The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Shivanshu Purohit about the world of open-source AI models and a significant open-source LLM coming soon from Stability AI and EleutherAI. They discuss the reasons for creating open-source models, the release of Facebook's LLaMA model, the black box nature of current models, the scientific mystery of how they really work, an opportunity for liberal arts majors, OpenAI's new plugin architecture, the analogy of the PC business around 1981, creating GPT-Neo & GPT-NeoX, the balance between data & architecture, the number of parameters in GPT-4, order of training's non-effect on memorization, phase changes due to scaling, Stability AI and EleutherAI's new collaboration & its specs, tradeoffs in price & size, the question of guardrails, reinforcement learning from human feedback, the missing economic model of generative AI, necessary hardware for the new suite, OpenAI's decreasing openness, Jim's commitment to help fund an open-source reinforcement learning dataset, the status of GPT-5 & other coming developments, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS Currents 038: Connor Leahy on Artificial Intelligence JRS Currents 033: Connor Leahy on Deep Learning ChatGPT Plugins Documentation Shivanshu Purohit is head of engineering at Eleuther AI and a research engineer at Stability AI, the creators of Stable Diffusion.

Jim talks with recurring guest Forrest Landry about his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss AI versus advanced planning systems (APS), the release of GPT-4, emergent intelligence from modest components, whether deep learning alone will produce AGI, Rice's theorem & the impossibility of predicting alignment, the likelihood that humans try to generalize AI, why the upside of AGI is an illusion, agency vs intelligence, instrumental convergence, implicit agency, deterministic chaos, theories of physics as theories of measurement, the relationship between human desire and AI tools, an analogy with human-animal relations, recognizing & avoiding multipolar traps, an environment increasingly hostile to humans, technology & toxicity, short-term vs long-term risks, why there's so much disagreement about AI risk, the substrate needs hypothesis, an inexorable long-term convergence process, why the only solution is avoiding the cycle, a boiling frog scenario, the displacement of humans, the necessity of understanding evolution, economic decoupling, non-transactional choices, the Forward Great Filter answer to the Fermi paradox, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 153 - Forrest Landry on Small Group Method Forrest Landry on Twitter JRS Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI JRS EP25 - Gary Marcus on Rebooting AI JRS Currents 036: Melanie Mitchell on Why AI is Hard EP137 Ken Stanley on Neuroevolution "Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)," by Scott Alexander Forrest Landry is a philosopher, writer, researcher, scientist, engineer, craftsman, and teacher focused on metaphysics, the manner in which software applications, tools, and techniques influence the design and management of very large scale complex systems, and the thriving of all forms of life on this planet. Forrest is also the founder and CEO of Magic Flight, a third-generation master woodworker who found that he had a unique set of skills in large-scale software systems design. Which led him to work in the production of several federal classified and unclassified systems, including various FBI investigative projects, TSC, IDW, DARPA, the Library of Congress Congressional Records System, and many others.

Jim talks with Monica Anderson about her paper "Bubble City Design Proposal: A Twitter Alternative Which Is Not a Social Medium." They discuss the origins of the Bubble City idea, its architecture, quenching the flood of social media information, only seeing the messages you want, research bots, the difference between a bubble and a Slack channel, fine-tuning bubbles, law enforcement, filtering, the place of curators, federating feeds into the system, how the system supports itself financially, how identity is handled, viscosity, the Pacer speed control, the clickbait problem, trusted streams, Google Wave, how LLMs are changing programming, version changes to Bubble City, Understanding Machine One, a call for fundraising, and much more. Episode Transcript "Bubble City Design Proposal: A Twitter Alternative Which Is Not a Social Medium," by Monica Anderson Experimental Epistemology Monica Anderson is an independent AI researcher and ex-Googler operating from Silicon Valley. Her company Syntience, Inc. has researched computer-based Natural Language Understanding since Jan 1, 2001.

Jim has a wide-ranging conversation with Jonny Miller about self-development and emotional resilience. They discuss being a natural human, self-help as deconditioning, self-unfoldment, ecologies of practices, giving power back to the individual, Jamie Wheal's hedonic engineering, pushing outside the window of tolerance, emotional anti-fragility, facilitated breath repatterning, affirming anger, principles of decision-making, decision paralysis, self-destructive patterns in relationships, common barriers to communication, surrendering to grief, conditions of play, preserving unscheduled time, critiquing "mental health," the importance & decline of friendship, sparring in schools, the resistance to unproductive activity, video games & disembodiment, the Nervous System Mastery course, and much more. Episode Transcript Nervous System Mastery Course JRS EP123 - Jamie Wheal on Recapturing the Rapture Curious Humans Podcast with Jonny Miller - Jamie Wheal on The Meaning Crisis, Hedonic Engineering & Forging a Culture of Post-Traumatic Growth Curious Humans Podcast with Jonny Miller - New Frontiers of Breathwork: Translating the Language of the Breath & Cultivating Nervous System Resilience with Ed Dangerfield Art of Accomplishment Podcast with Joe Hudson JRS EP148 - Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing Curious Humans Podcast with Jonny Miller - How to Human: Exploring Soul Initiation, Mythopoetic Identity & The Spiritual Adventure with Depth Psychologist & Wilderness Guide Dr. Bill Plotkin Jonny Miller is a Nervous System Specialist and host of the Curious Humans podcast. He’s spent cumulatively thousands of hours researching, training & mentoring high-performers and professionals — from the CEO of a rocket ship company to startup founders recovering from burnout as well as busy parents, early-stage solopreneurs & school-teachers.

