the INFERENCE

Jerry Kindall draws conclusions about AI

  • Quantity has a quality all its own

    The aphorism “quantity has a quality all its own” is usually attributed to Josef Stalin, though the earliest traceable source appears to be an American defense newsletter from 1979.

    Whoever said it, they were talking about armies. More soldiers don’t just let you fight the same battles better. Past a certain size, your army can fight a different kind of battle entirely, with new strategies and tactics. The observation applies at other scales, too: firing a machine gun is a very different experience from firing a musket—especially if you’re on the receiving end.

    The aphorism might as well be the thesis statement for one of the most surprising discoveries in modern AI research. I touched on it in my last post when I compared Mark V. Shaney’s capabilities to modern LLMs. The discovery is this: bigger language models don’t just do the same things, only better. When they grow large enough, they start to be able to do entirely new things.

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  • The ghost of Mark V. Shaney

    In 1984, an unusual user started posting in net.singles, a Usenet newsgroup where lonely people discussed dating, and he fit right in… sort of. He would respond to threads with sentences like “I have a great time to try to herd cats, and I’m not sure I agree with you.” Plausible. Slightly off, but weirdly confident.

    The poster was named Mark V. Shaney, and he wasn’t human. “He” was a computer program, or bot, that was in essence the forerunner of today’s large language models (LLMs).

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  • Welcome to The Inference

    I wanted to write for a living as soon as I learned that books don’t spring fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus but in fact are written by regular people. Hey, I’m a regular people!

    Not too long after that realization, I discovered the Apple II—and developed a second obsession, this one over a technology that was changing the world.

    I once intended to pursue a career in programming. But I stumbled into a job that let me scratch both my writing and programming itches. I’ve been a technical writer ever since.

    The arrival of large language models (LLMs) felt like a technological New Testament, a new era with new rules, but no less transformative than the personal computer revolution. The two things I loved and understood best, software and language, had formed a new, more intimate relationship. I’d used words to write about code; now code could itself read and write.

    Cool! … Cool?

    I’ve spent years documenting AI and ML features at Snowflake and Azure Cognitive Services, sitting close enough to see how the sausage is made, but far enough back to still find it tasty. Over those years, I’ve learned enough about LLMs to have developed opinions about them.

    Lately, I’ve been having thoughts about AI that don’t belong in documentation. The Inference is a place for those thoughts to go. I’ll try to be technically correct (the best kind of correct), intellectually curious, and mercifully brief. But no promises on that last one.

    Let me answer the obvious question up front: yes, I’m working with a large language model to create this blog. I’ll write more about that experience as it evolves.

    So pull up a comfy chair, sit down, settle in. Invite a Glen of Imaal Terrier onto your lap. Welcome to The Inference.