AlphaProof, AlphaGeometry, ChatGPT, and why the future of AI is neurosymbolic

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2024-07-28 Gary Marcus

My strong intuition, having studied neural networks for over 30 years (they were part of my dissertation) and LLMs since 2019, is that LLMs are simply never going to work reliably, at least not in the general form that so many people last year seemed to be hoping. Perhaps the deepest problem is that LLMs literally can’t sanity-check their own work.

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Since LLMs inevitably hallucinate and are constitutionally incapable of checking their own work, there are really only two possibilities: we abandon them, or we use them as components in larger systems that can reason and plan better, much as grownups and older children use times tables as part of a solution for multiplication, but not the whole solution.

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The idea is to try to take the best of two worlds, combining (akin to Kahneman’s System I and System II), neural networks, which are good at kind of quick intuition from familiar examples (a la Kahneman’s System I) with explicit symbolic systems that use formal logic and other reasoning tools (a la Kahneman’s System II).

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/alphaproof-alphageometry-chatgpt

Rooftop Revelations: Booker T. Washington predicted Black Lives Matter

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2022-02-02 Eli Steele

Pastor Corey Brooks wished to share his thoughts on Black Lives Matter and Booker T. Washington . . .

What makes me especially mad is that we have had blacks like these who milked black pain for money ever since we came out of slavery. We called them trickster figures. When Booker T. Washington wrote these words over 100 years ago, he was describing BLM:

“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Let me repeat: “Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances.”

Let that sink in, folks. You know who they are talking about? The folks right here. Right here in these streets. They want these folks to stay beaten down and downtrodden. They want to hold up the very people whose lives I’ve been trying to improve everyday for the last 20 years, and they want to hold these people up to Americans and say, see how bad you treat us, give us money.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rooftop-revelations-booker-t-washington-predicted-black-lives-matter

These bubbles kill cancer

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2023-10-06 Jim Lynch

The process [of histotripsy] uses a transducer—which converts electricity into sound—to deliver ultrasound waves to a malignant mass at a precise location. When the waves hit gasses inside cancerous cells, they generate clouds of tiny bubbles through a process known as cavitation.

Pulsing sound waves causes the millimeter-sized bubble clouds to repeatedly grow and collapse. On an ultrasound monitor, it can look like bubbles from boiling water—quickly rising and falling along the surface in your pot.

In the past, researchers saw the creation of bubbles through ultrasound as “uncontrollable,” something to be avoided. Histotripsy, however, generates mechanical energy to activate those bubble clouds and break up the tumor cells’ structure, turning it into a liquid called acellular lysate.

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histotripsy foils cancer’s cloaking efforts by destroying its cell walls, leaving the tumor antigens in plain sight for the body’s immune system.

https://news.engin.umich.edu/2023/10/these-bubbles-kill-cancer/

What Are Dreams For?

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2023-08-31 Amanda Gefter

In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses REM sleep to “learn” the body. You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with maps of our bodies

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In 2013, Blumberg published a paper in Current Biology titled “Twitching in Sensorimotor Development from Sleeping Rats to Robots.” In it, he asked, “Can twitching, as a special form of self-generated movement, contribute to a robot’s knowledge about its body and how it works?”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/what-are-dreams-for