Invention

During my parental leave, which ends tomorrow, I played through quite a few video games - something I love and one of the easiest ways to spend time while rocking my baby daughter to sleep. And it doesn’t hurt that my amazing wife loves watching games about as much as TV or movies with me, as long as they are beautiful or cooperative in some way. All of these are.

They include, in order:

I have long been of the mind that LLMs and their evolutions are truly thinking, and that they are on their way to solving all of the intellectual tasks that humans can solve today.

To me, it is just too uncanny that the technology that seems to have made the final jump to some degree of competence in tasks that require what is commonly understood as “thinking” or “understanding”, after a long string of attempts and architectures that fail these tasks, is a type of neural network. It would be much easier to argue away transformer models as non-thinking stochastic parrots if we had happened to have had success with any other architecture than the one that was designed to mimic our own brains and the neurons firing off to one another within them. It’s just too weird. They are shaped like us, they sound like us in a lot of ways, and it’s obvious they are thinking something like us too.

Editor’s note from 2025:

This article was written as part of the launch of Treekeepers VR and the sole proprietorship Together Again Studios, and represents some of my core beliefs of the value of VR and where it’s taking us socially. Though I’m no longer actively working on Treekeepers, I do hold that VR and AR are truly the “endgame” of interface and one that could save us from some of the social attitudes caused by social media of today. Enjoy!

With Together Again Studios and Treekeepers VR, we’re setting out to solve an insidious problem we see all around us: