Institute Output
Human Language and Machine Language
The explosion of large language models means that we are all suddenly awash in machine-generated language, spoken, written and even sung. There are many advantages to the artificial intelligence produced like this, and many disadvantages too: it remains to be seen what the eventual outcome will be. But there is one particular idea that keeps bubbling up to the surface: that AI is going to decide to kill us all. This, I suggest, is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of language.
Qualia and the Formal Structure of Meaning
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla
This work explores the hypothesis that subjectively attributed meaning constitutes the phenomenal content of conscious experience. This form of subjective meaning manifests as an intrinsic and non-representational character of qualia.
Will AIs Take All Our Jobs and End Human History—or Not? Well, It’s Complicated…
Stephen Wolfram
Untangling this issue will be at the heart of questions about how we fit into the AI future. And in what follows we’ll see over and over again that what might at first essentially seem like practical matters of technology quickly get enmeshed with deep questions of science and philosophy.
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.