a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Welp.
It seems that the company called OpenAI is no longer a stuffed turkey.
Altman was reinstated as CEO early Wednesday morning.
Co-founder Greg Brockman will return as well.
The directors on the board have been fired, instead— after demonstrating last Friday how profoundly out of touch they had been with the employees, and the investors of the company.
The problem’s plain to see
Too much technology
Machines to save our lives
Machines dehumanize
– From the song Mr. Roboto by Styx (1983)
There continues to be a lot of drama around the abrupt firing of Sam Altman on Friday, CEO of Open AI, by the Open AI board of directors.
(The board says Altman had lied to them and lost their trust, but as of Monday night that is all that is all we know).
Altman was a beloved and popular CEO and more than 90% of the 700-some employees at OpenAI are now threatening to quit.
Microsoft is a part of all the drama with a 49% stake in the company, a $13B investment to date and the supplier of critical cloud infrastructure.
Late on Sunday it was announced that Microsoft would hire Altman and Greg Brockman (OpenAI’s president and a company co-founder who quit in solidarity with Altman).
Some Background
By all accounts OpenAI is (was, now?) the 800-lb gorilla in the race for building artificial intelligence models such as GPT-4.
Released in March, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model.
Unlike its predecessors, GPT-4 is a multimodal model: it can take images as well as text as input.
This gives it the ability to describe the humor in unusual images, summarize text from screenshots, and answer exam questions that contain diagrams.
[Source: Wikipedia]
For further down the road, there is the concept of AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.
An artificial general intelligence is a hypothetical type of intelligent agent.
If realized, an AGI could learn to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform.
Some argue that it may be possible in years or decades; others maintain it might take a century or longer; and a minority believe it may never be achieved.
[Source: Wikipedia]
Otto Barten and Joep Meindertsma wrote in July in Time Magazine of a ‘godlike, superintelligent AI computer or agent’:
A superintelligent AI could therefore likely execute any goal it is given.
Such a goal would be initially introduced by humans, but might come from a malicious actor, or not have been thought through carefully, or might get corrupted during training or deployment.
If the resulting goal conflicts with what is in the best interest of humanity, a superintelligence would aim to execute it regardless.
To do so, it could first hack large parts of the internet and then use any hardware connected to it.
Or it could use its intelligence to construct narratives that are extremely convincing to us.
Combined with hacked access to our social media timelines, it could create a fake reality on a massive scale.
As Yuval Harari recently put it: “If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there.”
As a third option, after either legally making money or hacking our financial system, a superintelligence could simply pay us to perform any actions it needs from us.
And these are just some of the strategies a superintelligent AI could use in order to achieve its goals.
There are likely many more.
Like playing chess against grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, we cannot predict the moves he will play, but we can predict the outcome: we lose.
It’s cold outside (44°F / 6°C)— and here’s my car chiding me for pulling up at the Ellensburg supercharger station without giving it a heads up.
The sun came out late this afternoon, and I chased myself out of the house.
I was rewarded with spotting this beautiful 2023 Rivian R1S all-electric SUV here on Capitol Hill’s 15th Avenue.
A Tesla Cybertruck was spotted here in the city yesterday, at Pike Place Market.
It is not known if it will stick around for a while, or move on. This one was spotted in Northern California and in Oregon as well.
It was a lovely day here in Seattle (71 °F/ 22 °C).
Four of the amigos played a little pickleball this morning.
Afterwards we had something to eat and drink, on the patio of the dive bar called Twilight Exit, in Central District.
The pinball machines in Twilight are very cool.
Two two-lane bridges (Canoe Pass Bridge and Deception Pass Bridge) on Washington State Route 20, connect Whidbey Island in Island County, to Fidalgo Island in Skagit County in Washington State.
The bridges opened on July 31, 1935.
[Source: Wikipedia]
These pictures of the Canoe Pass Bridge were all taken from Pass Island, looking south. The pictures were taken around 4.15 pm. The Salish Sea is to the west, and with high tide at about 6.48 pm today, the tide from the Pacific Ocean was still coming in.
The US Open tennis tournament is a wrap*— and I believe this coat with a green sheen, on a Tesla Model Y, is a wrap as well.
*Novak Djokovic (Serbia, 36) beat Danill Medvedev (27) in straight sets in today’s Men’s Singles final. I pay my respects to Djokovic begrudgingly. I am not a fan of his.
I ran out to Best Buy today to pick up one more Google Chromecast*, for the TV in my guest room.
*A device that plugs into the HDMI port of a TV and then creates an on-screen user interface with a range of TV services, for watching shows or movies (such as Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube TV), listening to music (like Spotify or YouTube Music), and more.
. )
There was a Rivian R1S electric SUV parked in front of my house today.
I went back into the kitchen to tend to dinner on the stove.
When I went back to take another look at it, it was gone.
I found this feline at the West Exit of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo during my recent visit there (stills from a giant video screen).
