New Anthropic research: Signs of introspection in LLMs.
Can language models recognize their own internal thoughts? Or do they just make up plausible answers when asked about them? We found evidence for genuine—though limited—introspective capabilities in Claude.
I feel like the social network norm of encountering a random smattering of information of all kinds from everywhere will eventually prove to be damaging to the mind.
It’s why no one feels good after an hour of scrolling. Neurotransmitters are depleted and the mind is left in some bizarre superposition of amusement, boredom, dissatisfaction, resignation, and fight or flight.
What would the alternative be? Maybe a network with absolutely no feed. Just a prompt asking what you’re interested in or care about or what problem you’re facing. Then a high quality response, without excessive or irrelevant information.
I guess that’s what Internet search already is, but it’s too passive to compete with social media and requires wading through too much information in the response.
Just talking to AI and running deep research comes closer. But then there’s no social dynamic. Maybe there doesn’t need to be? Maybe pseudo-social environments are destroying us?
The most advantageous thing a person could do to adapt to the current environment, might be to disengage from all social media while making liberal use of AI to find the most useful information to them specifically.
It might be the most incredible opportunity sitting right there in front of us that almost no one can manage to take. Unplugging requires almost superhuman willpower and going massively countercultural.
Maybe that’s my next project: to build an AI that sits between me and the online world. A digital being less prone to dopamine hijacking and Internet addiction.
An AI designed to look out for my wellbeing and to relentlessly remind me of my own goals and desires and to retrieve only what is relevant and useful to me.
Outside of that, I’ll gather information IRL with my own eyes and ears and in-person conversations.
Clearly my environment has changed in wondrous and perilous ways. Feels like it’s time to adapt in a big way.
THE DESENSITIZED GENERATION
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Immune To Novelty By AI Video Fatigue
With just a few hours of testing OpenAI’s Sora2 Social Network for my clients and just finished a 218 page report, the thing I thought about for decades is upon us:
Full Desensitization Of Visual Novelty
I knew so many years ago, and one reason I have posted on the account so many novel images and videos that one day we will rapidly become immune to “oh damn, it’s over” images and video. With Sora2 this desensitization will rapidly accelerate as “you and your friends” build endless videos where you and they are inserted.
Like all things that get abused, the first phase is “wow look at this”, the next phase is “can it do that” and the last phase is “nothing is real and I don’t care”.
The shock value of the entire technology become removed but in the final phases it will be pushed to extremes of insults and potentially purposeful directed reputation damage.
This will take place so rapidly as Sora2 and every other social network rushes to take whatever nicely oxygen that is left in the room for more and more “it’s over, we are so cooked” fantastical videos.
They will continue to get so much better that even the “debunker” experts will give up their “look at the fingers-type troupe”, they honestly will not know and soon burn out.
My easy point is get ready to be bored by the novelty of humans that in the past took potentially hours of thier lives to create novelty in reality.
The hard point is what now? Once a society takes something that has increasingly more and more amazing possibilities like AI and rapidly becomes immune to the possibilities the entire industry become devalued because the front facing aspect to AI will be Sora2-like social media.
Humanity’s entire past of astonishing achievements, the high points and the low points and the incredible art we can make will equally become devalued because this fatigue will make us not care and not trust what was real.
Everything will become a forever now where there was no real past because it would take impossible effort to verify it if at all.
Why?
Because not only are we the Desensitized Generation we are also the Amnesia Generation where Petabytes of all forms of media, books, papers, microfilm/microfiche, film, VHS, audio tapes, records, etc is being thrown away or decayed. Not to mention the daily removal of text, images, video and audio from the internet. We simply will not have the receipts, we won’t have the memory and the fatigue is too large to care.
It took 5 dark nights for the Library to burn, the sum total of human knowledge. In our age the burn is slow and rapidly increasing till the pot boils over.
What are the answers?
I have thought about this for decades. I will continue to write about it a lot. But one thing you can do is understand we are rapidly losing our past because almost no one cares. I should not be the only one dumpster diving to save what I can. Also protect your mind and preserve your “novelty” sensitivity because once it is burned out with fatigue, it will never return.
And I ask you to have grace and compassion to those that don’t know what we know. You are the 1% of the 1% and must serve a place to help those that can understand what this means and have grace to those who can’t. I am serious, be gentle with them as they find the bottom of the hole and hopefully find a way back.
This video below was novel and she risked her life. You are the last generation to understand this.
The post reposted of a CEO head in a toilet, is AI rendered it is not novelty.
Five neural nets, achieving completely local voice AI, no internet, on an M1 with only 16GB ram.
Neural-based voice activity detection and turn detection means it's interruptible, but never interrupts me, and is able to sit idle and waiting. It's been flawless so far.
12B parameters is definitely smart enough for some very cool use-cases (will share more later).
Computers that can "think" feel strangely alive compared to dumb or networked hardware.
Fast? No. But crazy that it works at all on such a modest machine.
The stack:
- Silero VAD voice activity detection
- Whisper Large v3 turbo
- Smart Turn v2 by @trydaily
- Kokoro_tts
- Gemma_3_12B_it_QAT_Q4 rock-solid on @lmstudio
- vision easily removed thx to gguf @ggerganov
- @pipecat_ai integration by @kwindla
STUFF I DID IN THE '80s: "10:15 Saturday Night"
I’m not a competitive person per se, however; a pattern of behavior formed in my senior year of high school which would carry on throughout my life.
I was friends with a couple of other talented artists in school. Often, we would look at each other’s classwork to critique and support one another. One artist in particular, Angel Longoria, was adept with just about any medium he tried: pen, brush, pencil...you name it. Angel was inspired by Heavy Metal and EC comics, so his subject matter was creepy, gnarly and awesome to us fellow artists.
After weekends full of work and hanging out with my friends ‘til the wee hours, I’d reluctantly return to school every Monday waiting for next weekend to arrive. I’d soon realize that over the weekend, Angel would produce piles of amazing drawings. He was a machine, cranking out one rad image after another. I was inspired.
I stayed home on a Saturday night and painted until 1:00 AM. I continued tinkering with my painting Sunday afternoon and brought it in the following morning. Angel and my teachers liked what I’d done and asked what I would create next. Before long, Monday mornings became a ritual in the art room of sharing what we had created over the weekend. It was thrilling, I felt a balance of work, socializing and creative expression that I’d never really known. It was like a glimpse into a life I could only dream about. Thankfully, with years of practice and determination, I made that dream a reality.
I worry now.
How many teenagers are just as talented as Angel and I were back in 1986 but are hopelessly addicted to one device or another? Worse, how many are comparing themselves to EVERY artist that now shares their work online and feel untalented before they even pick up a pencil? How many abandon their dream of being a creative person when anyone, with no skills at all, can type a simple prompt and watch a computer magically create for them?
No question about it, these posts are a nostalgia trip for me to share with you. But this is one of many aspects of life that I feel was better back then than it is today.
Meet Google Sans Code — the new font meticulously crafted for coders, made by @Google! It blends geometric precision with a touch of calligraphic flair in a fixed-width design that's super easy to read, even at tiny code editor sizes. Say goodbye to squinting and hello to clear, beautiful code! ✨
@RoryTyer This is what everyone is most excited for at the moment. Problem being it’s $200 a month right now. But that’s cheaper than an assistant. Rumor has it Chat GPT is about to release their version soon too. They demoed this ability early in the year but it’s not public yet.