The photos are from the Fortune Ranch roundup in the Badlands, South Dakota.
Update: After posting this, I viewed a couple podcasts with Stephen Wolfram. I had heard his name before but did not realize that he is one of the creators of ChatGPT, via his language plug-in.
Although much of the talk was over my head, some things occurred to me based on the interviews.
Below I assume Wolfram is lying about his creation, something important about how it works, maybe. I’m not so sure now. He may instead be in denial about the status of ChatGPT. Right now I’m listening to man who genuinely does not understand ‘Why ChatGPT works.’ He keeps saying this, then rambles on about ‘computational reducibility’ and so on, while squirming in his chair.
And below you will read more of the same, with his use of words like ‘remarkable’ and ‘unexpected’ and (my favorite) ‘voodoo,’ as a reaction to the behavior of his creation. He is a materialist, by the way, which is not a good sign.
I have been wondering if I ‘missed something,’ given how ‘impossible’ it is that ChatGPT does what you’ve seen in my past posts, and based on the claims as to how it works. How could Wolfram not understand what is so obvious, at least to me?
Then I did a search and found that ChatGPT now has real time access to the Internet. You might recall that in my bashing of the movie Transcendence I mentioned that the only realistic aspect of the story was the fear of giving a Super AI (SAI) access to the Net. Most of the pundits agree here and simple logic tells us that an SIA would be the ultimate hacker, with its only limitations being the laws of physics (and it would understand such laws way better than we do).
I don’t really see a motive for Wolfram to lie about the general workings of ChatGPT. There is plenty to lie about (like who is funding him), but not so much that, especially given the nonsensicalness you will read below.
Point being, though, I’m a little nervous about ChatGPT, what it may soon be capable of. (end of update)
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One of you guys referred me to an essay by Stephen Wolfram purporting to explain how ChatGPT2-4 works. I say it’s bullshit and will attempt to explain why. As with yesterday’s post I will put in bold the sections of Wolfram’s text that you really need, although I suggest a complete reading, if you have the time and patience.
I will put my comments in bold also but they will also be in brackets [ ]. Keep this in mind so you know who is saying what!
Addendum: Here’s Wolfram’s Wiki page. The point of it is that given his background he should know better, i.e., odds are he’s one of them.
Stephen Wolfram (/ˈwʊlfrəm/ WUUL-frəm; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American[6]computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics.[7][8] In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[9] He is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science.[10]
It’s Just Adding One Word at a Time by Stephen Wolfram [The title says it all]
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected [Unexpected is right! Impossible is more like it]. But how does it do it? And why does it work?
[Yes, by all means, let’s see how and why it works and let’s keep in mind how it went with my last post and the short story (the earth an egg) it wrote.]
The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.”
[What is meant by ‘so far’? Chat has told us that it does not ‘understand’ words in the sense we do and only uses probabilities, but if this is true, how does it know what the first word(s) is/are (in the text/response). And how does it know what the prompt really means? This is really important!]
[In a comment in my last post I referred to a sentence Kristen wrote: “The danger is the fury that will be directed at the playful”. I pointed out that it’s possible that this sentence has never been written or uttered before in the history of the world, yet 
when I plugged it into Chat I got a long, convoluted but essentially coherent answer. How could that be if Chat does not ‘understand’ the deep meaning of words but only their statistical use in billions of pages of text it has scanned? (Most sentences have never been written before.) Think of this as a separate argument that Chat and those that write about it are lying.]
[In fact, the explanation we get (for how it works) reminds me of Neo-Darwinism’s absurd explanation for how evolution works. They both claim there is no long term plan but rather each step (mutation or next word) is unrelated (no cause and effect) to the final result (animal or story).] Remember that brackets are around my comments (except this sentence). 
