As a nerdy teen I hated neural networks in data science because I couldn’t train one to multiply two-digit numbers and had a friend who wanted to build a movie scene detector like Shazam did with songs, which I couldn’t do no matter how I tried — perceptual hashing + NNs — it was too early. I believe(d) that the natural human brain is a complex thing that will never, ever get approximated by a computer due to its sheer complexity:

hundreds of millions of years of development (neo-mammalian theory) compared to 1-2 centuries of computers

synapses have very complicated spiking patterns which no computer scientist or medical doctor really understands, apart from detecting seizures

scanning the brain is hard and most of glucose and EEG techniques are like putting a voltmeter on your laptop’s charging port and expecting to ‘measure’ what’s the code of the app running.

even one neurotransmitter like dopamine controls muscle movement, reward, lactation (!), expectations — and the brain has 60+ of them, in a complex loop.

every time a person tries to artificially make something similar using AI, people feel some interest and decide to fund research into it, but often a so called AI winter comes — and there are two AI ‘winters already (1974–1980 and 1987–2000)

And I still don’t know how complex the brain is and whether neural networks can approximate it sufficiently enough. To this day, I am fascinated by scientists like Donald Knuth who work on non-AI data structures and algorithms.

However, in 2019 someone released AI Dungeon, a text game based on something called GPT-2 and released it on social media. I clicked on it and it asked me what to do and I typed go to Macedonia and drive south, to which I got a response that I’m now in Greece and an elderly woman Eleni is greeting me. It felt uncanny, especially since everyone in the Balkans knows the borders and common Balkan names. At that point I had a gut feeling that this will explode so I messaged a computer scientist professor and we talked about it. It wasn’t going to disappear and neural networks weren’t that bad. I don’t have the transcript but I found a segment of one Dungeon saved on my Gist profile, where I’m stuck in Luton and want to go to Skopje:

What I do know is that that I have my future self will regret it if I don’t post a link to a gut feeling for something new, a paper named Situational Awareness on my blog, whose author, an ex OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner) spent a lot of time writing it, and I like people who spend a lot of effort on pursuing things.

???? https://situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/situationalawareness.pdf

Worst-case scenario: I get embarrassed by this post and Leopold Aschenbrenner is a young 25-year-old naive guy who spent a lot time writing some ideas that don’t make sense or cause confusion and panic.

Average case: Leopold’s work makes some bad and some good points about AI and its progress in the next century.

Best-case scenario: Leopold has important things to say:

p….] The smartest people I have ever met—and they are the ones building this technology. Perhaps they will be an odd footnote in history, or perhaps they will go down in history like Szilard and Oppenheimer and Teller. If they are seeing the future even close to correctly, we are in for a wild ride.

He dedicates the paper to Ilya Sutskever, the co-author of AlexNet and a person that at one point became the CEO of OpenAI. And he wants the world to know that AI progress may cause a lot of success but problems as well — and governments should be careful.

I would like to finish this post with two random facts:

Riemann’s Hypothesis, a 165-year-old unsolved math puzzle whose proof is worth $1M now has a piece cracked by two mathematicians: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/112557248794707738

I learned that a designer from my country of origin proposed a mail stamp celebrating the birth of Claude Shannon (one of the key people who founded the basics of artificial intelligence):

50 years since the birth of Claude Shannon; Republic of Macedonia

P.S. Shannon, although shy and quiet by nature (the only time he would get loud was if you challenged his opinions on intellectual matters at Bell Labs) was quite a funny guy: