The Nvidia Way by Tae Kim – Review

Posted on by Zbigatron

Score: 3 stars out of 5.

TLDR review: A very interesting read about the history of a large company. However, the lack of criticism of corporate culture was disappointing; as was also the fact that the book was not written for a larger audience.

Full review: Nvidia is hot at the moment. It’s a company founded by Jensen Huang that at one stage was the most valuable company in the world in terms of market capitalisation. It edged past Microsoft and Apple to achieve this crown mid-way through 2024.

Since then, the company’s stock has fallen as a result of a number of factors. Nonetheless, Nvidia is still a powerhouse, which is why I was keen to read an account of its history that was published in December 2024.

In this respect, the book was a fascinating read for a computer nerd like myself. I recall Nvidia from the 90s as a child who would do its best for bragging rights in the school’s playground. Back then, whoever had the fastest graphics card to play the latest FPS was the coolest kid around. Everybody wanted to befriend you in the hope that they would get invited to your house to see what marvels this new graphics card could produce on a monitor.

So, to read about what was happening behind the scenes at the company, to read about how the company went from nothing to the behemoth that it is today, was not only intriguing but also heartwarming. Jensen Huang, the CEO of the company, has steered the company very well through a constantly evolving industry. Kudos to him for that.

I took off two stars however, for two particular reasons.

Firstly, although the book is well-written, it is not written for a wider audience. This is hard to do for a topic such as this – but I have seen it done before. A book about a company such as Nvidia should be an interesting read for most people because of the company’s achievements.

Secondly, Jensen Huang is a typical corporate CEO: cutthroat and sometimes ruthless. He has set up a “culture” (a misnomer if I ever saw one) in the company that is unhealthy to say the least. Here’s a quote from the book:

… Nvidia demands much of its people. Extreme commitment is critical to the Nvidia way. 60-hour work weeks are expected as the bare minimum, even at junior positions. A workweek can stretch to 80 hours or more during critical periods in chip development. (Chapter 16)

When profits become the main driving factor for humans, this is not only unhealthy but is diseased. Sure, the company makes a lot of money but at what cost? Broken marriages, broken relationships, absent parents from households, psychological fatigue. The pain that ensues is something you can’t quantify and measure and place on a graph beside a company’s earnings. I have seen this kind of corporate “culture” when I once worked in the industry and it still disgusts me when I read about it. And it hurt me to see that the author of this book did not criticise this environment enough.

Here’s another quote:

Fear and anxiety became Jensen’s favourite motivational tools (Chapter 6)

This is nothing to be proud of. Like I said, it’s a disease. Money is not everything. We need to speak out more against dehumanising conditions in corporations.

I created a video of this review where I extend my analysis a bit further:

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Elon Musk and his broken promises

Elon Musk’s Broken Promises on Autonomous Vehicles

Posted on by Zbigatron

So, 2024 has come and gone. What a year it has been for AI. Plenty of new advancements, fresh innovations, and lots and lots of hype. Boy, I seriously believe that we’ve created an AI Bubble. However, I’ve already spoken about that (including in a latest video).

What I want to talk about is the hype surrounding AI and the broken promises that seemingly are passing under the radar. Big Tech is getting away with a lot. Sam Altman is already talking about “Super Intelligence” (skipping a step to Artificial General Intelligence). Google is lying to us about their ChatGPT version called Gemini.

And good ol’ Elon Musk.

Those that know me know that I have a love/hate relationship with the guy. I love his sense of adventure, his imagination, his “let’s just try it and see how we go” attitude. But he’s a businessman of major companies and as a result a master spin doctor.

In this post I wanted to highlight his broken promises surrounding autonomous vehicles. Since 2014, every year and sometimes multiple times a year, Elon has promised significant autonomy for his Tesla cars. Even recently, he announced robo-taxis coming soon with no steering wheels or pedals, claiming a fully unsupervised version of Full Self-Driving (FSD).

Let’s see how that stands in light of his past remarks on this topic.

