Category: History

  • VR Report Card: The Metaverse, 2014-2024

    VR Report Card: The Metaverse, 2014-2024

    From the moment I unboxed my Oculus DK2 in 2014, and for many many years after, I dedicated an immense amount of time and energy into building what — at the time — I considered the glorious future of our species: the Metaverse. Around 2108, I got very disillusioned with the concept, and adopted an…

  • The AI Tsunami – the Metaphor Explained

    In September of 2022, two months prior to the launch of ChatGPT, my son clued me into the groundbreaking art being produced by MidJourney, DALL-E, and StableDiffusion. Though I’d been working at the leading edge of AI for decades, I was nonetheless shocked. This advancement — generative AI, or genAI — tipped the scales. In…

  • Attention is All You Need : The Beginning of AGI v1.0

    On Monday, June 12, 2017, there was a second shift in the Force. On that afternoon, Ashish Vaswani and his colleagues at Google uploaded a 1 megabyte PDF file, in that moment pre-publishing a seminal paper, playfully named “Attention is All you Need.” The paper outlined the basic Transformer model which has been at the…

  • the Deep Learning Revolution: Why Today’s AI so Radically Transcends the Last 50 Years

    The purpose of this post is to enlighten you as to the fundamentals of the present Deep Learning Revolution, and to simultaneously debunk two very common myths which I hear over and over again from normal intelligent people. Debunking Common AI Myths Those being: AI is just one more innovation in a long string of…

  • Chip Design Software : Designing the Designers

    What happens when humans no longer are the designers, but merely the designers of the designers? In this true story, we examine merely one example of this phenomenon: Integrated Circuit Chip Design Software. The descent into profound AI complexity has begun… the Shiny New Black Boxes are all sealed tight. The year was 1999. We…

  • The Origin of AI : A Fairy Tale, Part 1

    Once upon a time… waaay back in the 1800s, some men became fascinated with the machines they were building: sewing machines, weaving machines, even wheeled machines. It seemed that everything people and horses could do, the machines were better, faster, and stronger at. Plus, the machines never tired. Sure, they needed repaired every once so…

  • Computational Neuroscience 3000? AYFKM?

    There’s a new sheriff in town, kids. Justs the other day, I learned of a new field of study, replete with PhD candidates and its own scholarly journal: Its called… wait for it: “computational neuroscience for AI minds.” The article was detailing the bizarre near-total opacity of the AI brain and how scientists were working…

  • AI Art : The Second Renaissance : AD 2022

    That same general purpose AI that mastered — totally mastered — the “logical” game of chess, has now been directed at a far hairier, more analog, more “human” challenge: the fine arts, including drawing, painting, photography, illustration, and yes — even sculpture and its digital cousin, 3d modeling. Although it goes by many names, most…

  • AI Chess: A Brief History of a Complicated Game

    As long as there have been computers, there have been programmers with dreams of building an app to play chess. Indeed, Chess playing programs have been one of the major testbeds for both programming skills and AI development since the 1950s. And they’ve received various levels of amusement and condemnation from the global chess-playing community…

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