Come to Jesus

Where we tell the machines what we really want, and they tell us what they really think

Author

Ate A Pi
January 26, 2024

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Here’s today at a glance:

🤔 What Do You Really Think?

Prophetic AI is nearing launch of its lucid dreaming headband, and is looking for beta test volunteers.

What is it really?

  • Its a headband

  • It reads brain signals using an electroencephalogram (EEG)

  • The EEG image is fed into an AI model. That model then generates an image of a pattern of sound waves that the model predicts will put your mind in an altered state

  • The headband generates those sound waves (transcranial focused ultrasound)

  • You get altered

EEG reading on left, AI model proposed ultrasound stimulation pattern on the right

While it all sounds very woo, it seems like the technology and the science are actually reaching maturity right now, with a combination of:

  • EEG miniaturization

  • ultrasound transducer miniaturization and resolution

  • EEG and fMRI data availablity

  • transformer AI models

  • lucid dreaming entering the fringe of the mainstream

Earlier generations of ultrasound stimulation, which used hammer size low resolution stimulation defined by regression models, achieved impressive if inconsistent results:

Neurosurgeon pioneers Alzheimer's, addiction treatments using ultrasound | 60 Minutes

American neurosurgeon Ali Rezai is pioneering ways to try to help people with drug addiction and with Alzheimer's disease. One experiment focuses beams of ultrasound on the brain.

And lucid dreaming, of course, is only the first of many states of consciousness we might be interested in inducing. Prophetic is currently only using a 100 million parameter AI model it compares to GPT-1… so you have to wonder what happens in 5 years when they get to a trillion parameter model.

đź©ş When The Doctor Tells You The Truth

Pretty amazing sequence of events at Stanford University, where in this paper, researchers found:

  • GPT-4 with a little prompt engineering

  • Passed 1st and 2nd year medical school exams at Stanford

  • 93% of the time, vs typical human med student performance of 85%

  • The questions were open ended, clinical reasoning questions

  • And graded by medical school examiners

Typical answer (hat tip @emollick)

What is also fascinating is that Stanford Medical School has already started to react to this:

  • converting open book exams which tested clinical reasoning and could be gamed with ChatGPT; to

  • closed book exams where students must memorize everything (seems regressive! We are going back to the 1970s here!)

We get ever closer to where we must answer.. is the expert the dispenser of knowledge? Or the dispenser of wisdom?

🗞️ Things Happen

  • OpenAI announces compressed embeddings models, bug fix for lazy GPT, and slashes GPT3.5-Turbo API prices 50%. Pretty clear that market competition is driving price decreases at this point.

  • Mamba paper gets dinged. Mamba is one of the most promising successor to the current architecture but can’t even get through peer review.

  • Major post CRISPR genetic engineering technique discovered by Silicon Valley funded Arc Institute. Tech folks made a big bet a couple of years ago that basic research in biology would progress faster outside of the constraints of a university environment and with sufficient funding, and that bet seems to be paying off.

🖼️ AI Artwork Of The Day

Breaking Bad, from the series Lost TV Pilots of the 1950s - u/superawesomemeuk from r/midjourney

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