Jim talks with Mirta Galesic about the ideas in her co-authored paper "Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior." They discuss the meaning of collective behavior, a crisis in network structures, the analogy of the printing press, consequences of person-to-person communication, the capacity for collective forgetting, unpredictable developments in chatbots, bottom-up vs top-down influence, advertising-driven information ecosystems, emergent knobs in social media design, ChatGPT's political bias, the widespread trust in algorithms, suggestions for reforming Twitter, information decay, viscosity, opportunities & dangers of mass surveillance data, the Twitter Files, free speech & cultural evolution, and much more. Episode Transcript "Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior," by Mirta Galesic et al. "Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation," by Mirta Galesic et al. "Collective moderation of hate, toxicity, and extremity in online discussions," by Mirta Galesic et al. The Jim Rutt Show Chatbot "Musk and Moderation," by Jim Rutt Mirta Galesic is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, as well as the Vermont Complex Systems Center, UVM. She is also an Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy and a non-resident system thinking expert at the United States Institute of Peace. She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce seemingly complex social phenomena. Her projects focus on developing empirically grounded computational models of social judgments, social learning, collective problem solving, and opinion dynamics. She is also interested in how people understand and cope with the uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions.

Jim talks with Lynne Kiesling about the electrical grid and what could and should change in its architecture in the years to come. They discuss electricity as a product, the move away from centralized control rooms, energy storage as the holy grail, base load vs peak load, distributed & intermittent energy resources, moving power to & from the grid, temporal patterns of supply & usage, varying demand to meet supply, programming thermostats, digitization of the electric grid, how rooftop solar systems coordinate with the grid, distributed energy resource management systems, advancements in storage, cyberattacks & solar flares, the Transactive Energy Service System (TESS), machine learning in energy bidding, the challenge of testing complex systems, the Olympic Peninsula Testbed Project, responding to events like the Great Texas Freeze of 2021, institutional design in a new technological landscape, wholesale power generation, power law distributions, and much more. Episode Transcript Transactive Energy Service System (TESS) JRS EP90 - Joshua Epstein on Agent-Based Modeling Lynne Kiesling is an economist focusing on regulation, market design, and the economics of digitization and smart grid technologies in the electricity industry. She is a Research Professor in the School of Engineering, Design and Computing at the University of Colorado-Denver, and Co-Director of the Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics. Lynne also provides advisory and analytical services as the President of Knowledge Problem LLC, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Masters of Science in Energy and Sustainability program at Northwestern University. In addition to her academic research, she is currently a member of the U.S. Department of Energy's Electricity Advisory Committee, has served as a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Smart Grid Advisory Committee, and is an emerita member of the GridWise Architecture Council. Her academic background includes a B.S. in Economics from Miami University (Ohio) and a Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University.

Jim talks with Joscha Bach about current and future developments in the generative AI space. They discuss the skepticism of the press, small productive applications, questions about intellectual property rights, confabulation in human thinking, nanny rails, 3 approaches to AI alignment, Aquinas's 7 virtues, issues of consciousness-like agency, love as an answer to the alignment problem, the difficulty with fairness, serving shared sacredness, dealing with entropy, integrated information theory & its incompatibility with the Church-Turing thesis, neural Darwinism, a point where extrapolation & interpolation become the same, building an AI artist, free will, the capacity of human memory, consciousness as a conductor, the scaling hypothesis in AGI, making the system learn from its own thoughts, computation as a rewrite system, neurons as animals, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP72 - Joscha Bach on Minds, Machines & Magic JRS EP87 - Joscha Bach on Theories of Consciousness JRS EP 178 - Anil Seth on A New Science of Consciousness JRS EP108 - Bernard Baars on Consciousness JRS EP105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness JRS Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI JRS EP137 - Ken Stanley on Neuroevolution Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist working for MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

