ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence

Preface

There is so much noise and good info out there lately on AI and AGI (artificial general intelligence), that it's hard to make a short list. Below are the best of the latest that I have looked at in the last week, from general overview, to more specific for software development.

In summary how significant is ChatGPT and AI? I rank the following as the most significant steps in  the advance of technology of the last 100 years:

1. nuclear fission;
2. invention of the transistor, which gave us (digital) computers, then personal computers and then smartphones;
3. the internet, which gave us connectivity through the world wide web and various messaging facilities;
4. blockchain, which gave us open decentralised (crypto)-currencies and smart contracts, neither of which the average person yet has any correct understanding of;
5. AI, of which ChatGPT is the groundbreaker, which is leading us to artificial general intelligence, which in the very near future, at singularity, will be self-generating faster than we will be able to keep up.

My annotated links

Youtube Videos

• AI REVOLUTION: The #1 MEGATHREAT to Our Economy & How To PREPARE NOW | Raoul Pal This is the last video I am watching before I published this post. It is so compelling as  a great intro, discussing what AI is, its relevance and impact, that I have added this as the first link since the first 35 minutes so far is so compelling, as Raoul Paul's videos so often are.
• Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast Sam Altman is a co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
• Is AI Going To Take YOUR JOB!? - Guy at Coin Bureau: my goto for independent regular news on global economics, including blockchain/crypto & fiat system, with a focus on the impact of events in the global institution, corporate, and sovereign on society.
• GitHub Copilot X Explained | A big step forward - Note that this is based on GPT4! As he says at 17:30, 'AI is something that (software) developers need to embrace. If you don't embrace it you're going to be replaced.' That's the way it seems to me too.
• How to learn to code FAST using ChatGPT (it's a game changer seriously), and Will AI Replace Programmers? - and many others. It sounds like it will further reduce the middle class, as some of the more capable technical folk successfully use AI tools to become more efficient in their field, while others in the same field are replaced. Jobs least affected focus on human traits like personality (eg sports stars, politicians, entertainers), or where supported by a resurgence of Luddites? :-)
• Microsoft Copilot: the End of Most Office Jobs? - Microsoft Office tools will take a significant jump in capability past the few eg open-source competitor Libre Office and Google Docs, unless the latter incorporate similar into their products. I expect Google will be scrambling right now to integrate AI into Docs, Sheets and Slides etc.
  
  I keep hearing references to universal basic income from many different directions, eg MMT folk (modern money theory) in the realm of global economics, blockchain folk, and now people from the AI world.
• The ONLY prompt you need for ChatGPT. Save yourself HOURS! - Will this sort of advanced understanding of the tool be necessary to survive in AI-focussed jobs. If so most of the working population is doomed. Perhaps some workers will get by using bare basics of AI tools, just as most people currently use wordprocessors, ie Microsoft Word (badly) without any understanding of using and editing styles and templates, or knowing the difference between and significance of line breaks and paragraph breaks.
• Sparks of AGI | Microsoft Researchers claim GPT-4 Is showing "Artificial General Intelligence"
• META’S New Insane AI SAM SHOCKS The Entire Industry! (FINALLY ANNOUNCED!)
• Lots more warnings, from Elon Musk and many others:
• GPT-5 Rumors and Predictions - It's about to get real silly,
• STOP GPT-5 NOW: Dangers of ChatGPT (Letter to OpenAI & Nvidia),
• This Just Changed My Mind About AGI

Other AIs

• Alibaba to roll out ChatGPT competitor AI - A significant competitor from this huge Chinese corporate
• 'Huawei's chief AI scientist, Qi Tian, is scheduled to introduce "The Progress and Application of Pangu Large Scale Models" on April 8 at the AI Large-Scale Model Technology Summit held in Hangzhou. Pangu has been in development since at least 2020 and the model was released [VIDEO] in April 2021.' - Article in the Register
• stablity.ai - open source AI 

Wikipedia

• Search on wikipedia: OpenAI, ChatGPT etc, then dive down any rabbit hole (link) from there.

