more on OpenAI, why you should be thankful for the cerebellum & moving to Boston
CC#74 - What We Learned about AI in 2023, the Welfare Approach to Animal Ethics & Founding Lab Retrospective
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
I have recently been trying to get a bit of a better feeling/impression for how OpenAI works, what their goals are, how they operate as a company & non-profit etc. (see also last edition of this newsletter for a podcast recommendation). This article is quite long, but its well narrated and helped me to better understand the history of how the organisation was founded and how it came to be the number #1 AI player - so would definitely recommend.
I had breakfast in San Francisco with Brockman a little more than a year after OpenAI’s founding. (…) The salaries of the 25 people on its staff—who were being paid at far less than market value—ate up the bulk of OpenAI’s expenses. “The goal for us, the thing that we’re really pushing on,” he said, “is to have the systems that can do things that humans were just not capable of doing before.” But for the time being, what that looked like was a bunch of researchers publishing papers. (…)
Had I gone in and asked around, I might have learned exactly how much OpenAI was floundering. Brockman now admits that “nothing was working.” Its researchers were tossing algorithmic spaghetti toward the ceiling to see what stuck. They delved into systems that solved video games and spent considerable effort on robotics. “We knew what we wanted to do,” says Altman. “We knew why we wanted to do it. But we had no idea how.”
But they believed. Supporting their optimism were the steady improvements in artificial neural networks that used deep-learning techniques.“The general idea is, don’t bet against deep learning,” says Sutskever. Chasing AGI, he says, “wasn’t totally crazy. It was only moderately crazy.”
🧠 What does the Cerebellum Do Anyway?
This was a really refreshing read outside my ‘usual areas of interest’. There is so little I know about how brains work, reading this reminded me just how astonishing it is that we as humans function the way we do. And apparently this little part at the end of our brain, called Cerebellum, plays quite an important role in that.
Even in the rare cases known as cerebellar agenesis, where a person is born totally lacking a cerebellum123, movement is still possible, just impaired: slow motor and speech development in childhood, abnormal spoken pronunciation, wobbly limb movements, and mild-to-moderate intellectual disability. But not paralysis, and not even particularly bad disability overall — a lot of these people were able to live independently and work at jobs.
So…that’s weird.
What is the cerebellum’s job? It seems weird to have a whole separate organ for “make motor and cognitive skills work somewhat better.” The other weird thing about the cerebellum is anatomical. These very large, complex neurons are the Purkinje cells, which exist only in the cerebellum. They have hundreds of synapses each, unlike the neurons of the cerebrum which only have a few.
Most of the other cells in the cerebellum are the small granule cells — in fact, they are so numerous that they comprise more than half of all neurons in the whole human brain. In total, the cerebellum contains 80% of all neurons!
🐖 The capabilities approach to Welfare (with Martha Nussbaum) [🎧]
Interview with philosopher Martha Nussbaumer on different ways of measuring and assessing welfare. A large part focuses on her work on animal ethics. Something that I haven’t engaged with from an academic perspective very much so far - found it helpful to get some ‘tools’ for thinking about this topic in a more structured way.
What is the capabilities approach to welfare? To what is this approach reacting? How should capabilities be balanced or traded off against each other? How do capabilities differ from needs? Are zoos unethical? Can plants be subject to injustice? What are our ethical obligations towards factory farms? How do our ethical obligations to domesticated animals and livestock differ from our ethical obligations to wild animals, if at all? Why is vulnerability important? Is inequality intrinsically bad, or is it only bad because of its effects?
Food for Thought.
🎧 Seems like its really worth investing into good noise cancelling headphones…
🤖 Really insightful (and fairly short) summary about ‘what we learned about AI in 2023’
✈️ I guess you too have heard about that Boeing where the door just fell out and wondered how that could ever happen? (And wondered if this might soon happen to you?) Here are some insights.
Random Stuff.
🤝 Interesting book excerpt with advice on how to network (something I definitely need).
⁉️ Adding to the above, I have made a resolution to try to engage in less small talk ask people more interesting questions. This article seems like a great resource to fuel this by providing a list of ‘things to argue about’.
😎 This guy made a receipt printer print an actual map. I agree that its mabye not too useful but still somewhat cool… no?
Personal Update.
I will stop apologizing for not sticking too my schedule. Seems to happen too often. Hope you still stay on board.
Also I was wondering, if there is anything specific you would like to see more of in this newsletter? Any topics that you are specifically interested in, any content you particularly like? In this case just send me an email - would love to hear your thoughts :)
I am in Boston now (or more specifically Cambridge). My luggage is still somewhere in Germany though, hopefully will arrive tomorrow. So started my stay here with a shopping trip and exploring some nearby coffeeshops. I will be here approximately until the end of May, visiting the MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society. Looking forward to exploring a new city and meeting new people (feel free to reach out if you are around). So far, I have been positively surprised - lots of bikelanes everywhere, no plastic bags in the supermarket, many healthy fast food options. I guess I have to revert some of my prejudices about the U.S. Only complaint: its freaking cold…
Last week, I finished the so-called ‘founding lab’ - the first course organised by the new ‘International Transformation University’ in Linz. I have quite some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I got to work further on one of my personal pet projects - extending the interactive meta-analysis app to more studies (here is a short report about it).
Will share the resulting protoype v2 within the next weeks. I also had many interesting discussions and got a better understanding of art (starting from a self-rated understanding of 0, that was not too hard though…). Also, really lovely and caring facilitators. At the same time, some of the content was lacking relevance for me (or maybe I am just lacking the understanding) and the inner workings of the university and its entanglement with political interests are very intransparent. Nonetheless, I think the aim itself - building a trans-disciplinary tech university, pioneering new forms of teaching & learning - is worth supporting. Curious to see where things are heading - I think the upcoming recruitment of the first tranche of professors will heavily impact the direction this university is heading… Keeping my fingers crossed 🤞