YearQuoteBroken Promise?
2014“Autonomous cars will definitely be a reality. A Tesla car next year will probably be 90 percent capable of autopilot. Like, so 90 percent of your miles can be on auto. For sure highway travel.” (source)Not Delivered
2015“Self-driving cars are going to get here much faster than people think [two to three years]” (source)Not Delivered
2016“Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we’ll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York… by the end of next year.” (source)Not Delivered
2017“[Coast to coast auto-pilot demo is] still on for end of year. Just software limited. Any Tesla car with HW2… will be able to do this.” (source)Not Delivered
2018“Self-driving will encompass all modes of driving by the end of next year” (source)Not Delivered
2019“I think we will be feature-complete full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention — this year. I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.” (source)Not Delivered
2020“I’m extremely confident that level five – or essentially complete autonomy – will happen and I think will happen very quickly… I feel like we are very close… I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year… There are no fundamental challenges remaining.” (source)Not Delivered
2021“And my personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year, yes, with data safety levels significantly greater than present.” (source)Not Delivered
2022“I will be shocked if we don’t achieve FSD safer than a human this year” (source)Not Delivered
2023“But the trend is very clearly towards full self-driving, towards full autonomy. And I hesitate to say this, but I think we’ll do it this year. So that’s what it looks like.” (source)Not Delivered
2024Recently, Elon Musk held a robotaxi reveal event where he said that he will release an unsupervised version of FSD [Full Self Driving] in 2025. (source)We’ll see!

Perhaps this time Elon will deliver on his promises. Perhaps not. What’s important, though, is to realise that AI is being overhyped and Big Tech (along with Big People) are getting away with a lot. You can’t just keep talking like this and getting away with it. It’s not right and as I’ve said before, people are going to get hurt because we’re being fed an image of AI that doesn’t exist in reality.

Unfortunately, businesses have invested a lot of money around AI and the return on investment so far has been minimal. So, more talk like this is expected to come. Which is a shame.

Video of my article:

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Image of Sam Altman

Reacting to Sam Altman’s “The Intelligence Age” – Videos

Posted on by Zbigatron

Recently, Sam Altman wrote an essay on his blog entitled “The Intelligence Age“. In this essay he ambitiously compares the current AI “revolution” to past technological ages, such as the Industrial and Information Ages, suggesting that AI’s impact could far surpass them.

I created two react videos to this essay – links below.

Part 1 – A Balanced Perspective, Please

In the first video, I recognise AI’s groundbreaking impact on how we work and manage daily tasks. However, I also express skepticism about the prevailing hype surrounding AI, advocating for a balanced perspective that tempers optimism with critical evaluation. Sam Altman’s essay positions us on the verge of what he calls “The Intelligence Age”, a transformative era akin to the Industrial Revolution. While I acknowledge the exciting potential of this shift, I critique the completely optimistic narrative.

For example, Altman claims that we are close to achieving Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). But we haven’t yet reached Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)! We really must be careful when listening to people behind Big Tech.

Part 2 – Machines are Still Just Machines

In the second part of my reaction to Sam Altman’s essay “The Intelligence Age”, I continue my plea for a balanced view to this phenomenon that is AI.

Altman suggests that humanity has created algorithms capable of learning the fundamental rules underlying data distributions, implying a level of machine understanding comparable to human cognition. In response, I discuss the limitations of the technology underlying the current AI revolution that is Deep Learning and talk about its limitations.

As a result, I emphasise the notion that machines operate on the level of knowledge, we operate on the level of knowledge and understanding. Hence, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves in this game.

The distinction between knowledge vs understanding is so crucial because it challenges the foundation of Altman’s vision of AI as a transformative force capable of fundamentally reshaping society.

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A person crafting a pot

The New “Handmade” in the Age of Generative AI

Posted on by Zbigatron

I just got back from my trip to the Vatican where I participated in an AI Forum with people from all walks of life. We got together to discuss many issues surrounding the growth of Artificial Intelligence and what this means for the Catholic Church.

It was a great experience for all of us present there. I think the networking aspect was the stand out factor for me, though. I got to talk to a lot of interesting people and hopefully the contacts I made there will last a lifetime.

Jamie Baxter, CEO of Exodus 90

One such interesting person I met was the current CEO of Exodus 90, Jamie Baxter. Exodus 90 is a popular 90-day spiritual exercise designed for men seeking spiritual growth, self-discipline, and freedom from attachments.

Jamie approached me after a particular workshop on AI and consciousness and we got talking about our views on how things are changing a lot around us in this new age of generative AI.

The Push to have AI Everywhere

Jamie told me that he is feeling pressure to have AI implemented in his organisation. Everyone is using it, everyone is raving about it, and so he asked me what my thoughts were on all of this.

It’s a great question.

No company nowadays can get away without mentioning that they use AI somewhere… anywhere! It’s a buzz word that’s being thrown around more than confetti at a New Year’s party. Here’s a video I recently posted on my LinkedIn page reacting to this:

Truly, people are starting to feel pressure to use AI just for the sake of it.

My response to Jamie was to mention what I always tell my students: “Before using AI, have a clear use case for it and make sure that it will contribute to your product in a positive way.” There is absolutely no point in using it just for the sake of using it. That’s just not how innovation and quality of products works.

Unfortunately, we take things too much on face value these days.

Stick to Simplicity

Jamie then said to me that he feels like he should keep his product (app and website tied to Exodus 90) AI free because it will feel “simpler” that way.

This is what piqued my interest. He touched on something important I had never considered before. We elaborated on this.

Simplicity in itself is a feature. There is a beauty to it. Famously, Steve Jobs built his own products around this notion:

Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

Currently, it feels like AI is being shoved down our throats. There’s definitely hype surrounding it (as I’ve written before) and it’s hard to see where we currently stand with it. It’s hard to make clear and unbiased judgments about its capabilities and about its future. Indeed, it’s a convoluted mess that is not imitative of a classic Steve Jobs product: minimalist and user-friendly.

So, I concurred with Jamie. Simple is good! Don’t bring AI into your company if you’re going to lose a certain integrity to your product.

The Classic Handmade Tag on Products

Then Jamie said something that made me realise immediately that our conversation was going to end up as the topic of my next blog post: “I want to keep my products handmade”.

That’s a great comment.

Manufactured products (be it furniture, clothes, plastic items) are soulless. They’re a sign of the times that prefer expediency and economy over intimacy and craftsmanship. Take a look at the modern buildings around us. Cheap, lifeless, bland, dispensable. Compare that to the architecture of days gone by. People still admire it.

I’ve written before about the fact that AI will never be able to create high art. AI is just an algorithm that works on statistics and regurgitates and shuffles around what it’s already been given in its training data. If it does create something new, it happens completely by chance.

Why is it that we prefer handmade things over those made on an assembly line? Craftsmanship and quality, for sure. But there’s also that element of a personal touch. Handmade items often feel more personal and can evoke stronger emotions or a sense of warmth and nostalgia. Deep down we feel a connection to another person.

Sometimes these emotions that I’m describing, these feelings of warmth, happen without us realising it. Not many people think about why they prefer handmade over anything else. But undoubtedly, handmade is a selling tool in the marketplace of the world.

Will this also not be the case with generated content online soon? Surely!

Maybe one day companies will stop spewing out how much AI they use in their products and will start to emphasise the human element in their content. Maybe such a shift in mentality will come about soon once all this hype dies down around AI? I think it just might.

Much like we crave human contact in real life in the age of social media, we will start to crave the personal touch in generated content in the products that surround our everyday lives. We want that warm feeling inside of us.

What a beautiful discussion I had with Jamie. Much appreciated, friend.

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awards-podium

ChatGPT is Bullshit – Zbigatron Paper of the Year Award

Posted on by Zbigatron

I have decided to create a new prestigious and highly-coveted award: the Zbigatron Paper of the Year Award.

And I hereby officially bestow the 2024 award to Hicks et al. for their academic publication entitled “ChatGPT is Bullshit“ (Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024)). What a paper. A breath of fresh air in the world of hype, lies, and financial bubbles that surround Artificial Intelligence today.

The premise of the paper is this: we should stop using terms like “hallucination” for situations where LLMs make up information and present them as facts because this is an inaccurate description of this phenomenon.

Now, I have been a huge champion of using more accurate terms to describe actions or attributes of machines that are deemed to be artificially intelligent. For example, in an article I wrote two years ago (entitled The Need for New Terminology in AI) I stated:

Terms like “intelligence”, “understanding”, “comprehending”, “learning” are loaded and imply something profound in the existence of an entity that is said to be or do those things… [T]he problem is that the aforementioned terms are being misunderstood and misinterpreted when used in AI.

And then we go and create an AI hype bubble as a result. So, in that article, I called for more precise terms to be substituted for these, such as using “Applied Statistics” in place of “Artificial Intelligence”. (Can you picture how the hype around AI would diminish if it was suddenly being referred to as Applied Statistics? This is a much more accurate term for it, in my opinion.)

Indeed, Hicks et al. have gone for the same approach classifying the phenomenon of hallucinations as something completely different. I need to quote their abstract to convey their message:

We argue that these [hallucinations], and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005)… We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems. [emphasis mine]

Yes! Please! Let’s start using more accurate terms to describe the phenomenon of AI. I highly agree that bullshit is a proper, scientifically-based, and sophisticated term that should be used in today’s day and age.

I need to drop some more quotes from this paper. It really does deserve my award:

Because these [LLMs] cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.

