Loughborough, England
Joined August 2009
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Derek Thomson retweeted
A Physics paper that has 5154 authors 📄
A record-breaking publication of a physics paper having the largest number of contributors ever- 5154. The article was published in Physical Review Letters and comprises a total of 33 pages.
The actual research and references are only described in the first 9 pages. The remaining 24 pages are dedicated to listing the authors and their respective institutions.
The paper is titled,
“Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at √s=7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments”
Derek Thomson retweeted
Oh, NOW Wall Street is worried about the AI boom collapsing….well, this is a bit awkward. TS Lombard is wargaming a 30% US equity decline, $20 trillion in lost market value and a wave of tech defaults.
Time to really watch the workforce.
As companies delay or abandon data-center projects, watch their contractors, engineering firms, equipment suppliers and construction partners.
The first cuts may not come from the AI giants. They may come from the companies hired to build their ambitions - and yes, I’m already seeing a change of hiring.
If infrastructure hiring keeps deteriorating across suppliers while hyperscalers keep announcing record spending, the workforce will expose a gap between capital commitments and actual execution.
Wall Street can watch the spending announcements. I’ll watch who stops hiring.
Five days ago the credit market was pricing CoreWeave and Oracle.
Now it's pricing Meta and Nvidia.
Meta's 5-year CDS: 108 bps, a record.
Nvidia: 101, a record.
Alphabet and Amazon at all-time highs.
Even Microsoft is climbing.
AI-linked CDS trading went from under $2B a week in July to $9B+ in September. AI debt raised this year is $466B, against $101B at this point last year.
And Goldman's prime book shows hedge funds cutting tech at the fastest pace since 2016.
When the "safe" names need default insurance, it isn't a neocloud problem anymore….. it’s straight up a funding problem.
And funding problems always end up on the headcount line.
Listen for "efficiency" on the Q3 calls. H127 looks to be bad for the workforce.
Derek Thomson retweeted
Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling
“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction between what AI does, which is simply predict the next token or the next word in a sentence, then add that word on, run it back to the machine, do a lot of computation and pick the next word."
"That is a very different thing than sentience or thought. And I think we need to be really clear about that because it can be convincingly, in an illusory way, sound like thought or like a person."
"But let’s be real clear. This is matrix multiplication. This is linear algebra. These are floating point calculations. It has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
Derek Thomson retweeted
Eight years ago we were losing graduates and architects to Silicon Valley start-ups and today we’re losing them to urban planning, construction management, building development, structural engineering and UX.
So, has nothing really changed except maybe the cool factor?
Our students and recent grads in 2018 were going to Boston Dynamics, Katerra, Tesla, NASA, Disney Imagineering, Google and Pixar Studios.
Today? Voting with their feet, they’re pursuing careers in urban planning and UX.
Anything, in other words, that appears more durable than architecture’s David to AI’s Goliath.
Only that architecture which represents nimble, human-scaled design and structural ingenuity that in the past would, like David, stand up to and challenge the brute-force, data-heavy scale of artificial intelligence, today takes one look at the massive server farms, multi-billion-dollar training runs and automated generation that prioritize statistical scale and raw computing power and says instead,
"I think I’ll transfer out of architecture into construction management."
Like musical chairs, we are experiencing The Great Reshuffling in Architecture.
The Great Reshuffling is a university and labor market trend where students and graduates voluntarily leave their original career path not to exit the workforce, but to switch careers, industries or employment categories in search of better pay, flexibility, alignment with their personal values and especially what they perceive to be the threats of AI.
Here's where I see The Great Reshuffling in Architecture playing out; how some of the current cohort's pivots and shifts are more like long-shot Hail Marys; the most attractive fields and careers for architects now that AI is here; why the best bet is in what I call an "architect +" career and what that implies; and lastly, which one I recommend.
All that and more at the link in comments below.
theagenticarchitect.substack…
Derek Thomson retweeted
There's a shocking article in the Spectator about "Edtech" in schools: screen use in class, homework on apps, physical books phased out. University students are routinely expected to read complex articles and books in digital formats. Nobody can read properly on a screen. /
Derek Thomson retweeted
people are starting to realize.
there *are* no moats left. the only true moat in existence was intelligence, and now that's out of the equation.
Derek Thomson retweeted
This is the least surprising graph in the world if you understand how gradient descent works.
Derek Thomson retweeted
Since learning is essentially correcting errors by using feedback, it's bizarre how little time we spend teaching students the importance or being wrong, recognising when you are wrong, forgiving others for being wrong, etc.
Derek Thomson retweeted
I take a moment to salute, as I regularly do, one of the best signs in America — found at the Milwaukee airport, after security screening (with the discombobulation such screening entails). At the same time, I salute the boundless ingenuity of the English language.
Derek Thomson retweeted
Of course they do, they can't see over the fucking steering wheel. Accident waiting to happen.
Derek Thomson retweeted
Academics have expressed dismay after AI was used to reject half of the grant proposals in a UK Research and Innovation-funded call
timeshighereducation.com/new…