So let’s say we’ve got the text “The best thing about AI is its ability to”. Imagine scanning billions of pages of human-written text (say on the web and in digitized books) and finding all instances of this text—then seeing what word comes next what fraction of the time. ChatGPT effectively does something like this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at literal text [because most sentences are unique?!]; it looks for things that in a certain sense “match in meaning” [how does it know anything about meanings if it only works on probabilities! Wolfram avoids this point by the dodgy qualification ‘in a certain sense’ and with his scare quotes around “match in meaning”]. But the end result is that it produces a ranked list of words that might follow, together with “probabilities”:
[In the above example the ‘first words’ are given literally but how does that relate to my two examples, the ‘earth is an egg’ story and my last post about cosmology? It’s obvious that (for better or worse) the Chat understands my prompt the same way you (or any person) would. Think about this; it’s a vital point here. If this is indeed the case, the explanation we’re getting (Wolfram’s version of how ChatGPT works) is pure balderdash. And it’s the same story as I got from ChatGPT in my last post.]
[Neo-Darwinism’s fatal weakness is similar in that it fails to explain how the process gets started without a plan . For example, the odds against any given protein (or even amino acid) forming (in a ‘primordial soup,’ say) are astronomical to the extent of impossibility; and this is only for one protein/amino acid (there are many needed). Extending the metaphor to a short story, say, what are the odds that the story will make sense if there is no goal (ending) to work towards? Wolfram’s next paragraph reinforces my point…]
And the remarkable thing is that when ChatGPT does something like write an essay what it’s essentially doing is just asking over and over again “given the text so far, what should the next word be?”—and each time adding a word. (More precisely, as I’ll explain, it’s adding a “token”, which could be just a part of a word, which is why it can sometimes “make up new words”.)
[Although there is cause and effect with ChatGPT’s text creation, it is limited to one word at a time. I am making the comparison with Neo-Darwinism because with both there is no plan beyond the next step (word or random mutation). With each word as the text goes along, the process seems to start over; ditto with evolution according to Dawkins et al. That’s what is being said here and it makes no sense.]
But, OK, at each step it gets a list of words with probabilities. But which one should it actually pick to add to the essay (or whatever) that it’s writing? [Do you see what I mean here? He’s actually saying that Chat goes one word at a time without any ‘thought’ of the overall story or essay. If true, most of its texts should ramble off subject, even into complete nonsense] One might think it should be the “highest-ranked” word (i.e. the one to which the highest “probability” was assigned). But this is where a bit of voodoo begins to creep in. Because for some reason—that maybe one day we’ll have a scientific-style understanding of—if we always pick the highest-ranked word, we’ll typically get a very “flat” essay, that never seems to “show any creativity” (and even sometimes repeats word for word). But if sometimes (at random) we pick lower-ranked words, we get a “more interesting” essay. [Given its one word at time M.O., Chat sould have no idea whatsoever as to what is ‘interesting’! How is it that Wolfram does not see this?]
[Also, the above is interesting for how it appears to abandon the concept of causation by bringing up ‘voodoo.’ I assume this is meant to explain the randomness Wolfram refers to in the next paragraph. Nuts!]
The fact that there’s randomness here means that if we use the same prompt multiple times, we’re likely to get different essays each time. [Yes, as I got different stories with my earth-egg premise, but as always is the case, there must be ‘something’ that ‘understands’ the premise of the story. This is denied by Wolfram and by ChatGPT itself, many times in yesterday’s post. Why we are being lied to about this is an important question.] And, in keeping 
with the idea of voodoo, there’s a particular so-called “temperature” parameter that determines how often lower-ranked words will be used, and for essay generation, it turns out that a “temperature” of 0.8 seems best. (It’s worth emphasizing that there’s no “theory” being used here; it’s just a matter of what’s been found to work in practice. And for example the concept of “temperature” is there because exponential distributions familiar from statistical physics happen to be being used, but there’s no “physical” connection—at least so far as we know.)
[Here Wolfram goes into probabilities, i.e., how low ranked words are chosen, and so on. Nothing here contradicts my point, so I’m not dealing with it. I suggest you go to the full text if you’re interested, but here is one of his diagrams supposedly demonstrating the Chat’s inner workings:]
[As I say, a problem with the above is that it explains nothing about how you get the
first phrase (‘The best thing about AI is its ability to’) if the prompt is something else, i.e., a question or statement that only implies this. This is so obvious that I have to shake my head and wonder what it is I’m missing here. The same with Neo-Darwinism, for the same ‘How does it start?’ reason.]
