few caveats apply because e.g. in many domains (e.g. code, math, creative writing) the companies hire skilled data labelers (so think of it as asking them instead), and this is not 100% true when reinforcement learning is involved, though I have an earlier rant on how RLHF is just barely RL, and "actual RL" is still too early and/or constrained to domains that offer easy reward functions (math etc.).

But roughly speaking (and today), you're not asking some magical AI. You're asking a human data labeler. Whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful ofc ourse. Post triggered by someone suggesting we ask an AI how to run the government etc. TLDR you're not asking an AI, you're asking some mashup spirit of its average data labeler.