grand theft autocomplete

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Grand Theft Autocomplete is my new favourite term for LLMs.” —@ben

Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of AI, was quoted in Life magazine — in 1970, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” —AIWS.net

“Some people will condescend to religious people for believing in gods or spirits and then turn around and tell you with a straight face that there’s this invisible thing called the economy that determines our lives.” — @HeavenlyPossum

In his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship, [Gustav] Gilbert wrote, “In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” —15-minute History, The Nuremberg Trials

“I once worked on an OCR [optical character recognition] project, and the executives never grasped the fundamental problem of OCR (which in my opinion applies to LLMs [large language models]).
If something is wrong 20% of the time
And you don’t know which 20%
You have to check 100% of its work”
—@SteveFenton

If the world was a Monopoly game, we’d be at the part where everybody rage quits because all the property is gone, rent is unaffordable, and one rich guy is ruining everyone’s fun. Source: various