PicoBlog

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science and engineering of creating intelligent machines and systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as vision, speech, decision making, and natural language processing. AI is transforming the world as we know it, creating new opportunities and challenges for businesses and individuals alike. As new AI tools become commonplace, more skills and knowledge are required to make the most of them in various domains and applications.

For most practical purposes, the prospects I outline in this article can be ignored. What matters to the rest of this project is updating perceived policy options to better align with reality, yet the transformative implications of other AI-enabled advances are well-enough aligned to do most of the work. Think of this article as an important heads-up, not a key argument. To understand the present situation calls for some history:

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for penalty recovery. See their case studies linked in the newsletter. This week’s recommended resources: {Sponsored} TheWordsmith.ai - Marketing Copilot that operates at the intersection of Brand and AI. Use your own OpenAI API Key. Learn how. Participate in an SEO version of Superbowl squares and predict how and when SGE will launch.

One of the many things that have become ubiquitous in discussions about AI over the few months or so is the tendency to compare AI to calculators. Comparing AI to any single tool or piece of technology is a massive oversimplification of its functionality and a massive underestimation of its potential impact. AI represents more than a new piece of technology: it’s an infrastructural development with fundamental implications for how humans live, work and learn.

AI21 Labs released an open-source model at the end of March, marking a new strategy for the Israeli company in terms of technology and market approach. Mamba is known as a structured state space model (SSM) architecture and Jamba combined this approach with a a transformer architecture. In addition, Jamba also adopted a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture where multiple smaller transformer models are combined to improve inference efficiency. So, Jamba offers a SSM+Transformer+MoE in what we might call a mixture-of-architectures (MoA) approach.

Late last week indictments were handed down in the Swadley’s Bar-B-Q/Foggy Bottom Kitchen scandal, involving longtime local restaurateur Brent Swadley and the state Department of Recreation and Tourism. Most of you know I covered that story from the beginning for The Oklahoman, so I thought I might offer some analysis on this soggy Sunday. Tres Savage did as good a job as anyone recapping the story for Non Doc if you want a refresher.

You have probably seen the word aioli on a menu and just assumed it was a creamy mayonnaise with some extra flavoring. Not much to it, just that “fancy” sauce that comes alongside truffle fries right? Nope, that’s where you’re mistaken! It’s not your fault though, in the US a lot of aioli is honestly just flavored mayo with a glorified name. That doesn’t stop people from saying they hate mayo but then shovel aioli down their throats…

Being asked for air fryer timings for my original recipe started out as a great excuse to make yet more quick dough cinnamon rolls. What larks! Easy peasy larks! Because air fryers, well they’re just small ovens, right? Nope. They’re small grills. And cinnamon rolls tend to be baked rather than grilled so… But after many (many, many) batches with burnt tops and raw bottoms and many towels about to be chucked in, I have finally reached a set of quantities and temperatures that yield a set of buns good enough to make the exercise worthwhile.

Good morning, clowns! I have to admit, I’ve been having a bit of a hard time concentrating with all the terrible news coming from Ukraine this week. I’m a believer that when catastrophe strikes one, it strikes all, especially when it’s by malicious, preventable, human design. I should probably keep away from social media because suddenly everyone on Twitter is some sort of international conflict expert, and it’s really infuriating. I’m trying my best not to lose my marbles.