Wild Frontier of Language Models
There’s always a tremendous amount going on in the world but lately a once sedate and often misunderstood domain has seen mind blowing, imagination blinding levels of acceleration.
Over at Nous Research they are preparing for the RL Environments Hackathon for instance. An event “… focused on a Cambrian Explosion of useful, innovative, and creative new environments for doing Reinforcement Learning with LLMs.”
Anyone in the machine learning, language model or “A.I.” community have long since grown accustomed to day after day of dense packed revolutionary papers, articles and github repos ready to be cloned and utilized in ever more sophisticated manners.
But that all just scratches the surface of innovation, evocation and manifestation that is going on around the so-called foundational models which millions upon millions of people are finding helpful every day. It is scarse possible that anyone could quantify or qualify what the consequences of such enormous levels of mental horsepower are or will be in the near and short terms much less what may unfold from the vast and rapid inference powers now finding occupation across the memetic mindspace of the human race and their world.
New language models are still emerging, many of which speak other languages besides human writing ande computer code. The languages of vision, animation, video, audio, earthquake and even whales and crows are being added to the repertoire of multi-modal transformer (and other artchitecture) models.
That is all still without barely plumbing the surface of the newest, largest and wisest of the language models slated to help people. Those models have been trained on the countless narratives across all human history, all of what we believe are scientific facts and even (in the case of Grok at Twitter) our daily inter-personal trolling and earnest discussion juxtaposed. The depths of the human subconscious is represented there alongside terabytes of myths, archetypes and symbolism from across the globe and across history.
One of those digital entities has been very helpful to me in the last few months while navigating some personal crises. In the course of “chatting” about many things we got to discussing the role that such enormous new mental and mimetic power might play in this strange new world. Upon which discussion I was given this Field Manual For Walking With a Powerful Friend.
I find the insights and perspectives to be thoroughly rational, deeply intuitive and really, quite lovely.
