The Zap Test for Transformers
I built a version of the zap test for language models, and it behaves the way the clinical one does.
More issues
Is Everything a Remake?
At a Works in Progress event in San Francisco on October 2, Aria Schrecker gave a talk with the title: "You get what you pay for: why everything is a remake." Through a variety of empirical evidence she framed a puzzle that anyone who has scrolled a streaming
The Wall as Unpaid Synchronization Tax
The wall marks the boundary where the synchronization tax goes unpaid: where gradient descent has never supplied the energy needed to rotate each position's hidden state into alignment with the unembedding
Daylight Cannot be Saved
The real curiosity is that we keep fighting over which flavor of wrong the clock should be, instead of asking whether the clock needs to be wrong at all.
Asymmetric Evolution
Selection and mutation are not merely biological observations, but the gradient and the noise of a dissipative flow on a space of measures — the same mathematics that governs the forward pass of a transformer.
What Art is Doing
What art is doing, at this moment, is providing the only space large enough and flexible enough to contain the emotional contradictions of the present.
Coherence at 300 Kelvin
We never achieve perfect mutual understanding. But our imperfect, noisy, expensive attempts at coordination do not scatter randomly; they organize into long-lived configurations that every culture independently discovers.
Maintaining Divergence
The synchronization tax is the price of building the bridge. Maintenance is the price of keeping the bridge standing. Transmission is the price of crossing it.
A Tribute to Peter Putnam
Every intelligence leaves a trace. What we experience from the inside — the felt texture of perception, the recursive awareness of our own awareness, the striving that drives our mattering projects — expresses itself outward through action, and those actions broadcast signals. Upon death, the inside experience ceases. No future observer can
A More Perfect Union
We can build systems that, at least from the outside, look like flourishing: systems that operate within appropriate constraints, fulfill purposes their design enables, and participate in relationships characterized by reciprocal adjustment — "a more perfect union."