And then this:

Currently, false statements by ChatGPT and other large language models are described as “hallucinations”, which give policymakers and the public the idea that these systems are misrepresenting the world, and describing what they “see”. We argue that this is an inapt metaphor which will misinform the public, policymakers, and other interested parties. [emphasis mine]

Finally, somebody calling out the BS (pun intended) for what it is. Like I said, what a breath of fresh air. And how important is this!? The public, policymakers, and other interested parties are making very important decisions based on false information.

It’s a classic case of PR talk, isn’t it?

I recently read an article (The Current State of AI Markets) that tried to quantify where revenue has occurred thus far in the AI Value Chain. We all know that companies are spending a ridiculous amount of money on AI – so what’s the current ROI on this looking like?

To quote the article:

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have spent a combined $177B on capital expenditures over the last four quarters… We haven’t seen wide-scale application revenue yet. AI applications have generated a very rough estimate of $20B in revenue.

As the article admits: it’s early days yet and the ROI may come in the future. Nonetheless, one cannot ignore the divide between expenditure and ROI.

So, when we need to call a spade a spade, it’s important that we do so. This is not a joke, nor a game. Like I have said in the past: “There’s a ridiculous amount of money being spent, passed around, and invested and a lot of it is built on a false idea of what AI is capable of and where it is going. People are going to get hurt. That’s not a good thing.”

I’m going to leave the final word on this very important topic to the official winner of the 2024 Zbigatron Paper of the Year Award:

Investors, policymakers, and members of the general public make decisions on how to treat these machines and how to react to them based not on a deep technical understanding of how they work, but on the often metaphorical way in which their abilities and function are communicated. Calling their mistakes ‘hallucinations’ isn’t harmless: it lends itself to the confusion that the machines are in some way misperceiving but are nonetheless trying to convey something that they believe or have perceived. This, as we’ve argued, is the wrong metaphor. The machines are not trying to communicate something they believe or perceive. Their inaccuracy is not due to misperception or hallucination. As we have pointed out, they are not trying to convey information at all. They are bullshitting.

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AI from the Perspective of Religion

Posted on by Zbigatron

Last week I was a guest speaker at a society at the University of Tasmania. I was asked to talk about the topic of Artificial Intelligence from the perspective of religion – and more precisely from the perspective of Christianity.

AI is shaking things up, it seems. With all this talk about consciousness, machines obtaining rights, and even machines taking over the world, it’s no surprise that this kind of rhetoric has infiltrated religious circles as well. As readers of my blog know, I have a PhD in AI but also a Master’s in Philosophy as well as Master’s in Theology so I have a unique understanding on these issues from their different perspectives. Hence the invitation to give a talk at the main University of the coldest state of our beautiful country.

Now, I’m not here to judge the perspectives of religion or science. I just want to present their points of view on this very broad topic. In my opinion this is a fascinating topic!

In my talk I began with the starting points of Christianity and science. They’re different. Let’s start with a summary of how science works.

Science looks at empirical data and after collecting enough of it decides to announce conclusions once a level of statistical certainty has been reached. So, for example, with respect to consciousness, it will look at the external effects of human consciousness (because we are currently the best examples of it), analyse them, and try to define consciousness this way.

Consciousness seems to allow individuals:

  • to make deliberate, goal-directed decisions and actions,
  • to communicate ideas, emotions, and thoughts through language, gestures, and other forms of communication,
  • to express themselves through creativity,
  • and much more…

After enough evidence of these phenomena is collected, and it appears as though most beings with consciousness possess these attributes, science will conclude, in one way or another, that this must be what consciousness is. (Of course, this is a difficult topic, so I am cutting corners here a lot – but the gist is there).

Hence, when looking at machines, science will attempt to do the same:

  • do machines appear to be making deliberate, goal-directed decisions and actions?
  • do machines appear to communicate ideas, emotions, and thoughts through language, gestures, and other forms of communication,
  • do machines appear to be expressing themselves through creativity,
  • and the like…

Science will then (to cut a long story short, again) reach a conclusion, once it feels justified to do so, that machines might actually possess consciousness because they are exhibiting the behaviour of conscious individuals.

If it looks like it has consciousness, it just might.

Now for Christianity.

Christianity has traditionally had a different starting point. It first tries to define what something is in terms of its being. To do this, sometimes it utilises information from sources that science would not accept. For example, the Bible. In Genesis (the first book of the Bible) Chapter 1, verse 27 says: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them”.

From this, it is concluded that we are unique creatures in this world. The typical interpretation of “being created in the image of God” means that we have an intellect, consciousness, and free will like God (rather than being another lesser god or an immaterial being). The attributes listed are “packaged” in an eternal soul. No other creatures in this world have these unique attributes, especially not entities that we create ourselves like software programs.

