These Strange New Minds

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How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

“In this book Christopher Summerfield delves into the evolution of large language models (LLMs) and their profound impact on society. Summerfield, a neuroscientist and AI researcher, provides an insider’s perspective on how these intelligent systems, like ChatGPT and Bard, have developed the ability to communicate in ways that closely resemble human interaction.

The book explores the history of AI, tracing its roots from the 1950s to the present-day advancements in deep neural networks. Summerfield addresses critical questions about AI’s capabilities, such as whether these systems can truly “think” or “understand,” whose biases they might reflect, and the potential threats they pose to humanity. Continue reading →

Suno AI

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“Suno AI is a generative artificial intelligence music creation program that allows users to generate realistic songs combining vocals and instrumentation based on text prompts. Suno has been widely available since December 20, 2023, after launching a web application and partnering with Microsoft to include Suno as a plugin in Microsoft Copilot.” (Wikipedia)

I had not heard of Suno until I received the following text from my friend David.

La Tiara, our favorite brand of taco shells, has been discontinued. I asked Claude for lyrics to a mariachi ballad in tribute, and fed them to Suno and got this.I asked for a mariachi style ballad. Was not expecting Spanish.

David and I worked together at Learfield Communications during the early days of the Internet. I was boring everyone to tears with my predictions about what a Big Deal it was going to be. Huge! Transformative! Bigger than radio! David shared my enthusiasm. To illustrate Suno’s magic…

I prompted for a song about a guy named Steve who’s trying to convince his company the internet is the next big thing, but they don’t believe him because all they know is radio.” It came up with the bizarrely accurate details on its own. [lyrics]

Organizing videos (categories and tags)

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I posted my first video to YouTube in February, 2006. Just a year after YouTube launched in 2005. (Yes, it was lame)

Since then I have embedded or linked to YouTube videos 713 times. That’s a lot, particularly if I wanted to see videos by category. For example, all videos on the topic of CONSCIOUSNESS. Or, all videos of my Land Rover. While I have a Land Rover category, many of those posts don’t include a video. The 6,400 posts here at smays.com are organized in 41 categories with 256 tags. 

While most of those 713 videos were created by someone else, I created 167 of them and 73 of them are YouTube selfies (me talking to the camera.)

Are you confused yet? It gets even more complicated. I created a category for videos not hosted on YouTube. These include .mp4, .mov, with a few Vimeo and TED Talk videos.

The goal here to make it easier to find videos by topic. Examples:

By combining categories and tags or tags and tags, I can make searches more specific.