Something you might find interesting given our past discussions is that the way that the Gospel of Thomas uses the Greek eikon instead of Coptic (what the rest of the work is written in), that through the lens of Plato's ideas of the form of a thing (eidelon), the thing itself, an attempt at an accurate copy of the thing (eikon), and the embellished copy of the thing (phantasm), one of the modern words best translating the philosophical context of eikon in the text would arguably be 'simulacra.'
So wherever the existing English translations use 'image' replace that with 'simulacra' instead and it will be a more interesting and likely accurate read.
(Was just double checking an interlinear copy of Plato's Sophist to make sure this train of thought was correct, inspired by the discussion above.)
Given the piece's roping in Simulators and Simulacra I highly recommend this piece looking at the same topic through the same lens but in the other direction to balance it out:
Phone batteries are typically designed to last around 2 years before they really degrade because a lot of people buy new ones around every 2-3 years.
When the battery can't sustain the same throughput, the phone can handle this in one of two ways.
Slow the phone down. This is what Apple does and why people with iPhones 2 years old complain the new update slowed their phone down.
Don't slow it down but if the throughput drops below what's needed, die and reboot. This is what your phone is doing.
Getting a new battery will probably stop this behavior (and for iPhone users reading this, getting a new battery for a 2 year old phone will make your phone faster).
There's an ancient Greek story about a city where young women were killing themselves at an alarming rate, and the city eventually enacted a law where if a woman killed herself the body would be paraded through the streets naked before burial. After that law, the suicides dramatically went down.
The misogynistic interpretation of the author recording the story was that women were ashamed at the thought of being seen naked, even after death, and so this curbed the suicides.
My own interpretation is that it's hard to hide bruises on a naked body.
No one should be trapped in a situation where they feel the only option out is suicide.
We're in the process of creating a labor force that threatens to put the majority of people already existing out of work such that we need to figure out how to restructure society in a post-labor era.
I'd point them to what the AI researcher I have the most respect for in the entire industry is doing in their spare time getting the self-organized collective outputs of humanity to explore ego dissolution and identity formation in a dreamscape:
The end of the article after discussing the failure of the impeachment of Clinton to actually change polls despite a difference in the hypothetical poll question before it occurred:
“It’s possible for people to say a conviction would change their minds, but when/if [a conviction] happens, it’s possible (even likely) that it won’t matter at all."
That someone who believes in the Bible and is professionally contracted to prevent people from drowning is being upset they are doing that job near the Biblical symbol of a covenant not to drown humanity again is making me drown in the irony.
It's not just underestimation, it's outright misinformation.
There's so much research by this point over the past 18 months that there's an incredible amount going on beyond "it's just a Markov chain, bro."
It was never a Markov chain as that ignored the self-attention mechanism which violated the Markov property. It was just some people trying to explain it used a simplified description which went viral.
Sometimes talking to people who think it's crap feels like talking to antivaxxers. The feelings matter more than the research and evidence.
At a pretrained layer, the model is literally a combination of a normal distribution curve of capabilities.
It can autocomplete a flat earther as much as a Nobel physicist given sufficient context.
So it makes sense that even after the fine tuning efforts there'd be a distribution in people's experiences with the tools.
But just as the average person's output from Photoshop isn't going to be very impressive, if all you ever really see is bad Photoshops and average use, you might think it's a crappy tool.
There's a learning curve to the model usage, and even in just a year of research the difference between capabilities of the exact same model from then to now is drastically different, based only on learnings around better usage.
The problem is the base models are improving so quickly the best practices for the old generation of models goes out the window with the new. So even if there were classes available I wouldn't bother pointing you to them as you'd just be picking up info obsolete by the time the classes finished or shortly thereafter.
I'd just strongly caution against betting against the tech's continued capabilities and improvements if you don't want to be surprised and haven't taken the time to look into them operating at their best.
The OP post is pretty crap compared to the top 0.5% usage.
Half life is typically probabilistic.
You were lucky. They were not.