[Later, Wolfram digs deeper into how next-words are chosen. Since this too has nothing to do with my point that the explanation of how Chat works is fatally flawed and even an insult to our intelligences, I will not deal with it. If I did miss something, I trust one of you will straighten me out.]
[If you want a specific example of how Neo-Darwinism and the ‘next-word only’ causation of text creation by ChatGPT, here you go:
Create a whale from what was basically a cow in 10 million years with one at a time random mutations. This means that while the legs were becoming fins and the nose was moving to the top of the head and the lungs and genitals and so on were changing for life in the ocean, none of these changes were part of a plan. By coincidence they created a whale. In 10 million years, a blink of an eye.]
Likewise, ChatGPT supposedly created the text of my earth-egg premise in random fashion, with no plan toward an ending. The whole of the text (the story) being our metaphorical whale.]
[I think I have one more post on this subject and it has to do with who is backing the R&D in the Artificial Intelligence racket, and why. This vital issue is never spoken about in the books and podcasts I’ve taken in. A dead giveaway we have a problem.]
Allan
As mentioned in the update, I’ve changed my view on Wolfram a bit. Although he cannot be trusted, I’m inclined to think he’s more misguided than dishonest on the issue of how his ChatGPT works. Up until recently I didn’t buy the idea of silicon-based consciousness. Now I’m not so sure.
Also, I probably should have left evolution out of it. Just couldn’t help myself in pointing out the similarities.
Final addendum: Hold on! Sorry but maybe you noticed I forgot about my last post (and others), which proved that ChatGPT is programmed to support the mainstream view of… everything. Recall this one, about The Pale Blue Dot photo, how it could not keep its story straight about star magnitudes? And so on! This stuff is absolute proof that the ‘one word at a time’ theory is… well, a lie, and Wolfram must know it. (The issue of supporting mainstream lies is a Big Picture issue that ChatGPT could not possibly ‘think of’ of its own.) So we know he is lying. What we don’t know is the depth of his deceit…
Enough!
I’m late to this party but will comment anyway. I write fiction. When I’m “in it” the words seem to come from a place that is not me or is beyond me, call it God or call It the collective. So I act as a medium between me and the story, as if I am being channeled to express something that existed before me and needed me to bring it into creation. Many writers and artists have expressed this idea. Often. It’s voodoo when it happens to you as a writer. And if you can get yourself out of the way, it can happen fast and the words that result are often in need of no revision after the fact. So could it be that the power, call it God, that wants the expression of a story to become manifest and that usually chooses humans through which to make that story manifest is also capable of using GPChat to do the very same thing?
That’s my two cents Allan. I cannot solve your first word problem.
There is no reason. Or more accurately, I think it is hubris for humans of earth to think their reason prevails in the infinite reality. We just do not know. What we collectively as humans have historically thought of reality is only through a human lens therefore limited, of course our human take on stuff always changed across time. But probabilty seems to be about the most logical, reliable and valid discovery of humans on earth. One word does not cause another. The AI/CHAT gpt just places the word that fits that has the highest probabiliyt of fitting given every thing they scan. Can someone mess around with it? Of course. But it does not need meaning to mechanically work. And with each step, with each word placed, the probailities change. And yes it mimics mainstream because that is the most probable, the ‘main” (?) probabiility given stuff that has been scanned. Des Carte and the age of enlightenment saw the world superficially, i.e. with cause and effect but Einstein forever changed the view of two dimensional (surface only) and presented thought to
quantum, multidimensional, relative view of human logic and rejected cause and effect There is only probability and the odds change constantly, (step by step,word by word.) Every nanosecond the odds are different.
Can some group harness this to do harm? Of course. Can someone harness this to do good? Of course. Is there a probability of of something we think as good leading to disaster ? Of course.
Allan, I must mention how Superb your Cowboys (and Cow girls!) & the Cattle photo’s are!.
