The story of computing is the story of humanity: this is a story of ambition, invention, creativity, vision, avarice, power, and serendipity, powered by a refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pygmalion sculpts a woman from ivory, then prays to Aphrodite to give it life. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles fights with Scamander, a powerful god who takes the form of a river as if it were a person. In the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, we read of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth, a ritual that reanimates corpses or statues so as to embed them with a soul's life force. In Jewish folklore, there is the Golem, clay animated by inscribing it with the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God. In Hinduism, the Vedic ritual of Pran Pratishta places the life force in an other wise inanimate object. Among the Pueblo people, native to the southwestern United States, an individual house and the village itself are seen as sentient entities through which the breath of the cosmos flows. In our time, we see some who project consciousness and perhaps even sentience into AI, artifacts that are formed from artificial neural networks which themselves are abstractions that execute on symbolic von Neumann machines that in turn run on cunningly designed fragments of silicon flecked with certain rare earth minerals and etched with intricate patterns that channel lightening. In each of these cases, we humans - undeniably sentience creatures of exquisite complexity and capable of curiosity and wonder and love and hate - project sentience on to a multitude of distinctly non-sentient artifacts. The fact we have done this throughout our history and in our mythology and religion and even our casual daily lives tells us much about ourselves. Each of us seeks to know and be known, see and be seen, and so I suspect that much of why we do this is because we desire a connection. To quote a line from Sagan's Contact, "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."

I was one of those who "doused Galactica with vitriol". And I'd do it again: Galactica was a fascinating and frightening piece of software, capable of generating reasonably coherent words colored with false and misleading information. My feedback to Yann at the time was that such a thing was eminently dangerous if unleashed at scale. He blocked me for relentlessly saying so while he simultaneously downplayed the risk. What I and others said then about Galactica foreshadowed the mess we are in today.

“LLMs converge on brain-like structures” Only at the most primitive kinds of structures found in the brain: LLMs have no analog to cortical columns and their groupings found in the cerebral cortex, no mechanisms akin to the brain’s endocrine system, no differentiation as with the rich classes of neurons found in organic brains, no equivalent to the thalamus or corpus callosum, and certainly no structures that correspond to to the brain’s elegant apparatus for plasticity.

The term "artificial intelligence" was coined before the term "software" first appeared in print. www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/… jstor.org/stable/2310294

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity By Jeffrey Katzenberg A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe. Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.” I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both. In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious. There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love. People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft. Is History Repeating Itself? The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul." Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work. A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept. They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded. This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix. What I Learned From Walt Disney In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell. We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not. That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create. A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did. Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.” A Distinction With a Difference I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . . Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new. Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out. Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new. One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable. Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground. A Path Forward In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . . Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human. At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling. The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it. There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us. The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires. What I Learned From Steve Jobs Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities. What I See Coming Soon As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process. Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

In my career, compilers have always generated better code that I ever could have. I find this to be increasingly so with contemporary AIs. But you know what neither can do better than me? Knowing what software to write, what shape it should take, and what I want it to do. The entire history of software engineering has been one of rising levels of abstraction. This is how it was, how it is now, and how it shall be in the fullness of time.

"Critics without programming/math/tech-adjacent skills are like blind men trying to understand an elephant." I know one or two things about programming. And AI. From my experience, contemporary AI "thinks" only to the degree that one has a particularly casual meaning of the word "think".

Typical off-by-one programmer error. Elon’s using base 11 numbering again.

Question: What kind of a prison would we need to build to incarcerate an AI that violates the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act? I suppose at the very least you'd need a good size Faraday cage...

I see that @GregCasar is advancing a bill to ban the use of recursive self improvement. I have absolutely no idea how anyone or any agency could ban RSI. Alternately, I suggest you legislate a ban against naked pointers in programming languages, for at least that would gain you some political capital among conservatives. And in the meantime, rather than waste the time to pass these vacuous laws that offer no actionable value, please have you and your colleagues do something about the clear and present harms that are already taking place by genAI, not to mention their theft of intellectual property that has taken place on a grand scale.

