Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips The most important computer processor ever made was the Intel 8087 (well, a little exaggeration). Spend more money on hardware or more money on smarts? The decision is still with us. It was 1980. Intel had just released the 8086 CPU—a computer on a chip that worked on 16 bits at a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have computing power a thousand magnitudes greater than what took us to the moon and back. And we use it to play checkers. Sitting here in the coffee shop writing these blog posts, I look across the room and note someone playing checkers on their new Windows 11 computer. Also on […]

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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 We have yet more examples showing how remote sensing is difficult. One day, we learn this well enough to anticipate it? There have been several unmanned craft land on the moon recently. That is a great accomplishment to send something to the moon and have it land soft enough to still function. […]

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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 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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by Dwayne Phillips BYOD or Bring Your Own Data is a big deal. It has been in computing since the start of computing. Nothing new here folks, but it is still important. Everyone is a data scientist (sort of). Everyone works for a data-centric organization (sort of). Data is the new oil (sort of). Data […]

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by Dwayne Phillips You would think by now that we would have straightened out all this mess with computers not quite working right. Sigh. Maybe one day. Over 30 years ago, (yes, I am that old) I was loading software onto a computer via 5 1/4″ floppy disks (yes, I am that old) and… kaput. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Recent advances in chatting or Q&A software has provided the ability to write simple computer programs. Hooray! There is a trend in the workplace called “low-code/no-code.” A person at work writes a ten-line computer program that is helpful in that it will do something in a minute that would take the person […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I think OpenAI did this before I get around to writing this blog post, but if you want AI to succeed, stop calling it AI. There is a large part of society that doesn’t like “AI.” First, how do you pronounce “AI?” Is it “A” then “I” or it some word that […]

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