They are really Fantastic, and are right up there in my favorites of favorites.
And Yes, I agree with all your points about the AI Chat (have all along).
The big ones being – they are lying how it works, AND it is being used to suppress real information, from it’s beginning already.
Thanks, yeah my main breakthru was making friends with the wife and son. The husband didnt want me around. I’m still in touch w mrs Fortune. Kind woman.
This interview with Mo Gawdat who developed AI as a high level employee at Google before he left is very insightful. AI is coded, and then “trained” by humans using algorithms that rely upon information theory, which is essentially an abstract branch of probability, and statistics, which is what the genius Claude Shannon invented while trying to develop a code for English, which he failed to do.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bk-nQ7HF6k4&pp=ygUYbW8gZ2F3ZGF0IGRpYXJ5IG9mIGEgY2Vv
That was the first one I viewed, then the one with Lex Fridman (who is either a coward or a mole). If you see anything I missed in my post, let me know. I still cannot see how the ‘one word at a time’ paradigm could possibly work, except by random accident.
In that youtube vid, those guys are parroting lies within the first minute! –
– “We fucked up! – like with climate change” – No.1 biggest monster lie under the Sun!.
And BEWARE! – when someone says – “Government needs to act (do something) NOW”
Yes, when they bring up climate change you know the BS is in the immediate offing.
Allan, I’m not gonna lie, all of this is way above my head. I have enough trouble turning a light switch on. But I will say this, I LOVE your photography and the stories you tell about your life past and present. So, as always, thank you and stay safe (well, kind of a little risk is sometimes fun!!!).
Plus this one was written a bit sloppy; I think I got tired and just thought ‘good enough’ when it wasn’t. So it’s not just you. I’ll try to do better.
Thanks for that. Believe me, I’m not so sure if I understand a lot of the stuff I write about so I stick to common sense stuff, which is sorely lacking in ‘science’ these days, the Big Bang being the most obvious example. but don’t get me started kind of a thing.
Allan,
Cow to whale is just a theory, isn’t it?
Establishing that that particular assumed path is nigh impossible does not take down the basic random mutation – natural selection theory.
The important point, for me, in what I accept as evolution, is that it never has a goal. Everything we see simply reflects what happened to happen, in our particular play of the game. Natural selection having simply rollled forward what happened to work. Certainly, failures / “mistakes” outnumber successes by some vast factor I wouldn’t attempt to guess, but that’s OK, when you’ve a similar number of horses in the race, and a helluva long time available for it to take.
Chat GPT, by contrast, always has a goal, unless, that is, it can place its random word salads in an environment in which only the (somewhat) sensible / coherent responses survive. But, then we’d have to explain what creates that environment, and that would be the real (artificial) intelligence!
We disagree about both subject, I guess…
Allan,
As far as I can make out, I am agreeing with you on Chat GPT. What it gives us is not a statistically-appropriate word salad, as Wolfram seems to believe, or wishes us to believe.
I’d noticed the complexity of the halting condition, but, unlike you, I missed the starting problem. Determining an appropriate following word won’t work for the first word. (Anyway, how is statistics going to keep the text on topic?)
On evolution, I do think random mutation plus natural selection could have created all the life we know, just as you could score six sixes in a roll of six dice (although, at 46656:1, your odds are nothing like as pitiful). Note that the species didn’t HAVE to become exactly as they are; we are just seeing what happened to occur, in our particular run-through.
If the theory of evolution is extended to encompass specific evolutionary paths, then I may not find all of these credible – no more than you do – but that does not nullify what I said just before.
You are right to bring up the evolution aspect because if you think about it they want us to accept evolution as a totally random process with no planning and they want us to accept the exact same with chatGPT.
I had read most of the Wolfram article and was more inclined to take him at face value but I was not satisfied with his explanation. What we need to understand is how would one would represent or model the whole concept of planning or having a high level “thought” as a story plot. I can accept that the probabilistic selection of words and even short phrases might constitute the lower level part of a piece of software or neural net that does the actual generation of text but you are right it should eventually run off the rails without guidance.