So, when religion looks at things like machines and the discussion of consciousness surrounding them it will respond with something like this:

Just because a machine looks intelligent doesn’t mean it is intelligent. It can exhibit the symptoms of consciousness all it wants. On the level of being, rather than empirical phenomena, it will always just be a lifeless machine.

These are fundamentally two different starting positions that then have far-reaching consequences in terms of conclusions. For example:

  • Will AI take over the world?
    • Science: It might.
    • Religion: It may become dangerous but it will never have understanding because this is fundamental to having a soul. Understanding, rather than just possessing knowledge, goes a long way in actions so lacking this will inhibit AI immensely.
  • Should we worry about AI having feelings?
    • Science: Probably. Look at how ChatGPT is already answering its questions. It’s only a matter of time before actual feelings develop.
    • Religion: No chance. Just because a machine looks like it has feelings, doesn’t mean it does.
  • Will AI machines need to be given special rights in the future?
    • Science: Maybe
    • Religion: Nah. Even if AI’s abilities continue improving, nothing about what it fundamentally is (i.e. a lifeless machine) will change.

Different starting points give different conclusions on very important questions, indeed. Religion argues that science limits itself by not considering different, non-empirical sources of knowledge. In response, science contends that the veracity of these sources cannot be proven through scientific methods, and thus, religion should hold a lesser degree of influence.

Conflict from this can ensue between science and religion. Not really on the level of discoveries of material facts about such things as laws of physics or chemistry (although in the past this was not always the case, of course) but more on the level of conclusions reached in the sphere of immaterial philosophy like “what defines a human being” or “what is objectively a good or bad action” or the questions listed above.

Different worlds certainly open up for the two “disciplines” from their differing starting position. Both worlds truly are fascinating and hence why I’ve devoted half of my life to studying both science as well as philosophy/religion.

Hopefully this post has helped you to see both perspectives in this phenomenon that is Artificial Intelligence.

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Arduino 2WD Lafvin Robot

Arduino – Rotor Sweeping for Obstacle Detection Code

Posted on by Zbigatron

I started a Robotics Club recently at the Institute I’m currently working at in which I’ve been slowly getting my beginner students to become acquianted with Arduino-based robots and Arduino coding.

We purchased a set of Lafvin 2WD Robot Kits (see image above) from Little Bird Electronics and step-by-step I’ve been getting my students to learn how to control each piece of hardware attached to the robot. We’re working towards getting the robot to move around a room without bumping into anything it might encounter along the way.

In this post I thought I’d share some code I’ve written for this club that uses an ultrasonic sensor mounted on a servo motor to detect the distance of obstacles from the robot.

The code gets the rotor to sweep 180 degrees in one direction and then back again. It stops, however, every 45 degrees to use the ultrasonic sensor to detect if there is an object within 30cm (1 foot) of the machine. If there is, a message is printed on the Serial Monitor.

Key equipment used is as follows:

  • Arduino Uno R3
  • Arduino Sensor Expansion Shield V5.0 (attached to Uno)
  • SG90 Micro Servo motor
  • Ultrasonic Sensor (HC-SR04)

This video shows how we have put together the pieces and connections. The relevant connection diagrams are as follows:

The code below is well-commented so there’s no need for me to explain any more. But please note that you will need to install the “Servo” library before running this code.

If you have any questions, post them below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. 

/* 
  This code uses an Ultrasonic (US) sensor mounted on a servo motor to detect obstacles
  for a moving robot. The rotor sweeps 180 degrees from left to right and then
  back again. It takes readings every 45 degrees (and 200 milliseconds). If there is 
  an object within 30cm, it prints a message to the Serial monitor. 
  Once the obstacle is cleared, the rotor will start sweeping again.

  My code works for an Arduino Uno R3 board and a Sensor ExapansionShield v5.0. 
  The rotor and sensor are connected to pins A0-A2 of the Power Shield.

  I have also put in skeleton code (via "sweep" variable) to indicate where one might 
  write code to manoeuvre a robot if an obstacle is encountered.
*/

#include <Servo.h> // Servo library
#include "SR04.h" // Ultrasonic (US) sensor library
#define TRIG_PIN A1 // UltraSonic I/O 
#define ECHO_PIN A0 // UltraSonic I/O

// Create Ultrasonic object
SR04 sr04 = SR04(ECHO_PIN,TRIG_PIN);
int obj_distance; // variable to store distance returned by US sensor
int distance_threshold = 30; // how close to get to an object before deciding to act

// Create a servo object
Servo myServo;

int sweep_directions[] = {0, 45, 90, 135, 180}; // possible rotor positions (degrees)
int direction_index = 0; // current index of rotor position
int direction = 1; // Direction of rotor: 1 for forward (sweep right), -1 for backward (sweep left)

