Way back in the day, some people decried the amount of energy used to perform a search on a search engine. Those people’s heads would explode at the energy consumed by an LLM to respond to a message that just said “hello” or “thanks”. If that doesn’t do the trick, just tell them the amount of energy required to train one of the models. Does this mean it would be terrible to replace a call centre with AIs?
Continue reading “E=L²M”An AI in every pocket
Right now, ChatGPT lives in data centres around the world. But in the not-to-distant future, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT will run locally on portable, ubiquitous devices.
Continue reading “An AI in every pocket”LLMs vs. 5 year olds
A measure of complexity of large language models (LLMs) is the number of “parameters” they use. GPT-1 had on the order of 100 million parameters; the recently released GPT-4 used in ChatGPT has on the order of 1 trillion parameters — a ten-thousand-fold increase. I’m not an AI researcher, but I think we can look at human children to see why scaling the number of parameters will likely lead to diminishing returns on intelligence.
Continue reading “LLMs vs. 5 year olds”ChatGPT: Dawn of ubiquitous AI
Move over Eliza and expert systems. ChatGPT belongs to a family of artificial intelligence (AI) know as large language models (LLMs). The ChatGPT service lets you hold conversations with a computer ranging from astronomy to Zoroastrianism. This AI has some Kepler paid for my first month’s subscription of the ChatGPT service in December which gave me the opportunity to have more conversations with the AI. While it has its quirks, I can definitely see it becoming something that can assist with productivity when used correctly. In fact, I found it so useful, I got myself a subscription. In this blog post, I talk more about my experiences and where I think this technology might be headed.
Continue reading “ChatGPT: Dawn of ubiquitous AI”The Internet in Space is boring
This is part of a series of working at Kepler Communications. As usual, all opinions and views expressed on this blog are my own.
I’ve just crossed the four-year mark of being at Kepler Communications. In that time, our software team has
- grown from two people to over twenty;
- we’ve gone from operating two satellites to nearly twenty (we are now the largest satellite operator in Canada);
- and humans have gone from being a one-planet species to a… well, we’re still a one-planet species.
The biggest change within the company is where our development resources are focused. Kepler’s mission has always been to deliver the Internet in Space (more on what that means below). As a startup, we’ve had to take a less direct route while as we built expertise, reputation, and capital.
Continue reading “The Internet in Space is boring”Electrical grids of the near-future
This blog post is around seven or eight years overdue. Anyway, I had been musing about energy grids at the time and thinking about things like long-distance alternating current (AC) power transmission, the rise of solar panels, and electronics. I figured in 15-20 years (so about 7-12 years from now), we’d start seeing direct current (DC) power being more available from the wall. Before that can happen, people need a supply of DC power and devices that use DC power.
B is for Blockchain
This is part of an on-going series of “Blockchain according to jono” in which I try to explain blockchains to both a non-technical and technical audience. This post describes some of the basic things blockchain enables.
Hello world!
This is a continuation of Debeakered.
Secure Docker ambassador
As part of my work at Sojourn Labs (more about this at a later time), I’ve recently been working with creating a secure private cloud based on CoreOS, Docker (basically, a lightweight virtualization system), and some decade-old (or older) hardware. Different applications within the cloud need to communicate with each other securely. For example, our wiki needs to communicate with our database server. To link two Docker containers on the same machine together, one need only instruct Docker to create a link between the two. Things get more interesting when the communicating containers reside on different machines.
The Proprietary Ties that Bind: Part I — Instagram, not the last straw
In yesterday’s New York Times, there was an article about people getting angry over changes to Instagram’s privacy policies under Facebook rule. Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter Group was quoted as saying
There are always Facebook users who say ‘This is the last straw,’ [but] there’s not a lot of portability. Where would you go?”
Continue reading “The Proprietary Ties that Bind: Part I — Instagram, not the last straw”