Things go to shit because someone wanted to “fill a position quickly” Thousands of senior managers today operate blind to the multiplier effect of their own inefficiency. The hidden CTC of hiring someone inefficient is rises exponentially with their seniority.
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.
You thought it was you. It is not you.
Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.
Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.
The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.
Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.
What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.
Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.
They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.
The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."
The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.
This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.
The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.
Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
The cost of wasteful entrepreneurship has climbed to an alarming all time high. It’s high time we called out zero-value high-cost business because the negative impact on the environment will be borne by all. If you’re consuming energy, natural resources, you better be useful.
Probably the biggest danger of a capitalist system is that it’s safest to want what everyone else also wants. Because by the time everyone realizes that this is not what we wanted it’s too late.
We had ordered a certain cake for my birthday yesterday from @TheobromaIndia via @zomato
When we opened the box at night we found that it was some other cake. On raising a complaint on @zomatocare we got an instant refund. No questions asked, no share a photo etc. Pretty amazing
🌳 The African baobab — often called the “Tree of Life” — can live for over 1,500 years.
Native to South Africa and other parts of Africa, it stores water in its massive trunk and supports entire ecosystems with food, shelter, and nutrients.
One of the oldest and most remarkable living trees on Earth.
Reality check: the space between atoms in a molecule is proportionally similar to the space between the earth and the sun. Calling something made of atoms “solid” is like calling the space between the earth and the sun solid.
Human evolution does not happen with great advances in science and industry. It happens with doing smaller things with great love and awareness. In fact the better we get at the latter, the more the former becomes irrelevant.
Domestic skills are severely underrated despite the fact that they’re our #1 priority in life. Please know that before you become an AI-expert or an artistic genius, you’ll probably need to put a baby to sleep- and that itself can be your masterpiece of the day.
The universe operates at maximum efficiency. If it sends you a problem, it’s because you are the most efficient way to solve it. Trust the universe because the universe trusts you.
I open @YouTube app to search for a video, get blasted by unwanted noise from some random short instead, which destroys the quiet of the room & wakes up person sleeping next to me. I understand the greed behind forcing shorts as default, but can you at least mute the damn thing?
I keep coming back to Leo Tolstoy’s checklist to remind myself that I already have a lot of the things that constitute his idea of happiness. Can’t help but feel deeply thankful and fortunate for this life 😇