The introduction to the book Metaverse Evolution Theory by Japanese VTuber and writer Virtual Girl Nem has now been published in English. The 5,000-word introduction is available at her official Medium page, and aimed at generating discussion about her book in the English-speaking community.

They see facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices as inevitable evolutions. They’re not. Imagine you’re taking an online business class — the kind where you watch video lectures and then answer questions at the end.

This video explores the journey of AI language models, from their modest beginnings through the development of OpenAI's GPT models. Our journey takes us through the key moments in generative neural network research involved in next word prediction. We delve into the early experiments with tiny language models in the 1980s, highlighting significant contributions by researchers like Jordan, who introduced Recurrent Neural Networks, and Elman, whose work on learning word boundaries revolutionized our understanding of language processing. It leaves us with a question: what is thought? Is simulated thought, thought? Featuring Noam Chomsky Douglas Hofstadter Michael I. Jordan Jeffrey Elman Geoffrey Hinton Ilya Sutskever Andrej Karpathy Yann LeCun and more. (Sam altman)

My script, references & visualizations here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s7FNPoKPW9y3EhvzNgexJaEG2pP4Fx_rmI4askoKZPA

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This is the last video in the series "The Pattern Machine" you can watch it all here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbg3ZX2pWlgKV8K6bFJr5dhM7oOClExUJ

00:00 - Introduction 00:32 - hofstader's thoughts on chatGPT 01:00 - recap of supervised learning 01:55 - first paper on sequential learning 02:55 - first use of state units (RNN) 04:33 - first observation of word boundary detection 05:30 - first observation of word clustering 07:16 - first "large" language model Hinton/Sutskever 10:10 - sentiment neuron (Ilya | OpenAI) 12:30 - transformer explaination 15:50 - GPT-1 17:00 - GPT-2 17:55 - GPT-3 18:20 - In-context learning 19:40 - ChatGPT 21:10 - tool use 23:25 - philosophical question: what is thought?

Scientists are planning to solve one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries.

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12 and learn how business leaders are getting ahead of the generative AI revolution. Learn More

No one can define it, much less fully replicate it. If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.

Big ideas reflecting our evolution and what makes us intrinsically human.

Big ideas reflecting our evolution and what makes us intrinsically human.

When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.

When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With typical graduate-student arrogance, I pronounced it “too many ideas chasing too little data.

The eye-catching victory of AlphaZero, the artificial-intelligence program that taught itself to play chess, over the No 1 computer engine Stockfish, has evoked comparisons with human legends.

Around 1425, the Florentine artist Masaccio painted the first major works in one-point perspective. That revolutionized what artists could do ever after. In Paris in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre demonstrated his new photographic invention.

Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates.

In a new paper, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, the team sets out how these insights can be used to forecast the future of ecosystem services such as climate change mitigation, food provisioning and clean water.

The same fascistic tendencies Walter Benjamin saw in the rise of mass media are at play in the NFT "revolution," too.

Island Southeast Asia contains one of the world's richest fossil records documenting human evolution. Some of these fossils date to at least 1.3 million years ago. 

It’s 7 AM, April 13th, 2025. Your smart clock rouses you from a dreamless sleep and you climb from bed as your house comes to life. The bathroom light turns itself on and the shower begins to heat its water. After washing off, you throw on a T-shirt which has been perfectly fit for your body.

Humans are shaping the evolutionary future of life on Earth.

The first Neanderthal face to emerge from time’s sarcophagus was a woman’s. As the social and liberal revolutions of 1848 began convulsing Europe, quarry workers’ rough hands pulled her from the great Rock of Gibraltar.

Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment. If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the product of reflection, time and experience.