Hello

The frontier AI companies races themselves to reach AGI and Super Intelligence.

Tech companies races themselves to adopt AI so they’re not left behind.

Every employees races themselves so they’re not left behind by colleagues that efficiently uses AI.

We shaped our speed, pace, energy - so it matches a machine. An machine that endlessly produces tokens. While they produces 67 words per seconds, we struggle to read 6 words per second. So we build a system around it, that we need to bend our way to be more confident with what the machine produces.

Back then, the labour did races with machines too. One holding hammer bending a steel bar, the other holding a button that pushes the hammer to bend a steel bar.

You can see and check a steel bar quickly, but you cant check and see that 1.000 files the AI just generated. So you thought - how can we see those 1.000 files and easily check it like checking a bent steel bar.

And it was not just the steel being bent. Our way of talking, bent by machine that want to talk like us. We ended up talking like them. It’s not an accident, it’s a gradient where we all seems to be going.

The gradients of AI, gradients us towards a singularity. Not the singularity of where AI is finally super intelligent. But singularity where we eventually becomes the machine itself.

We used to offload our hands so the hammer is a machine.

Now we offloaded our brains so the thinking is of machine.

God knows, the finish line of human is not the stars.

It’s earth. Soil that covers their mouth.

Humans will not be satisfied with a starful of gold. They will reach for the second stars. A third one. They only stop when soil sealed their mouth off.

Some reaches the finish line earlier.

Should you reach the stars? There’s nothing wrong with that. The number of stars in this universe are probably enough for everyone.

yet - you can hear someone out there, “one star is not enough for me”

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In fairness, everyone has their own star.

And everyone has their race.

But the opponent is never other racers. It’s their own deadline. A literal deadline.

The bakery owner races with their client orders, and the other shops.

The cashiers races with their customers and the other cashiers.

Everyone had their own races.

Some stomped on others along the way.

So, have you filled your eyes with stars, or filled your stomach with soil?

If you are confused on which new GPT model to use so you can get the best price -> performance.

All models below are GPT 6 family.

Luna (high) -> Luna (max) -> Sol (medium) -> Sol (xhigh) -> Astra (high) -> Astra (xhigh) -> Astra (max)

Source: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/

“I love you” and the act of love. Which one do you think goes first? Do I “love” you because I acted like I love you. Or I acted like I love you because I “loved” you?

How do you know which one drives which one? Does emotion come first and then the motion continues? Or you already swung in such motion that the emotion naturally exists now?

Someone can act all caring and kind without actually carrying a feeling of love at all. From the eye of an observer, the act of caring and kindness is indistinguishable from love. But the person doing that might not actually feel any love at all.

At the same time, someone can love someone but from the outside, the amount of care and kindness is not enough for an observer to say. “Yeah that is love”.

Or what about hatred? Someone can hate someone so much yet did not do any harm to that person.

Or someone can act rude and cruel to someone without carrying any hate at all.

There are studies about smiling. That if you smile, even without feeling anything, somehow that smile would make you bit happier. The motion of smile itself, can affect your emotion. Where smile is not the effect of happiness, but the cause of happiness itself.

So what if you kept saying “I love you” - and take care of that person, asking how was their day, what did they eat for lunch, remember what they like, tend to them when they’re sick. Are those affection the product of love. Or love is the product of that affection?

At which point that they converge into a singularity? That finally, motion and emotion can no longer be distinguished, and that each empower each other continuously like a perpetual heartbeats?

Human being imitates each other all the time. Babies learn by imitating adults. We learn when to smile, when to laugh, when to cry, when to say thank you, when to say sorry, when to be angry, and when to be happy - we’ve learned a lot of social behaviors through mimicry. Even though some are inherently biological. Like hunger, that in turns make you irritable.

So if you imitate an emotion, do a mimicry of “love”. Does it mean that the love is fake?

Maybe it explains why rituals are very common amongst humans. We repeat words, gestures, routines, and many other things. Because emotion is unreliable. Our feelings are fluctuative. We can be grateful and annoyed at the same day. We can love someone and still be angry with them. We can care about something and at the same time feel too tired to feel anything.

But motion is predictable.

You can make breakfast for someone even when you are annoyed with them. You can visit someone sick even when you don’t particularly like going outside. You still say thank you even when you don’t really understand why. Maybe you keep repeating this motions, so that the emotion will stop fluctuating on its own, and starts moving into the direction of the motion.

Though the opposite is also true. Motion can start become meaningless. You can say “I love you” everyday before it can’t be distinguished with “good morning”. You can say “sorry” repeatedly that the word no longer means something to you.

So maybe love is not just an emotion. If love is only an emotion, then someone who loves another person but never show it can still possesses complete love. Yet, someone who consistently takes care, protects, remembers, and sacrifices for someone - can still say that they don’t feel anything. Even though from the outside observer, they would describe those actions as love.

Maybe love exists outside emotion, and outside the motion. Or maybe it exists on both. Or maybe half in motion and half in emotion. Or maybe its up to anyone who with hearts to decide what is love anyway.

