Brain

LLMs (large language models) are changing the world. Widely used LLMs were built by training algorithms to predict the next word based on the preceding word sequence. (Technically, LLMs operate on “tokens,” not words. Words and tokens are related but distinct. A typical LLM would probably represent the word “isn’t” with two ordered tokens, the first representing “is” and the second representing “not” because whether someone says “isn’t” or “is not” is basically irrelevant.) ...

A lifetime ago, I discovered my life’s calling… Well, it would have, could have, should have been my life’s calling… Unfortunately, the US government literally blew up my plan! (And I mean “literally” literally, not as an intensifier for figuratively, as so many do these days.) How the US literally blew up my life’s dream, causing me to stop studying Mandarin for 25 years I studied government in college and was studying economics in grad school when I met my wife, a physics PhD student from China. I quickly realized studying China – with its rapidly expanding and globalizing economy – would be far more interesting and useful than being the hundred thousandth economist studying Western economies. ...