// Time tracking variables to only move the rotor between certain elapsed time intervals
unsigned long previousMillis = 0;
const unsigned int interval = 200; // interval in milliseconds between US readings

// this boolean is not used in this code but I left it here to give you an idea of how 
// you could build an obstacle avoiding robot in the future
bool sweep = true; 

void setup() {
  // Start the serial monitor
  Serial.begin(9600);

  // Connect servo motor to shield
  myServo.attach(A2);
}

void loop() {
  // Get the current time
  unsigned long currentMillis = millis();

  // Check if the interval has passed from last reading
  if (currentMillis - previousMillis >= interval) {
    obj_distance = sr04.Distance(); // get obstacle distance
    
    if(obj_distance <= distance_threshold) {
      // obstacle detected within distance threshold
      Serial.print("STOP! Obstacle distance: ");
      Serial.println(obj_distance);
      /* 
        You would write code here to stop the robot from moving,
        set sweep to false to give the robot time to work out 
        which direction to turn and then to manoeuvre.

        Once, we're good to go again, set sweep to true.
      */
      
    }
    else if(sweep) {
      // If we're in "sweep" state, we change rotor direction and
      // wait another 200 milliseconds from the last reading
      myServo.write(sweep_directions[direction_index]);
      Serial.print("Sweep direction:");
      Serial.println(sweep_directions[direction_index]);

      // Check if the end or beginning of the array is reached
      if (direction_index == 4) {
        direction = -1; // Reverse direction of sweeping at the end
      } else if (direction_index == 0) {
        direction = 1; // Reverse direction at the beginning
      }
      direction_index += direction; // increment or decrement index accordingly
    }
    previousMillis = currentMillis;
  }
}

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snail

Artificial Intelligence is Slowing Down – Part 3

Posted on by Zbigatron

Nearly three years ago (July 2021) I wrote an article on this blog arguing that artificial intelligence is slowing down. Among other things I stated:

[C]an we keep growing our deep learning models to accommodate for more and more complex tasks? Can we keep increasing the number of parameters in these things to allow current AI to get better and better at what it does. Surely, we are going to hit a wall soon with our current technology?

Artificial Intelligence is Slowing Down, zbigatron.com

Then 7 months later I dared to write a sequel to that post in which I presented an article written for IEEE Spectrum. The article, entitled “Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns – The cost of improvement is becoming unsustainable“, came to the same conclusions as I did (and more) regarding AI but it presented much harder facts to back its claims. The claims presented by the authors were based on an analysis of 1,058 research papers (plus additional benchmark sources).

A key finding of the authors’ research was the following: with the increase in performance of a DL model, the computational cost increases exponentially by a factor of nine (i.e. to improve performance by a factor of k, the computational cost scales by k^9). With this, we basically received an equation to estimate just how much money we’ll need to keep spending to improve AI.

Here we are, then, 3 years on. How have my opinion pieces fared after such a lengthy time (an eternity, in fact, considering how fast technology moves these days)? Since July 2021 we’ve seen releases of ChatGPT, Dall-E 2 and 3, Gemini, Co-Pilot, Midjourney, Sora… my goodness, the list is endless. Immense developments.

So, is AI slowing down? Was I right or wrong way back in 2021?

I think I was both right and wrong.

My initial claim was backed-up by Jerome Pesenti who at the time was head of AI at Facebook (the current head there now is none other than Yann LeCun). In an article for Wired Jerome stated the following:

jerome-pesenti

When you scale deep learning, it tends to behave better and to be able to solve a broader task in a better way… But clearly the rate of progress is not sustainable… Right now, an experiment might [cost] seven figures, but it’s not going to go to nine or ten figures, it’s not possible, nobody can afford that…​

In many ways we already have [hit a wall]. Not every area has reached the limit of scaling, but in most places, we’re getting to a point where we really need to think in terms of optimization, in terms of cost benefit

Article for Wired.com, Dec 2019 [emphasis mine]

I agreed with him back then. What I didn’t take into consideration (and neither did he) was that Big Tech would get on board with the AI mania. They are capable of dumping nine or ten figures at the drop of a hat. And they are also capable of fuelling the AI hype to maintain the large influx of money from other sources constantly entering the market. Below are recent figures regarding investments in the field of Artificial Intelligence:

  • Anthropic, a direct rival of OpenAI, received at least $1.75 billion this year with a further $4.75 billion available in the near future,
  • Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion for its very own chatbot called Pi,
  • Abound raked in $600 million for its personal lending platform,
  • SandboxAQ got $500 million for its idea to combine quantum sensors with AI,
  • Mistral AI raised $113 million in June last year despite it being only 4 weeks old at the time and having no product at all to speak of. Crazy.
  • and the list goes on…

Staggering amounts of money. But the big one is Microsoft who pumped US$10 billion into OpenAI in January this year. That goes on top of what they’ve already invested in the company.