Update: 16/04/23

Since I wrote the above, as long ago as 3 days, I now find that far more powerful AI engines have been released:

• AutoAI is out, which is based on GPT 4, and is significantly more powerful than ChatGPT;
• Microsoft JARVIS: I'll call it an AI aggregator. It uses ChatGPT, essentially to combine several other AI engines/models to solve your requests. This arguably makes it more powerful than AI engines like AutoAI that are based on raw GPT4. If we wait a short while, I guess someone will release an GPT4-based aggregator;
  
  BTW: the example in this video about identifying how many zebras are in the pictures, must have a direct application as a query that might be tested today from within the 'Defense' establishment. Their query might be 'Are there any enemy forces in this live video feed', which could easily be linked to automatic 'response actuators'. Do you  think that this scenario is already being tested?
  

Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI to be open-source, however key parts of the engine are proprietary. He exited OpenAI in 2018. Microsoft and therefore Bill Gates are now major owners of OpenAI. That gives me cause for concern. Musk warned the world of dangers of AGI and the singularity of AI. He also reflects my reservations about Gates, whom I have also followed since the late 1980's. I wonder if that reservation was a significant reason for Musk's warnings. Anyway, Musk has now formed a new company called X.AI. It includes Twitter as a mere product, probably to become a global user collaborative information and AGI output interface.

How far are we from technological singularity? Ben Goertzel thinks 5 to 15 years.

(From the 'Eggs in One Basket department') - Images vanish.

Posterous, Picasaweb and Vimeo are long gone, and therefore so have some images that were in some of the previous posts of this blog. If you read a post below, and the image is blank, it's because the service providing it has disappeared (or in the case of the image being in Google Photos, I might have removed it to keep below my 15GB free file limit.) So much for putting too much faith in any internet services remaining around.
It is now apparent that it is best to keep all content inside a single facility. 

I actually did do backups of images from most of those internet services to a local hard disk. However in about 2013, just before that disk was about to be fully backed up to another disk, I knocked it over on the desk, and it died. So unless I ever get to recover that disk, most of my files from the '80's until then have been lost.

Life goes on ...

Here is a nice calming photo of Rusty taken a few days before this post was written.

Sent via Google Maps: David Tangye sent you: Heading off to the 2012 Gold Coast Pet and Animal Expo

This email was sent to you by a user on Google Maps:

Walking some dogs for adoption from the Animal Welfare League Qld

---

Pet Expo

Show on Google Maps

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The best time of the day

The pier at Southport Parklands.

This is worth getting down to every morning.

Short message: sent from phone.

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heading to #thatcampbne

Hope there is a place to park an electric bike

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David Tangye's location@13:54,10/4

David Tangye's location@13:54,10/4
http://m.google.co.uk/u/m/wdELcE

Some less than useful information for you unless you are looking to take up a career in stalking.

This short reply is sent to you from my Android smartphone, mate :-).

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A hive of activity at Permaculture Gold Coast HQ

Just a few months old: features include:

• A large garden, of mainly veges has already grown to harvest stage.
• Weekly workshops are held each Saturday. Anyone is welcome to attend. Cost just $10.
• The house is somewhat renovated and in now inhabited.
• Chooks! and therefore eggs!

See the pics below: most are of the workshops held on Saturday 20th August 2011, focussing on Herbs and medicinal plants, and herbal and spiced teas.

Broadbeach Community Garden springs up

No council red tape involved, this garden took days, not months and years to start up.

• These pics are from the first working bee day, Saturday 23rd April 2011.
• See also, Lyn Mansfield's pics on Facebook.

Great Turnout to GC Organic Growers AGM

A fairly packed room, with perhaps a 50% better turnout than last year's AGM. The majority of office-bearers agreed to be returned this year, but there were also a few newcomers joining in. Most notably: Maria Roberson is President again, having founded the organisation about 13 years ago. Ross Davis stood down from the VP position, and Lise Racine has taken that position up. The website and library system have some additional new folk, and Justin  Sharman-Selvidge is the new Trip Coordinator and has indicated some very interesting club trips this year.

