[FRIAM] fat tails

[steve smith]

Glen -

very insightful observation with interesting bookends, esp Corlin's 
internet detox journal

The implications are sort of ringing in the echo chamber of my mind with 
thoughts about power-law distributed process-structures.   I can't 
really render/distill this down to anything vaguely coherent, but  I am 
hoping there will be more discussion here.

My latest conceptual darling is "Markov Blankets" so true to form I'm 
force-fitting the ideas onto what you say here about the value/necessity 
of some enforced partitioning to maintain or elaborate compelexity?

- Steve

On 3/20/25 8:26 AM, glen wrote:
> https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/why-tech-bros-overestimate-ai-s-creative-abilities 
>
>
> So, if we accept the assumption that the stuff way out in the tails 
> (good writing, good cinematography, good science, etc.) is somehow a 
> function of the stuff in the middle of the distribution, what happens 
> when we replace the generators of the mediocre stuff with AI? What 
> happens to the generators of the stuff in the tails? What *is* the 
> functional relationship between the generators in the middle and the 
> generators in the tail(s)? (Note I'm talking about processes more than 
> artifacts.)
>
> I think the relationship is diversity. And a critical part of the 
> assignation to the categories (incl. mediocre and great) depends on 
> applying lenses (or baffles) to the diverse, percolating stew. And 
> that includes those lenses being held by the components inside the 
> stew. So not merely a diversity of generators, but a diversity of lens 
> sizes and types.
>
> What I don't yet see in LLMs is that diversity of diverse generators. 
> And, yes, it's more than "multimodal". It's born of scope limiting. If 
> we can limit the scopes (experiences, fine-tunings, biasings) of a 
> diverse population of otherwise expansively trained (universal) LLMs, 
> then we might be able to fit the tails as well as the middles.
>
> This implies that while, yes, LLMs demonstrate a universality ratchet 
> we haven't seen before, in order to fit the tails, we need autonomy, 
> agency, embodiment, etc. And that implies moving them *off* the 
> cloud/net, out of the data centers. Similar to these diary entries of 
> one of my favorite monks:
>
> https://world.hey.com/corlin/burnout-an-internet-fast-5517ccaa
>
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