Jim talks with Gregg Henriques in the third and final part of a series on his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss the concept of justification, replacing "justice" with "justification," behavioral investment theory, John Vervaeke's recursive relevance realization, 6 principles of animal mindedness, making a living, animals as functional behavioral investors, evolution of mental behavior in 4 stages, the P − M => E learning control theory, emotion vs valence, framing an architecture of human mind, layers of working memory, 3 types of mind, what it is like to be, the 2-step model of consciousness, the Aristotelian soul, integrated information theory, global worskpace theory, the unknown mechanisms of neurocognitive causation, Unified Theory of Knowledge, the influence matrix, Vervaeke's 4P/3R meta-theory, integrating independent meta-theories, Timothy Leary's interpersonal circumplex, the origin of gender roles, the 5-part map of mind, what a person is, JII (justification, influence, influence) dynamics & the unconscious, 4 functional contexts of justification, bullshit as a problem of social epistemology, evolution of the culture-person plane, whether post-modernism is really an epoch, the entire structure in recap, and much more. Listeners may be interested to know that Gregg is organizing a conference. Consistent with his book, it is called Consilience: Unifying Knowledge and Orienting Toward a Wisdom Commons. It will be held online March 17 and 18th. It is a Zoom event, and free to the public. Jim will be talking about Game B, and will be joined by Jordan Hall. John Vervaeke will give the keynote. And there will be over 40 presentations by many folks who have been featured on the Jim Rutt Show. Links below: Register for the conference. UTOK Conference 2023 – Clip Conference Flyer Episode Links: Episode Transcript JRS EP105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness JRS EP108 - Bernard Baars on Consciousness Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis The Elusive I - Part 1 - The Cognitive Science Show (YouTube) Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, by Frans de Waal Dr. Gregg Henriques is Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University in the Combined Doctoral Program in Clinical and School Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Vermont and did his post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a theoretical psychologist and has developed the “Unified Theory of Knowledge,” which is a consilient scientific humanistic worldview to unify psychology. He is the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology (Springer, 2011), and A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap (Palgrave McMillian, November 2022). His scholarly work has been published in the field’s best journals, and he has developed a popular blog on Psychology Today, Theory of Knowledge, which has received over eight million views. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the 2022 President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, and founded the Theory of Knowledge academic society.

Jim talks with Dan Shipper about practical uses of GPT-3 and ChatGPT at the personal scale. They discuss how Dan started playing with these tools, the feeling of new generative AIs, GPT-3 vs ChatGPT, writing a screenplay using ChatGPT, using GPT-3 to analyze journal entries, circumventing the context window limitation, GPT-3 as a journaling tool, how ChatGPT does embedding, the coming market for chatbot personas, the value of guardrails, the monetary cost of using GPT-3, solving the organizational problems of note-taking, Stephen Reid's knowledge-graph of this podcast, the invention of the graphic web browser & the frozen accidents of HTTP & HTML, meta-prompts & data pipelines, how Yohei Nakajima eliminates repetitive tasks using LLMs, and much more. Episode Transcript Chain of Thought (Every) "Can GPT-3 Explain My Past and Tell My Future?", by Dan Shipper GPT Index LangChain "Chat GPT 'DAN' (and other 'Jailbreaks')" Character.AI JRS Knowledgegraph, by Stephen Reid Dan Shipper is the CEO and co-founder of Every, a daily newsletter on business, AI, and personal development read by almost 75,000 founders, operators, and investors. Previously he was the CEO and co-founder of Firefly, an enterprise software company that he sold to Pegasystems. He writes a weekly at column at Every called Chain of Thought where he covers AI, tools for thought, and the psychology of work.

Jim talks with Anil Seth about his book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. They discuss the curious non-experience of general anesthesia, defining consciousness, the difference between consciousness & intelligence, experiential vs functional aspects, the hard problem vs the real problem, measuring consciousness, consciousness vs wakefulness, Lempel-Ziv complexity, zap & zip, consciousness as multidimensional, psychedelic states of consciousness, integrated information theory & phi, Scott Aaronson's expander grids, quantum IIT, accounting for conscious contents, the Bayesian brain, paying attention, Adelson's checkerboard, the perception census, prediction error minimization, active inference, the two bridges experiment, aspects of self, the rubber hand illusion, somatoparaphrenia, separating self from personal identity, whether advanced mammals have personal identity, being a beast machine, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP97 - Emery Brown on Consciousness & Anesthesia JRS EP148 - Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing The Perception Census Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind and Consciousness, a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator, and Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press). With more than two decades of research and outreach experience, Anil’s mission is to advance the science of consciousness and to use its insights for the benefit of society, technology and medicine. An internationally leading researcher, Anil is also a renowned public speaker, best-selling author, and sought-after collaborator on high-profile art-science projects.