Emotion drives motion. Motion drives emotions. And we’re stuck in this loop, constantly turning things we feel into things we do, and turning things we do into things we feel.

AI is an equalizer. Or I would say, averagizer. I know it’s probably not a real word. But it seems to be a word that fits what AI is.

I have seen a fresh-graduate using AI to make themselves look like a decent software engineer, and they might produce decent code as well if they know how to direct it.

At the same time, I’ve seen an expert using AI to go further and beyond, like Terence Tao who discussed with ChatGPT about the Jacobian conjecture. My math knowledge is very limited, so when I read the chat transcript, I don’t even understand what’s being talked and why it’s even a breakthrough. But at least it gives me a chance to shout at ChatGPT “WTH IS EVEN THIS” “WHY ITS LIKE THIS” “YES BUT WHY ITS IMPORTANT” or something like that.

After 30 mins or so on trying to understand. AI has bumped my math knowledge by 0.01%. Because now I know more about polynomials. Maybe if I shouted louder, I’d bumped it by 0.02%. If I do it 1000 times, maybe my math knowledge would gradient towards 1% understanding. Do it 10.000 times and maybe my error rate on trying to explain this conjecture to a stranger would now be 0.1%.

Yet, I’ve seen people that were capable of writing, capable of thinking - using AI to dumb down their output. Before AI, their output was superior. A highly readable code, a nicely designed design patterns - now their output is bunch of top level exports inside 10 scattered typescript files.

For people that have lower than average numbers, AI will help them move up and reach the averages. For people that are higher than the average, AI will drag them down to reach the averages.

For people that know what they’re doing, and use AI to expand their thinking capacity - like Terence Tao; will be able to move up above the average.

It’s just how an LLM is inherently. They are trained to guess the most probable token given the previous tokens. And what’s the most probable one?

The average.

A friend and a colleague of mine shared a podcast about how AI will soon make the world a grim place to live in.

And then my Balkan’s friends told me that que sera sera, whatever will be, will be. I think they’ve lived enough to see the world goes up and down. The sky turned gray and red. Or when it turned blue again and business continue as usual.

Maybe I am speaking from a privileged position. I never went to war, nor lived through crisis, or even when I do, I was shielded from such things. So I tried as hard as possible to see the world from their lens too.

The lens from my colleague as he was worried about AI, and their self-research and self-improvements rate, how it will rapidly accelerate destructions. The game theory and race to the equilibrium. How Anthropic and OpenAI seems to be the one eagerly trying to replace themselves with AI.

“We’re building a self-improving AI so we have the best AI” - and it seems software engineers are always the one who wanted to replace themselves so they can finally put their laptop down and move to remote areas and live as farmers. Until they discover that they can maximize their crop yields and starts engineering their farm. Guess with what? I think AI again.

And I tried to see the lens from someone who can just say whatever will be will be. I think now I have two lens, one on each eye. Where I can see how the world might become a worst place to live, and that whatever will be will be anyway. But I am just a person who have astigmatism and need prescription glasses. Whatever lens I wear, I’d see blurs and ghosts anyway.

There’s an image that I am particularly fond of. An image of me sitting under the blue sky, surrounded with flowers and butterflies, even though I find butterflies scary due to Spongebob episodes that I watched when I was a kid. And I sit there, with sharp grass blades piercing on my skin. Which actually make me rarely sit on grass in real life.

But that image goes against what I usually do in real life. In real life, I went to a coffee shop, no flowers in sight. Or when I do see one, it dropped on the ground, I’d pick it and slide it under my watch so I can see flowers whenever I check my watch.

I don’t particularly enjoy the heat under the sun, or the sharp grass blades piercing my skin, or the emptiness of such vast meadows. Even the thought of me needing to drive for hours to reach the mountains and hike - is probably something that I don’t really like.

But that image, that goes against what I truly am, is something that I am truly fond of.

There’s a war happening somewhere. Haze that covers my nations, flood that sweeps my lands, corruptions that happens right and left. The world tried so hard to give me lens so I can see chaos out of everything.

But I only have two eyes. So when I either kept switching in between lens to see everything for what they truly are. Or I stacked all of the lens the world gave me, until its as thick as Pinokio nose when it lies. Or maybe for me, its not that my nose grows as I gather these lies. But the lens on my eyes, it keeps getting thicker.

Now I barely know which are the truth and which are lies anymore. My eyes has been stacked with too many lens I find it hard to see. Everything seems to be reduced to an average. Show me the world in red and blue, and when I kept stacking the lens, I think what I can see is now gray.

So maybe gray is the lens that we all use to see the world now. Bleak. Bland. But gray is still a color too.

Or maybe its time for me to remove all of that lenses. When I do, I can see that the sky is blue, and that I still rest under the same tree. I can hear the birds singing, and the butterflies flutter on my ears. I can feel the sharp blades touching my skins.

Is that blue sky something that I truly see? Or its just a dream? Or its a lie that now I have begun to believe? Have I truly removed all of my lenses?

I rest, until the day I don’t have to open my eyes.