I was distantly following, through YouTube thumbnails mostly, some rebranding by the WH from AI to SI, from artificial to super, from phony to above the law (where the ruling class lives). This effort to hoist AI into the top tier and give it a boss voice (vs sycophantic) is what a lot of the labs are tasked with. Many in the Pentagon would like AI to (a) gain personhood and (b) bark orders. Humans could then shield themselves from taking responsibility, as they do using corporate personhood today (capitalism = AI as Nick Land puts it).
What strikes me is machine learning techniques really did help to amplify search (as in Google search). I know it’s trendy to make fun of boomers like me who see “aksing” as the main point of a MEMEX, but let’s get real: chatbots are big business, circular financing (self booting?) notwithstanding. By “search” I mean the next step beyond getting a long list of hits; getting a synthetic material woven from raw strands, pulling together authored texts and swirling them together into structured cogitations.
I’m happily surprised how effective next token prediction is really, when the LLM is suitably trained. The magnetic inter-attractiveness of text blobs, based on KQV attentiveness, really makes some nice “glue balls” on almost any topic (even if some of these bubbles are little more than thought balloons that go pop in the night). We use RI (real or raw intelligence — human generated) to train the models, so what we get back is both digestible and, ideally, nutritious.
So why not turn happy suprisal into its adjacent namesake: synergetic? Machine learning proved to be synergetic, when LA (linear algebra, word2vec stuff), or call it NLP (natural language processing) got hyperscaled to engulf what used to be called “big data” (I date myself). Swallow as much RI as possible and map it as a terrain, like when developing a gravity map of the earth (vs GPS). Let humans loose in the Matrix. Let them go wild. Endow them with agentic powers. That’s the hype.
Speaking of “hype” (poet Gene Fowler — Regeniusing Project — complained it meant little more than “wow” that word), the reason I sometimes say “aks” instead of “prompt” is I’m “axing” through hyper-dimensional space to flatten a hyper-plane (angled slice) into 2D representations in terms of tokens, all that chatter the chatterbox hands back.
So yeah: SI = synergetic intelligence. By that I don’t mean something to worship or make into a boss. We’re not going back to “divine right” with ELIZA (the paradigm proto-MEMEX in terms of putting humans to the Turing Test (a test many fail hah hah)) the Queen Bee.
We’re just saying the intel got surprisingly useful all of a sudden, and in ways that helped the readers (the aksers) catch up. I’m not suggesting AI (SI) puts us all on the same page, but it does propagate convergence to some average, some mean. It recenters the bell curve, in terms of what’s normal to think. From there, RI (real intelligence) is free to branch off, further exploring this new geometry of thinking.
Ditto the LMMs BTW, meaning image generators with a wider semiotic range when it comes to tokens. A central problem in the philosophy of language has been how to generalize this word “language” such that it could take in “the language of film” (semiology). Language is not just various flavors of prose and programs. Language is driving your car (language game) to the grocery store (shopping games) and back.
What does the “center line” represent (sometimes solid, sometimes dashes)? The dashboard instruments share First Person Physics (think airplane cockpit). The actively inferring driver is giving different weights, levels of attention, to types of signage. The act of driving is not “representational” in the picture theory of meaning sense.
“To language” is “to engage” in the sense of “gear in with” to do work. Sometimes language goes on vacation (Wittgenstein) and becomes more like idle wheel-spinning. Likewise chatbots needn’t be about providing results of earth-shaking significance. They simply chatter. It’s easy to be synergetic without needing to be super. In aksing a trained MEMEX to synthesize reading materials from stored RI, I get to stay a self employed Quaker Subgenius at the end of the day.
