Conferences; research updates

[dmm]

This week, Nov 17-18, Thu-Fri, 8am-11:45am Boston time, "Quantum physics and the first-person perspective": www.essentiafoundation.org/quantum-physics-and-the-first-person-perspective/seeing/

JuliaCon 2023, juliacon.org/2023/ the call for proposals is posted, deadline Dec 18: pretalx.com/juliacon2023/cfp


I've spent more quality time focusing of two breakthroughs in understanding the nature and the behavior of machine learning models which came from the "penumbra" of "prosaic alignment" start-ups and which I wrote about in my previous two posts.

"Grokking is (more or less) solved." I took brief notes between Oct 21 and Oct 23: github.com/anhinga/2022-notes/tree/main/Grokking-is-solved

"Generative autoregressive models are similators." I took extensive notes between Oct 5 and Oct 23: github.com/anhinga/2022-notes/tree/main/Generative-autoregressive-models-are-similators

I am continuing to develop thoughts related to these topics, I am going to gradually write more about those topics in the comments.

Comments

[dmm]

He argues that physical laws are purely epistemic, have no ontological status.

He proposes to focus on "agents", and he defines agents as entities performing modeling activity (this is, in some sense, in line with my recent thinking).

But he notes that quantum gravity is the real challenge in this sense, and the real litmus test for any methodology...