Taming Silicon Valley

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The similarities and contrast between this book and AI Snake Oil are striking. For example, AI Snake Oil describes generative AI as something which largely works but is sometimes wrong, whereas this book is very concerned about how they've been rushed out the door in the wake of the unexpected popularity of ChatGPT despite clear issues with hallucinations and unacceptable content generation. Yet the books agree on many things too -- the widespread use of creators' content without permission, weaponization of generative AI political misinformation, the dangers of deep fakes, and the lack of any form of factual verification (or understanding of the world at all) in the statistical approaches used to generate the content. Big tech has no answer for these "negative externalities" that they are enabling and would really rather we all pretend they're not a thing. This book pushes much harder on the issue of how unregulated big tech is, and how it is repeatedly allowed to cause harm to society in returns for profits. It will be interesting to see if any regulation with teeth is created in this space. I find the assertion made in this book that large language models should not be open…

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AI Snake Oil

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Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is. The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI -- imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like "car", "bus'', "rocket", and "boat". Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was talking about boats and you were talking about rockets. This is one of the issues right now with discussions of "AI" -- there are several kinds of AI, but the commentary is all grouped together and conflating the various types. I think this is probably a specific example of what Ben Goldacre talks about in Bad Science -- science reporting by non-scientists is often overly credulous, and misses the subtleties. Next we need to decide what is in fact AI versus being something else which might be like AI, but not really AI. The book poses three questions to help here: Would a human performing this role require training? If so this might be AI. Image generation is a good example where. Is the behaviour of the system specified directly in code, or is it learnt from examples or a database search? The later is…

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Chaos Monkeys

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A very well written tale of a Wall Street quant who left during the GFC to adventure in startup land and ended up at Facebook attempting to solve their monetization problems for an indifferent employer. Martinez must have been stomping around Mountain View because his description of the environment and what its like to work inside a Silicon Valley company ring very true to me. A good read.

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Cryptonomicon

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I read this book on an international trip, and it was a good choice for that. Its long (around 900 pages), but very readable. This is the second time I've read the book, and this time its amazing how well the description of Silicon Valley startups matches my experiences there. I love this book. Update 2022: having now read this book for a third time, I have to say it does stand the test of time. However, having read the rest of the Baroque Cycle now, I do wish somewhere in the series more attention was paid to explaining Enoch Root's back story.

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