Institute Output
Identifying and Manipulating Personality Traits in LLMs Through Activation Engineering
Rumi A. Allbert, James K. Wiles
An exploration into the latent space of Large Language Models to find and steer the personality of Generative Artificial Intelligence
What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models
Stephen Wolfram
It’s surprising how little is known about the foundations of machine learning. Yes, from an engineering point of view, an immense amount has been figured out about how to build neural nets that do all kinds of impressive and sometimes almost magical things. But at a fundamental level we still don’t really know why neural nets “work”—and we don’t have any kind of “scientific big picture” of what’s going on inside them.
Can AI Solve Science?
Stephen Wolfram
Particularly given its recent surprise successes, there’s a somewhat widespread belief that eventually AI will be able to “do everything”, or at least everything we currently do. So what about science? Over the centuries we humans have made incremental progress, gradually building up what’s now essentially the single largest intellectual edifice of our civilization. But despite all our efforts, there are still all sorts of scientific questions that remain. So can AI now come in and just solve all of them?
Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds
Stephen Wolfram
How do alien minds perceive the world? It’s an old and oft-debated question in philosophy. And it now turns out to also be a question that rises to prominence in connection with the concept of the ruliad that’s emerged from our Wolfram Physics Project.
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
Stephen Wolfram
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text.
Alien Intelligence and the Concept of Technology
Stephen Wolfram
“We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”.
But as I thought about it, I realized that beyond the “absurdly extreme moonshot” character of this pitch, there’s some science that I’ve done that makes it clear that it’s also fundamentally philosophically confused. The nature of the confusion is interesting, however, and untangling it will give us an opportunity to illuminate some deep features of both intelligence and technology—and in the end suggest a way to think about the long-term trajectory of the very concept of technology and its relation to our universe.