Hey, long-time fan of Steve’s work. I recently regained a years-dormant fixation on the subject of AI, despite the best efforts of contemporary examples (LLMs etc.) to make it unlikable and boring. I blame the funny turtle streamer.

So, I spent the last couple of months processing a lot of information. Reading up on the theory behind current LLM stuff, a lot of Wikipedia, whatever science papers I can find related to my own thoughts/observations, like non-linguistic forms of intelligence, the brain being a physical machine that changes structure, concepts like brainwaves applied to AI (LinOSS seems interesting).

And, of course, I’ve been reading blog posts and comments from Phantasia (and Steve’s old WordPress, etc.).

Something I’m not fully clear on (and hoping it isn’t rude to ask!) is whether some of the outside ideas/research address Steve’s past criticisms about the shallowness of mainstream AI research, whether certain ideas overlap, etc.

Like “world models”, for example. The premise of modeling and predicting the states of the physical world seems similar to the premise Phantasian brains, but I don’t think they’re the same.

I also figured it’s time that I join some communities with people who actually know/talk about the subject of AI in some way, instead of burdening a couple Discord contacts with my entire stream of consciousness, random scientific papers, and excerpts from my cluttered notes.

Obligatory mention: I sometimes do YouTube. I’ve struggled to actually be productive for many reasons (I’ve rewritten this post several times) but I’d be happy to contribute on the “content creator” front if people have ideas.