US$10 billion is 11 figures. “[N]obody can afford that,” according to Jerome Pesenti (and me). Big Tech can, it seems!

Let’s look at some fresh research now on this topic.

Every year the influential AI Index is released, which is a comprehensive report that tracks, collates, distils, and visualises data and trends related to AI. It’s produced by a team of researchers and experts from academia and industry. This year the AI Index (released this month) has been “the most comprehensive to date” with a staggering 502 pages. There are some incredibly insightful graphs and information in the report but two graphs in particular stood out for me.

The first one shows the estimated training costs vs publication dates of leading AI models. Note that the y-axis (training cost) is in logarithmic scale.

It’s clear that newer models are costing more and more. Way more (considering the log scale).

For actual training cost amounts, this graph provides a neat summary:

Note the GPT-4 (available to premium users of ChatGPT) and Gemini Ultra estimated training costs: US$78 million and US$191 million, respectively.

Gemini Ultra was developed by Google, GPT-4 was de-facto developed by Microsoft. Makes sense.

Where does this leave us? Considering the latest product releases, it seems like AI is not slowing down, yet. There still seems to be steam left in the industry. But with numbers like those presented above your average organisations just cannot compete any more. They’ve dropped out. It’s just the big boys left in the game.

Of course, the big boys have vast reserves of money so the race is on, for sure. We could keep going for a while like this. However, it’s surely fair to say once again that this kind of growth is unsustainable. Yes, more models will keep emerging that are going to get better and better. Yes, more and more money will be dropped into the kitty. But you can’t keep moving to the right of those graphs indefinitely. The equation still holds true that with the increase in performance of a DL model, the computational cost increases exponentially. Returns on investments will start to diminish (unless a significant breakthrough comes along that changes the way we do things – I discussed this topic in my previous two posts).

The craziness that big tech has brought to this whole saga is exciting and it has extended the life of AI quite significantly. However, the fact that only big players are left now who have wealth at their disposal larger than most countries in the world is a telling sign. AI is slowing down.

(I’ll see you in three years’ time again when I concede defeat and admit that I’ve been wrong. I truly hope I am because I want this to keep going. It’s been fun.)

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An image of a Genie

Video Games Generated by AI (Text-to-Video Game Translation)

Posted on by Zbigatron

The recent reveal of OpenAI’s Sora model which generates videos from text made headlines around the world. And understandably so, because it’s truly something amazing.

But I was not too surprised with the announcement. I wrote about the emergence of text-to-video generative AI on my blog 16 months ago! See here: AI Video Generation (Text-To-Video Translation). So, I knew that it was just a matter of time before one of the big players released something of such beautiful calibre.

What did surprise me, however, was something that seemingly went under the radar just 2 weeks ago: an announcement from Google’s DeepMind research team of an AI model that generates video games from single example images. The original academic paper, entitled “Genie: Generative Interactive Environments” was published 23 February 2024.

With Genie, Google is coining a new term: “generative interactive environments (Genie), whereby interactive, playable environments can be generated from a single image prompt”. 

What does this mean? Simple: you provide Genie with an example image (hand drawn, if you want) and you can then play a 2D platformer game set inside the environment that you created.

Here are some examples. The first image is a human-drawn sketch, the following image is a short video showing somebody playing a video game inside the world depicted in the first image:

Here’s another one that starts off with a hand-drawn picture:

Real world images (photos) work as well! Once again, the second image is a short snippet of somebody actually moving a character with a controller inside a generated video game.

See Google’s announcement for more great examples.

The title of my post states “Text-to-Video Game Translation”. If the only input permitted is a single image, how does “text-to-video game” fit here? The idea is that text-to-image models/generators like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion could be used to convert your initial text prompt into an image, and then that image could be fed into Genie.

Very cool.

Video Game Quality

Now, the generated video game quality isn’t perfect. It certainly leaves a lot to be desired. Also, you can only play the game at 1 frame per second (FPS). Typically games run at 30-60 FPS, so seeing the screen change only once per second is no fun. However, the game is being generated on-the-fly, as you play it. So, if you press one of 8 possible buttons on a gamepad, the next frame will be a freshly generated response to your chosen action.

