Daily Tech News 28 August 2024

• Why AI can't spell "strawberry". (Tech Crunch)
  
  I've said before that currently popular AI models - which is to say, Large Language Models or LLMs - don't understand anything at all except language. They're language models. That's what they do, and it's all they do.
  
  Except that's not quite true, because they don't understand language in any real way either.

  The failure of large language models to understand the concepts of letters and syllables is indicative of a larger truth that we often forget: These things don't have brains. They do not think like we do. They are not human, nor even particularly humanlike.

  Most LLMs are built on transformers, a kind of deep learning architecture. Transformer models break text into tokens, which can be full words, syllables, or letters, depending on the model.

  "LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it's translated into an encoding," Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta, told TechCrunch. "When it sees the word 'the,' it has this one encoding of what 'the' means, but it does not know about 'T,' 'H,' 'E.'"

  Typeahead with delusions of grandeur.

• Microsoft has applied the same AMD speed improvements I mentioned yesterday to the current version of Windows 11. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So you don't need to upgrade to a new version; it will arrive with the regular monthly updates.
  
  
  
• Don't buy tattoo ink from Amazon. (Ars Technica)
  
  Unless you're a microbiology student looking for a great topic for your PhD thesis.
  
  
  
• Can a YouTube video fix your wet phone? (The Verge)
  
  Well, no, but curiously enough, sort of.
  
  It's not the video, of course, but the audio that goes with it, which is designed to generate the lowest tones a phone speaker can produce at as loud a volume as possible.
  
  And testing shows that this does eject water from the speaker. There's a video of it in action in the article.
  
  If the water gets elsewhere inside the phone, though, it's probably toast.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:24 AM

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