The entrance to the Studio Alta building right next door is one of world’s famous rendezvous points.
Some 3.6 million people pass through Shinjuku Station every single day.
I am at Haneda airport— ready for the flight back to Vanouver (9 hours), and then on to Seattle (45 mins). I had a wonderful time, but I am looking forward to the cooler weather that seems to persist this summer in the Pacific Northwest.
Here’s a view from the little driverless train on the Yurikamome Line (it opened in 1995) that runs across Odeiba, an artificial island close to the shoreline in Tokyo Bay. The 6-car train runs on a double track and 600 V 50 Hz 3-phase alternating current.
Look for the little Statue of Liberty in the second picture (on Odeiba). In the background is the Rainbow Bridge that opened in August 1993, so just about 30 years old.
We did a quickie return trip today on the shinkansen from Shinagawa Station to Shin-Yokohama Station, and back.
It took all of 11 minutes to get there.
It would easily take twice that amount of time with the regular train— or by car.
This is the Nozomi N700— the ‘New 700’ series that had gradually replaced the 300, 500 and 700 series sets.
(The N700S entered service in 2020 with plans to eventually replace all N700-series trains).
This train is operated with 8 cars per train set, and it has a maximum speed of 300 km/h (186 mph). The N700 also accelerates more quickly than the older 700 series trains, with a maximum acceleration rate of 2.6 km/h/s.
That means it could attain its top speed of 300 km/h in just under two minutes.
I checked in at the Yodobashi Camera store in Akihabara today.
(No, I have not bought a new camera yet).
The store is a giant department store for all things technology, office, home appliances, home decor, toys & games, entertainment, and even more.
The craft submerged Sunday morning, and its support vessel lost contact with it about an hour and 45 minutes later, according to the Coast Guard.
The vessel was reported overdue about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, according to Canada’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The Titan was launched from an icebreaker that was hired by OceanGate and formerly operated by the Canadian Coast Guard. The ship has ferried dozens of people and the submersible craft to the North Atlantic wreck site, where the Titan has made multiple dives.
The U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday afternoon that the submersible had about 40 hours of oxygen remaining, meaning the supply could run out Thursday morning.
– Reported by AP News
There are five people on the vessel: OceanGate Inc. founder Stockton Rush, British businessman Hamish Harding, father-and-son Shahzada Dawood & Suleman Dawood from Pakistan, and former French navy officer Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
Update Thu 6/22:
Headlines from the New York Times—
After days of searching, no hope of finding survivors remains.
Debris suggests 5 aboard submersible were lost in ‘catastrophic implosion’.
These pictures are all from inside the National Neon Sign Museum in the former Elks Building in the heart of The Dalles downtown historic district.
The museum narrates the evolution of the electric sign, from pre-electric and gold leaf signage to the invention and widespread use of neon signs.
It houses one of the largest collections of neon storefront signs in the world.
Yes, neon signage has been in decline the last few decades, but many cities are now concerned with preserving and restoring their antique neon signs.
Fun fact— Argon is much more versatile than neon for creating colors, and some 75% of ‘neon’ signs actually has argon in the tubes and not neon. ‘Neon’ is the name that stuck for all signs that use either neon or argon.
Pictures:
That’s David Benko himself in one of the pictures, telling us about the history of neon signs. He established the museum in 2018, and is the curator— with a lifelong passion for collecting neon signs.
The museum has displays that show inventors and their experimentation with electricity in the 1700s and 1800s, the discovery of the noble gases argon (1894) and neon (1898) and a model of the patent for the first neon sign tubes that were created in 1910 by French engineer and inventor Georges Claude (the third picture).
By the end of the Roaring ’20s, most American cities were electrified. Illuminated streets and storefronts lured people into the streets at night time. The commercialization of neon signs took off in the 1930s after the Great Depression.
We drove back to Seattle via Interstate 5 on Thursday, and stopped at two superchargers on the way: the one at Hood River and the one at Chehalis.
Interstate 84 out of The Dalles runs through the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic area, offering beautiful views of the cliffs and forests along the river.
Three amigos in two Teslas drove down to The Dalles in Oregon on Wednesday.
(Two more amigos were in The Dalles already).
We made stops at Snoqualmie Pass, in Ellensburg, and at the Tesla supercharger station in Yakima.
Here’s a gray Porsche Carrera GTS and a white Boxster S, keeping each other company in the bowels of the Amazon Fresh parking garage on Jackson Street today.
These are not EVs— Porsche’s electric cars are the Porsche Taycan (several versions) and the upcoming 2024 Porsche Macan EV (SUV).
Here’s a Kia EV6— all the way from Texas— on the streets of Capitol Hill today.
According to the registration data from Experian (via Automotive News), the total number of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) registrations during the first three months of 2023 amounted to 257,507, which is 63 % more than a year ago and about 7 % of the total market (up from 4.6 % in Q1 ’22).
[Source: InsideEVs.com]
