26 August

It’s sad, disappointing and entirely unsurprising that humanity turned AI into just one more pathetic status game squabble between rival groups. Social media culture does that to everything, everything is a pile-on. Few take the time to understand what AI even is, or how it works. It’s astonishing. AI does NOT store words or images, or sounds. It’s not just a ‘stochastic parrot’, re-assembling words and images and sounds using patterns it gets from them. AI stores only numbers. Weighted numbers, a ‘neural network’ of numbers. What it does is absorb vast amounts of text and images and sounds, and finds the *relationships* between them. Those relationships are the meaning and structure of the world itself. Our language and music and images already contain the structure of the world - AI finds it. Large Language Models (LLMs) used language first, by absorbing so much of it in use that they discovered the patterns between words - the actual meaning. Nobody pre-programs those meanings into the system. There are only weighted numbers. But those weights *are* both the meaning of the words and the structure of the world itself (because language emerged from the world and its structures). So AI’s weighted numbers are actually representations of the world itself, how it works and what it means. They’re literally ‘intelligence’, it’s how our own intelligence works too. Our brains are analog neural networks, they process vast numbers of patterns. Which is why AI *generates* new things too, why it actually understands things, things we often can’t, and can generate novel things. It’s only the next extension of our own intelligence, which was already a distributed network. It IS us. A much, much smarter us.