Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips When confronting something that looks odd, show it to an old person. They may have seen this before and can explain it. Many years ago, a programmer saw an odd way to demodulate amplitude modulation. The method didn’t resemble any of the equations or diagrams regarding amplitude modulation (AM, or that radio […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Here come the AI assistants. They will do amazing things for us. Nothing new here. We’ve had these for decades. Nice, but not new. I’ve seen several AI assistants recently. They are usually called “agents.” Well, “agent” is shorter and easier to spell than “assistant,” so I guess that is an improvement. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is what the people who steer the money want from AI or anything else. We don’t want AI to do the dishes and the laundry. Well, most of us want these things, but the people who steer the money, i.e., the CEO folks, want answers to their big questions. Big questions […]

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by Dwayne Phillips These chattering bots can “generate” all sorts of information. Humans must do more and better to keep their paying jobs. I recently sat in a lecture about some worthwhile topic. The lecturer started with, “There are eight aspects to this topic that we will cover in the next ten sessions.” The lecturer […]

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by Dwayne Phillips You think the US government is big and spends lots of money? It is now overshadowed by industry—especially in computing. I was an employee of the US Federal government for 28 years. We did big things in computing that cost big dollars. I once worked in a lab where we had four […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Of course software running for the thousandth time works better than some people at some tasks. It has for half-a-dozen decades. Why does this continue to surprise us? Here is a recent breath-taking story about how AI performs better than doctors at detecting a type of cancer. Of course it does. Put […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Reducing the time spent typing on the keyboards reduces the number of interruptions. There are new tools that reduce both. I can type fairly fast. At least I give myself credit for that. Like everyone else, I am interrupted while typing. I could estimate number of interruptions per hour or some rate […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We want AI systems to act like us. Or do we? Perhaps we want AI systems to act like some of us. But who is “us” and who is “not us?” Testing shows that the latest and greatest large language models will generate bad information about political campaigns. That is wrong; those […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I share an idea for a manual writing instrument that I had several decades ago. Today’s technology might be ready for it. Several decades ago, I had this idea for a pencil, pen, or white board marker. I shared the idea with a few smart folks. Nothing became of it as the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Large Language Models appear to have all sorts of problems. I wonder why companies that build such don’t hire adults to help build them. I recently learned that large language models (LLMs) have “sleeper agents” in them. Given some inputs, the LLM starts doing crazy things that it shouldn’t do. Gosh. LLMs […]

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