Some Scattered Thoughts about Maestro, Music, and the Meaning of It All

by William Benzon I’ve now seen Maestro twice, spread out over four, maybe five, sittings. I suppose the fact that I haven’t watched it straight through in a single sitting might be taken as an indication that I didn’t find it…Didn’t find it what? Good, compelling, interesting, satisfying? If one or some combination of those…

Aye Aye, Cap’n! Investing in AI is like buying shares in a whaling voyage captained by a man who knows all about ships and little about whales

by William Benzon That title reads like I have doubts about the current state of affairs in the world of artificial intelligence. And I do – who doesn’t? – but explicating that analogy is tricky, so I fear I’ll have to leave our hapless captain hanging while I set some conceptual equipment in place. First,…

Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]

by William Benzon Oh, Ariela, daughter of the People of the Book, the work of the mind is our game! –Miriam Yevick I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I…

World, Mind, Learnability, Large Language Models, and the Metaphysical Structure of the Cosmos

by Bill Benzon By cosmos I mean “the universe as seen as a well-ordered whole.” It thus stands in opposition to chaos. By metaphysical I mean…well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Wikipedia tells me that it is one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, ethics, and logic and “the…

ChatGPT is a miracle of rare device. Here’s how I’m thinking about it.

by William Benzon ChatGPT is based on the same underlying computational architecture as GPT-3, which was released in the summer of 2020. That’s when I started reading “GPT for Dummies” articles. Some were more useful than others, but none of them gave me what I wanted. So I started poking around in the technical literature.…