5 posts tagged “robin-sloan”
2026
AGI is here! When exactly it arrived, we’ll never know; whether it was one company’s Pro or another company’s Pro Max (Eddie Bauer Edition) that tip-toed first across the line … you may debate. But generality has been achieved, & now we can proceed to new questions. [...]
The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a particular purpose. Consider landmark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these systems were all different, but all alike in this way.
Language models were trained for a purpose, too … but, surprise: the mechanism & scale of that training did something new: opened a wormhole, through which a vast field of action & response could be reached. Towering libraries of human writing, drawn together across time & space, all the dumb reasons for it … that’s rich fuel, if you can hold it all in your head.
— Robin Sloan, AGI is here (and I feel fine)
2023
What could I do with a universal function — a tool for turning just about any X into just about any Y with plain language instructions?
When you start a creative project but don’t finish, the experience drags you down. Worst of all is when you never decisively abandon a project, instead allowing it to fade into forgetfulness. The fades add up; they become a gloomy haze that whispers, you’re not the kind of person who DOES things.
When you start and finish, by contrast — and it can be a project of any scope: a 24-hour comic, a one-page short story, truly anything — it is powerful fuel that goes straight back into the tank. When a project is finished, it exits the realm of “this is gonna be great” and becomes instead something you (and perhaps others) can actually evaluate. Even if that evaluation is disastrous, it is also, I will insist, thrilling and productive. A project finished is the pump of a piston, preparing the engine for the next one.
2021
Many Web3 boosters see themselves as disruptors, but “tokenize all the things” is nothing if not an obedient continuation of “market-ize all the things”, the campaign started in the 1970s, hugely successful, ongoing. I think the World Wide Web was the real rupture — “Where … is the money?”—which Web 2.0 smoothed over and Web3 now attempts to seal totally.
2009
Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store. Enormously entertaining short story about data visualisation and creepy San Francisco bookshops by Robin Sloan.