Beren's Blog

An interesting way I like to think about the singularity is as the cognitive decoupling. Specifically, the singularity is the final industrial revolution that lets capital be converted directly into intellectual labour 1. The first industrial revolution occurred when capital became convertible into manual energy – i.e. humanity learned to... [Read More]

Now that deep learning has been fully victorious and the reasons for its victory have started to be understood, it is interesting to revisit some old debates and return to the question of why GOFAI failed with a new perspective. [Read More]

Originally written in early 2021 while writing up my thesis. Never got around to publishing it on my blog then. I think it might be interesting to people wanting to see what a PhD looks like from the ‘inside’. Note that everyone’s PhD experience is highly personal to them and... [Read More]

Epistemic status: I owe a lot of my thoughts to Jacob Cannell’s work on both brains and deep learning. My thinking here comes from my experience in large-scale ML as well as neuroscience background and specifically experience in analog hardware for deep learning [Read More]

This is a short post meant to highlight something I do not yet understand and therefore a potential issue with my models. Why do vision (and audio) models work so well despite being so small? State of the art models like stable diffusion and midjourney work exceptionally well, generating near-photorealistic... [Read More]