Strong recommend for the book _The Alignment Problem_ which while only somewhat touching on systems which is an excellent lay overview of the state of ML which

Strong recommend for the book _The Alignment Problem_ which while only somewhat touching on systems which is an excellent lay overview of the state of ML which does a good effort to explain the principles involved, the challenges and blockers, and the ways in which progress has been made. The field is moving so quickly it will stop short of the current status quo, but, it's still remarkable. I have been myself playing with MidJourney, which like DALL-E 2 is a text prompt to image generation system; it has different goals and favors aestheticized output over photorealism. The premises of that project and its current execution (as an explicit exercise in collective- rather that siloed-and-contractual relations) are genuinely remarkable and I believe represent a watershed. The rate of evolution of what it is doing are something to behold. I have generated around 7500 images with MidJourney so far and am slowly developing what feels like an intuition for the way it "sees" images, which as the devs say in regular office hours, is unlike how humans see them. The limitations, and superpowers, of the system as it exists are already deeply provocative. When things scale again to the next level, the degree of uncanniness and challenge to our preconceptions about the nature and locus of intelligence in ourselves may be genuinely shaking. Or so I currently think. I highly recommend taking time to really feel out these systems, because the ways they do and do not succeed and fail serves as a very potent first-hand education in the opportunities, and perhaps much more important, perils, of their application in other more quotidian areas. It's one thing for them to reliable produce "nightmare fuel" because of their inability to retain very high level coherence down through low level details, when they are drawing limbs, hands, faces... ...it's another thing entirely when analogous failure modes quietly permeate their ability to recognize illness, or, approve a loan, or recommend an interest rate. Or—as the example which opens _The Alignment Problem_ spells out—recommend whether someone should or should not offered bail. (A real world example with life-changing consequences for people who interact with ML in this path, in something over 30 states today... at least, as of publication).