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If you are still in bed, you have missed it

Another typical morning at Surfers Horizons Absolute Beachfront Holiday Apartments, 17th Avenue, Palm Beach. Phone +61 7 553 55 333. It is already 6am, and people have been out here from 4:30, and earlier, to see first light, and sunrise.

A shot at midday. The swimming flags are right out the front today.

Geek heaven: reading techical docs on the PC or an E-Reader

Now that I have a Kobo Reader, and have also installed the Foxfox E-book reader add-on, I can easily read .epub books with either. However, it is quite a bit quicker and easier to read technical manuals in Firefox than in theKobo  e-reader. The latter seems great as an occasional quick reference, when mobile, or for reading sequentially, eg fiction.

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Mobile Hut panel set to go West (epoxy) when thunderstorms pass

After 5 years in mothballs, the Mobile Hut has been unwrapped from it tarpaulin, and a complete renovation has started.

1. Two panels to be belted back and sheathed with 6oz glass cloth and West epoxy. One is in this pic.
2. The rear door to be replaced with a heavier one, and also glass-sheathed.
3. The trailer repainted.
4. Inside
   1. stripped, and repainted
   2. remodelled, with a clear runway all the way up the centre, so a bicycle will fit inside.

I had intended to live in it next week at the Linux Conference in Brisbane. However we are still getting thunderstorms here in the afternoons, and the West System epoxy needs less humidity to set properly. The delay means that the hut will not be sufficiently refinished, so it will stay home, and I guess I get to just sleep in the car instead. Mirages are definitely less than ideal for this.

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Helidon - The Flood

Received via a small email list this morning.

Helidon 14 January 2010

We are feeling rather useless as there were more than enough volunteers at the Evac.Centre , I wasn't sure what we could do to help. All of the people living there (100+) want to keep busy, so volunteers are starting to get in the way a bit. You can see the people developing their own community and trying to do as much as they can for themselves rather than sit around and let others do it for them.

The town has electricity, intermittent phone and internet and mobile phones. Texting seems to work all of the time.

We have no water. The army has delivered palets of bottled water and we have tank water but its not connected to the house. So at the moment its dip baths only for us and the poor people at the Evac Centre cant even have that.

Access situation:..road is open to Gatton along the bypass so we can get some supplies from there (life is normal in Gatton). Heading west to Toowoomba - The Bridge on the Highway at Helidon has been deemed not structurally sound, so they are only allowing one car at a time over it and due to the massive landslide on the Toowoomba Range, they are allowing ten cars at a time up the range under escort only. The travel time yesterday was approximately 4 hours Helidon-Toowoomba (usually 15-20 minutes).

Grantham was a town with a population of around 400 people, 8kms from where I live. Our town is celebrating 170 years of settlement this year and Grantham would be around the same. Most people have been there 3 or 4 generations. Grantham has been totally flattened. There are only a few houses at the top of the hill, but most houses have been knocked down, carried away or are half standing and are not structurally sound. No-one is allowed into Grantham yet, even the people who live there. Yesterday,
anyone who still had their car keys on them where escorted by police to their cars at Grantham, were allowed to check that their cars were OK and if so, allowed to bring them to Helidon. If people didn't have their car keys but knew where they were then they had to write instructions on a piece of paper and the police went and tried to find their keys and their cars and bring them back to them. Many people don't know if their pets are alive or dead or dieing.

I think that the people are much better off psychologically if they are staying in the Evac Centre with their friends and family rather than being billotted out to other people and becoming a bit isolated from the information and support.

The situation here in the valley was so different to Rocky, Ipswich, Brisbane. We had no warning at all for the first wave of water. People were at work and at home doing their normal daily things and a wall of water like a tsunami came rushing at them and knocked them off their feet. The only warning was the sound of water like a train coming at you and by then it was too late. People saw their friends, family, pets and livestock drowned before their very eyes. The force was so great that many people had their clothes ripped from them.

