Representing Reality

Leveraging Film The attempt to embody the real world is the central aim of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Fortunately, there are some tools already at our disposal from the medium that has made its business precisely that: the world of film. One hopes that, until the day we have sensory-empowered…

The Trouble With Linguistics

Language is beautiful. The study of language, linguistics, less so. Consider the following, from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Compositionality of stereotype: the stereotype associated with a complex expression E in a natural language is determined by (and only by) (i) E’s morphosyntactic structure and (ii) the stereotypes associated with…

Begging The Question

A brief personal rant “Begs the question” does not mean the same as “raises the question,” though it is increasingly being used that way. Merriam-Webster defines “begging the question” as “to pass over or ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled.” In other words, it means…

The NWITS model

Prediction of the Next Word In The Sentence (NWITS) is the very definition and measure of a language model. It leaves out meaning, and for this reason it has become the subject of some derision, bordering on scorn, in spite of the remarkable capabilities of ChatGPT. If we modify this…