[FRIAM] Musk’s America Party – Some Thoughts from Afar

[glen]

I try not to mix work with FriAM. But 95% of my interaction with LLMs is for work. I admit I have started using some for household chores. E.g. Perplexity gave me a recipe for a relatively non-toxic herbicide for our way-too-large gravel driveway. (Vinegar, salt, plain dish soap) I coulda got that from DuckDuckGo. But it was easier to ask a few follow-up questions of Perplexity than it would have been to find the right DDG result that also contained my follow-ups. (E.g. how much salt would poison that soil for how long, and what's the undeground plume from that salt.)

And over and above the limited interaction I have with the online ones, most of my work uses the "open" sourced ones I can run locally. That helps ensure privacy. The gods only know what OpenAI might be doing with the info you divulge in your chats ... feels like Cambridge Analytica on steroids to me.

Anyway, once this current project ends, I'll post a link to the publication (assuming there is one).

On 7/10/25 11:53 AM, steve smith wrote:
> 
> On 7/10/25 12:12 PM, glen wrote:
>> Ha! I doubt you can stick to that story! 8^D I know you could re-generate *a* stream like that again. But how close would that stream be to this one? How reliably could you re-generate that stream given the same or similar prompt? Say what we will about the LLMs, but they are way more reliable than we are, even at high temp.
> 
> yes, I am an unreliable (chaotic) hose snaking around under pressure-spew.   I am glad you recognized the implicit tongue-in-cheek in the "sticking to it" (or regenerating it) business.   Every *good* /Just So/ story is bespoke to the moment, and in my case generated JIT (just in time)...  as such stories *were* intended to be used back in the day when we recycled our old stories to fit new (nuancedly so often) contexts.  Just ask Br'er Rabbit?
> 
> While LLMs are somewhat "reliable" (repeatable) I am naturally very inspired by *their* ability to "spew" in all directions at once (sensitive dependence on initial conditions).   The (multi)bifurcation paths they are capable of following are legion and spectacular (at least to this meat-space confined creature that is me)...
> 
> I shifted a longstanding discussion from George to Claude recently and was amazed at how much more in-tune Claude was.  It was about my mental model/hypothesis of LLM training sets as a Plenum and the resulting attentional spaces (implied and exposed) between us as we discourse being a family of manifolds, maybe a "sheave?" or "fiber-bundle" for the mathHoles among us?    The *manifold* it co-explored/created with me was wonderfully complementary to the one(s) George has...   I haven't tried to resolve them against one another directly, but there is a marked stylistic difference between how the two are willing/able/motivated to discuss this with me.
> 
>> Along similar lines, the "AI WEAPONS" essayist made a comment that he was confident that book "The Human-Machine Team" was *not* written by AI because the writing was so bad. The LLMs' interpolation functions make it difficult to get pathological styles back out. 
> Yah, could an AI have generated the 90 days/90 deals trade-deal-letters DJT has spewed across our (former) allies and frienemies this season?   Could it generate his (or Elno's) spew of dia-tripe (gratuitous neologism of the moment) on Truth-Special or eXno?   I think it could generate a *parody* or caricature thereof, but I think even the signature of that spew would be recognizeable as a forgery?
>> They can "read" a tranche of bad l33t coded screeds on 4chan and will still re-generate something akin to a (l33t coded) philosophy professor because the centroid pulls the interpolation toward a more stable region of the space. A recent experiment of mine was to use an LLM to analyze the linguistic style of a person's spoken language, then use a different LLM to render some information into a new document using that style. When the person *read* it, they objected that it didn't match their "voice" at all ... a bit like how uncomfortable many of us can be when we listen to our own recorded voice. Even given that written "voice" is almost always very different from spoken "voice", whether the LLMs got it more right than wrong is up in the air because the person may have a self-image distant from their self. What's that Butthole Surfers line? "You never know just how [to|you] look, Through other people's eyes."
> 
> <halfhearted Snark> I'm glad to get more hints of how YOU are burning our grandchildren's carbon/entropy budget through data centers...  probably better than the old-man chatter the rest of us are engaged in with Dan and George and Yawe and... </Snark>
> 
> I would be fascinated to hear more about some of your experiments in these realms,  your allusions to "waiting for several LLMs to report back" (probably butchered the quote) intrigued me.   I haven't found much good (accessible to me) work on interpretability of LLM training and engagement, but suspect there are thousands of ad-hoc projects/experiments afoot at any moment? Is that what the AI gurus are mining now?  Our parallelized experiments?  Crowdsourcing...
> 


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