Jim talks with BJ Campbell and Patrick Ryan about understanding the present moment through the concept of egregores. They discuss the meaning of the term, its roots in early occultism, social media as the fertile ground, an analogy with neural nets, measuring egregores with grammar velocity, LLMs as a Broca’s area for tech, how guns have won the culture […]

Jim talks with Erik Torenberg about the ideas in his Substack series on navigating the status games of today. They discuss status as reputation allocation, cyclical change in status mobility over time, status in the world of social media, beliefs as fashions, the status games of adolescent girls, therapy as a status signal, status games around

Jim continues his conversation with recurring guest Forrest Landry on his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss the liminal feeling of the current moment in AI, Rice’s theorem & the unknowability of alignment, the analogy & disanalogy of bridge-building, external ensemble testing, the emergence of a feedback curve, the

Jim talks with Melanie Mitchell about her critique of applying standardized exams to LLMs and the debate over understanding in AI. They discuss ChatGPT and GPT-4’s performance on standardized exams, questioning the underlying assumptions, OpenAI’s lack of transparency, soon-to-be-released open-source LLMs, prompt engineering, making GPT its own skyhook to reduce hallucinations, the number of parameters in

Jim talks with Brad DeLong about his book Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. They discuss how everything changed around 1870, the idea of a polycrisis, Friedrich von Hayek’s affirmation of the market system, the calculation problem, Karl Polanyi’s response, a quantitative index of technological knowledge, the pace of growth, the necessity of a

Jim talks with Shivanshu Purohit about the world of open-source AI models and a significant open-source LLM coming soon from Stability AI and EleutherAI. They discuss the reasons for creating open-source models, the release of Facebook’s LLaMA model, the black box nature of current models, the scientific mystery of how they really work, an opportunity

Jim talks with recurring guest Forrest Landry about his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss AI versus advanced planning systems (APS), the release of GPT-4, emergent intelligence from modest components, whether deep learning alone will produce AGI, Rice’s theorem & the impossibility of predicting alignment, the likelihood that