Another example of what I find to be two very passionate AI communities taking past one another. The original assertion by Bender/Gebru/McMillan-Major/Mitchell holds: any internal structures we find inside a model are not grounded in the model's own perception and action and both rather are only learned from the patterns found in the linguistic forms that describe those worlds. As such, they reflect nothing more than what are the self-consistent patterns found in those linguistic forms. What Pierre and Natand others are talking about are compressed latent structures which are indeed present. But, using Plato's allegory of the cave, I would suggest that these artifacts are more like the flickering of the shadows from the light: there's a pattern, it's imprecise, and it's not directly grounded in what the world really is. And all that being said, transformer-based models remain next token predictors. The fact that they can yield surprisingly coherent results is splendid and useful. I'll return to something @aran_nayebi observed and so which I fully agree: alignment is important, because the shadow and the light are different things. But the open question remains as to if this is possible at all with our current architectures.

Super Intelligence is such a lame idea. I’m waiting for Super Duper Intelligence, or better yet, the true pinnacle of human achievement, Trumpian Stable Genius Intelligence.

Personally, I would never choose to install @Muse and alarmingly more so now, before their confidential VM is deployed. “Trust me” and @Meta are words I find incompatible in every dimension of meaning. Is there utility in such an agent? Certainly. Is there a non-small probability of misuse? There is precedence.

Hey @aran_nayebi, upon reflection it suddenly hit me why you and I keep butting heads. I have come to realize you and I have been talking past one another these past years. You once stated the neural networks are “the best *quantitative* predictors of large-scale brain data we have today.” You may be surprised to know that I now agree, having finally understood the boundaries of your statement! Artificial neural networks are great way to model and extrapolate data we have observed from the brain. However, while interesting and useful, my interest lies elsewhere: what is the architecture of the brain and the patterns therein that yield the exquisite behavior of the brain? These are two very different things. To paraphrase the dialog from my favorite movie, you fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well known is this: "Never conflate correlation with causation.” Where I think you and other others go off the rails and which I have pushed back against consistently is when you take the leap that such predicted powers of ANNs suggests that the brain and large language models in particular work the same way and share similar static and dynamic structures. On this matter, I disagree vigorously, despite you having a doctorate in neuroscience and me not (but please respect that I remain well informed in the domain of software and systems architecture). It is clear that artificial neurons are just the echo of a whisper of what organic neurons do. It is also clear that contemporary AI completely dismisses what we know to be found in organic minds, things such as spiking neurons, glial cells and the role of the various endocrine mechanisms to name just a few (and don’t get me started about cortical columns and the different kinds of neurons and the extraordinary strange loops we see in the brain’s wiring). It is also clear that contemporary AI is just now rediscovering patterns neuroscience has posited for many years. There’s a similar thing happening in the world of weather models, and I think it offers an excellent illustration of how you and I are at odds. The incomparable Von Neumann was one of the first to try to model weather using the emerging computational power of his time. This has led us to where we are today with the primary United States and European weather models based on multiple complex and insanely detailed algorithms using various theories of fluid dynamics. These models are remarkable in their predictive power, and we keep tweaking them as we gain a better understanding of the underlying physics as well as the nature of the complex system as a whole. Lately we have seen the emergence of neural models that are proving to be useful, but require far less computational resources. None of these neural models deal with the underlying thermodynamics or fluid dynamics, but rather they’re just predictive of the data we have gathered over the decades. Classical models were based upon our understanding of the science, and in fact, they were also useful because they pointed out that where we found gaps between observation and prediction that would lead us to deeper science and help model the way weather works at scale. These newer models do not such thing, and while they are useful in their own regard, they do not advance our understanding of the science of weather, and by no means can one say that their structures are the way the world works. I think the same thing is happening between you and I in particular and in the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence in general. Neural networks are indeed a useful way to predict brain behavior but IMHO it is a profound error to project that artificial neural networks are the way the brain works.

And yet, Kevin, the very nature of the architecture of every transformer-based LLM yields next token prediction. Symbolic harnesses that surround an LLM soften those sharp edges, but at the core, they remain non-deterministic, statistical engines walking through a large static multi-dimensional manifold.

here is a gift link wapo.st/4rkNpZo hope you'll give it a read. there's a lot of reporting, color and context. diff approach from the way these issues are covered elsewhere. still could only get into about 2%

Hello :-)

Both things can be true, Tim: they are wrong and they are not part of some well-organized psyop.

Contemporary AI IMHO is perhaps better named statistical intelligence. Cybernetics, as promoted by Norbert Wiener, involved principles such as homeostasis and communication architecture, which are orthogonal to the nature of LLMs.