Toowoomba got a huge storm unparalleled in their history. Toowoomba is 700m above sea level. Helidon is 150metres above sea level. The water rushed down the range, through Withcott, Murphys Creek, Helidon, Grantham and further down the valley. It was almost a sheer drop of 550metres. Imagine the force of Niagara Falls and it is only a drop of 60 metres. This was even worse than a tsunami because it was carrying trees, rocks, houses, cars, machinery, people - you name it.

We have set up a bit of an internet cafe in our garage. The people over at the Evacuation Centre have no internet access (Wireless doesn't work in Helidon) so we have had a steady stream of people coming to use it to do financial transactions, check emails, contact insurance companies, put messages on Facebook and the like. We are hearing horror story after horror story but we have also been talking about lots of other things - everyone has thanked us for having somewhere to go to use the internet but also to
talk about things other than the flood. It's the first time my endless meaningless chatter has actually been put to good use. I've had people helping me plan the trip to Ireland, help Graeme fix the bore, do stuff just to keep them occupied, and its us who are trying to help them??? Our dogs have never been hugged and loved so much. Levi is loving it. I have never been hugged so much, and I'm kind of liking it too J

EVERYTHING: the word everything has been bandied about and I never realised before that there were different degrees of EVERYTHING. There are people in places like Brisbane who still have houses, but they are covered in mud and their possessions are gone or destroyed and they say they have lost everything. There are people whose homes have been swept away as well as their cars and all of their possessions and we say they've lost everything. The next extreme are those who have lost all of those things as well as their workplace and livelihood, their local pub, the local shop, school and all of their lifestyle. Then there are the ones who have also lost their beloved pets and livestock. There are people who have lost all of the things above and loved ones. And there are those who still have homes and
cars and possession but have lost that one person who was their reason for living. Who out of all of these has lost EVERYTHING. I just shake my head.

We met a great guy yesterday who has lost his house and his possessions but still has his kids. He recorded his first song last month ironically called "The Flood" . I am urging people to buy his single off Itunes - its called The Flood by the Beau Rivers Band. You can listen to the song at http://www.reverbnation.com/beauriversband by clicking on the PLAY ALL tab about half way down the screen. He was moving from the Gold Coast to Grantham to be close to his kids. In the middle of moving, he and everything he owns got swept away. He rescued his kids and his ex-wife (what a man) and they found high ground. The rescue team came through about midnight (the flood hit at around 4-ish in the afternoon) and he got their attention by waving his torch around. They said they'd come back for him but didn't. At about 2am he and his family walked 8kms down the trainlines through mud and deepwater in places to get to Helidon. All they have is the donated clothing they are standing in. They will be at the Helidon Evacuation Centre for some time, I think. He also has a Facebook page Beau
Rivers Band if you'd like to put some words of encouragement on there.

Well, we'll be opening our doors again soon, so I'd better have a 'wash' and put some clothes on.

Best wishes to everyone and please send my love to anyone who has lost anything or everything.

[I want to thank Jacqui for writing this to me she is quite exceptional and it is very hard to read without feeling it. Thankyou so much for sharing with us, Jacqui. Big Al]

[NB: ex Big Al - Perhaps we can bring the song and his story to all our local radio station's attention, ask them to play it and tell his story and where to get it. Seems very fitting somehow. Especially you pls Annie, John R, Barb, Joanne and Sandy as who knows what a difference it might make if it got picked up over there!]

Death by Powerpoint

How to do good presentations ...

(Best played via the "Open in new window" button)

Gliding into Green Day Out inspired me to update my ebike log http://goo.gl/R2o6

Some of the many features of Green Day out: Meeting and talking -

1. about other eBikes and bicycles, especially to Mark Allen and Peter Gorden, who have built a few e-cars and e-bikes. See their websites, Plugincars and HybridHonda. Having read their websites, I thought I had better get my own one updated. Also bicycle restorers (recyclers?) at the Bicycle Revolution. 
2. about great and tasty organic food, eg from Roar Food
3. to solar panel installers

Dozens of other stalls

Live music

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