Still, it’s not super exciting. But just like with my first post on text-to-video generative AI that introduced the whole idea of videos generated by AI, I’m doing the same thing now. This is what is currently being worked on. So, there might be more exciting stuff coming just around the corner – in 16 months perhaps? For example this: “We focus on videos of 2D platformer games and robotics but our method is general and should work for any type of domain, and is scalable to ever larger Internet datasets.” (quoted from here)

There’s more coming. You heard it here first!

Other Works

For full disclosure, I need to mention that this isn’t the first time people have dabbled in text-to-video game generation. Nvidia, for example, released GameGAN in 2020, which could produce clones of games like Pac-Man.

The difference with Google’s model is that it was entirely trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled internet videos. So, Genie learned just from videos what elements on the screen were being controlled by a player, what the corresponding controls were, and which elements were simply part of the scrolling background. Nvidia, on the other hand, used as training material video input paired with descriptions of actions taken. Creating a labelled dataset of actions paired with video results is a laborious process. Like I said, Google did their training raw: on 30,000 hours of just internet videos of hundreds of 2D platform games.

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Gemini logo

Google Lied to Us About Gemini – their ChatGPT Alternative

Posted on by Zbigatron

Last month (Dec 2023) Google presented their response to ChatGPT called Gemini to much fanfare. The race for superior generative AI models is certainly heating up. There’s a ridiculous amount of money to be made here.

But have a quick look at their demonstration video, if you haven’t done so already:

It would seem as though Gemini is reacting to the video sequences we are shown on the left side of the video, right? Surely!?

Nope! That video was faked. It turns out that Gemini was only shown still images accompanied by prompts. It’s all in the fine-print, folks. In the video description on the YouTube page, if you click on “…more” you’ll see the following text:

Explore our prompting approaches here: https://goo.gle/how-its-made-gemini

Description on the video’s YouTube page

And on that page is where everything comes to the fore. Let’s take a look at some examples. (All images below are taken from that “documentation” page).

Examples

If you jump to timestamp 2:45 of the video you’ll see somebody playing Rock, Scissors, Paper with the AI. It seems as though Gemini is responding to this and jumping in with its response of: “I know what you’re doing! You’re playing Rock, Paper, Scissors!”

Nope! That’s definitely not what actually happened. Gemini was shown still images of rock, paper, and scissors and then a prompt that included “Hint: it’s a game”:

I mean, come on! That is fundamentally different to what the video shows!? Gemini even gets a suggestion at what its response should be.

Let’s jump to timestamp 4:26. It seems as though Gemini is shown three sticky notes with hand-drawn planets on them and then a voice prompt follows from the user: “Is this the correct order?”

Once again, not what happened. A single still image was shown to Gemini with a prompt:

The AI program got a hint again, too: “Consider the distance from the sun…” C’mon guys! Not even close to what you’re presenting in the video.

I’ll stop there with the examples, but if you want more just compare the video to that page I linked above.

Discussion

What needs to be talked about now is how Google can get away with something like that and then this whole notion, so often repeated by me on my blog, that there is a reason AI is currently over-hyped.

So, firstly, how can Google get away with something like this? Like I said, it’s all in the fine-print, isn’t it? Apart from the “documentation” page found in the information section of the video, there is also the text displayed at the beginning of the presentation:

We’ve been testing the capabilities of Gemini, our new multimodal AI. We’ve been capturing footage to test it on a wide range of challenges, showing it a series of images, and asking it to reason about what it sees. This video highlights some of our favourite interactions with Gemini.

Timeframe 0:00 to 0:15 of the Presentation

If you look closely with a magnifying glass you’ll notice Google saying that it showed Gemini “a series of images”. Don’t worry about the fact that it mentions that Gemini is a multimodal AI (meaning it can process input in the form of audio, video, images, and text), and that Google have been “capturing footage”, and that they state that their “favourite interactions” are forthcoming.

Oh no, it’s the fine print we have to focus on. And this is how corporations get away with it: with corporate and misdirecting language. Google wants us to believe one thing by clearly implying video interactions with their product, but legally their backs are covered.

And secondly, time and time again I’ve stated on this blog that AI is over-hyped and one of the reasons for this is that companies that make money out of AI have a vested interest in maintaining and even flaming the hype fire. The Gemini presentation is a perfect example of this. (And then I have to deal with students in my classes who are starting to believe that AI actually understands what it is doing and that AI is going to take over the world. I’m not surprised fiction like this is beginning to pervade our society considering what we’re witnessing).

There’s plenty more of this nonsense to come, however, because there’s just more and more money to be made here.

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