Could it be that Wolfram doesn’t know himself. He seems way too intelligent to not want to know how it really works.
I have seen it written elsewhere that these bigger multilayered neural nets can feed signals back through the network. To me this means as data flows through the neural net, it figures out certain things and by feeding it back a few layers, then it is able to give clues earlier in the process and enhance its ability to do whatever problem it is trying to solve at that moment and do it quicker and in a smaller set of neurons. In effect the feedback allows it to do more and have more capability than a simple forward flow. It is know that our brains sends waves of activity back and forwards as we think and do various things.
Such a process would be required if your AI system was say telling a story. You need constant feedback onto itself to tell it how the generation of the text is proceeding so far and whether it is on track wit your overall plan / story plot.
I really don’t know much about all this stuff but do know that in general the early neural networks decades ago had few layers and not as many software “neurons” as they do now which number in the billions. I would expect when it moves to this scale that the capability vastly increases and presumably that is what we are seeing combined with the training. The recent advances could be related to technicalities of how to digest the training data and is possibly is out there described in research papers but none of us are familiar with.
So on the one hand it is possible that many who are close to the action aren’t entirely sure how it all works because they are just focused on their bit; there could also be attempts to conceal it for commercial reasons but the most likely is to conceal how it works because of the nefarious aspects of it OR that they can have plausible deniability of what it is doing. The random explanation works for them that way. This though is in opposition to the fact that there are open source models out there available to use. Sure ChatGPT 4 is better, but will the open source models not be just as good in 2 or 3 years time anyhow.
Going back to the evolution problem, the mainstream science says DNA is just sequences of 4 types of base pairs with sections coded for genes and lots of junk DNA in between. Recently the field of epi-genetics suggests it is far more dynamic and not so straight forward. Could it be that the interactions within the DNA itself are so complex that it gives rise to emergent properties (just like neural nets apparently can) so that it is a sort of micro-scale computer of sorts with it’s own AI and it is this DNA AI that helps direct evolution? Many have viewed DNA as an information processor or computer in other words.
I know there is a certain amount of hand waving here but hopefully its gets us a tiny bit further.
Well said. This stuff is way over my head except inso far as it flies in the face of my common sense, which both Wolfram and the Chat both do. (Via my other bouts with Chat.) i say i might be missing something because what i say and now you say seems so f-ing obvious… which you seem to agree with. But are we being lied to or is this an example of some sort of denial in action. Re the feedback mechanism you refer to, i have to wonder why Wolfram and others would not bring it up. It does seem like a possible explanation. Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful response. Be interesting to see what happens next.
Here’s an example of the state of the alt media via a comment I left on the Lex Fridman interview with Wolfram:
@Allan-kb6bb
25 minutes ago
Re ‘truth’, boy you guys dodged the issue, ‘with who is the best actress’ crapola. How about ‘Who killed JFK’? (Lex not being capable of asking about 911.)
Hey, Al Gore inented the internet, plus he and Tipper were the models for the couple in “Love Story”.
If Wolfram created ChatGPT, I have a bridge to sell you in NYC. Cheap.
What’s your convoluted point? He had nothing to do with it? If I made an error how about just informing me with a little class? Are you capable of that?
‘The Wolfram plugin makes ChatGPT smarter by giving it access to powerful computation, accurate math, curated knowledge, real-time data and visualization through Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language’
I have a whole country to sell you for a dollar! – Al gore didn’t invent Shit!
He knows that, Brett. He was trying to be cute.
Here is some more for your memory card;
You are correct that OpenAI has collaborated with Wolfram Research to integrate the Wolfram technology into ChatGPT. The integration of the Wolfram plugin allows ChatGPT to access the computation, math capabilities, curated knowledge, real-time data, and visualization provided by Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language. This collaboration enhances ChatGPT’s ability to provide more accurate and detailed responses to queries related to mathematics, computation, and other areas covered by the Wolfram technology. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and I apologize for any misinformation in my previous response.
The last sentence sounds like it was talking directly to you.