OpenAI comms: [underspecific hype-y 'big tings coming!!' pls like and subscribe]
Google comms: [corporate vagueness about Gemini3-0011 v2 FINAL.docx on Vertex available to 14 users]
GDM comms: [we have simulated a rat's brain capable of solving 4D chess, but we're not sure why]…— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) December 3, 2024
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Previous LLOG coverage: "AI on Rs in 'strawberry'", 8/28/2024; "'The cosmic jam from whence it came'", 9/26/2024.
Current satire: Alberto Romero, "Report: OpenAI Spends Millions a Year Miscounting the R’s in ‘Strawberry’", Medium 11/22/2024.
OpenAI, the most talked-about tech start-up of the decade, convened an emergency company-wide meeting Tuesday to address what executives are calling “the single greatest existential challenge facing artificial intelligence today”: Why can’t their models count the R’s in strawberry?
The controversy began shortly after the release of GPT-4, on March 2023, when users on Reddit and Twitter discovered the model’s inability to count the R’s in strawberry. The responses varied from inaccurate guesses to cryptic replies like, “More R’s than you can handle.” In one particularly unhinged moment, the chatbot signed off with, “Call me Sydney. That’s all you need to know.”
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[This is a guest post by Michael Witzel]
A few months ago you published a discussion of whimsical surnames. Since then I have paid attention and have found new ones in almost every news broadcast.
It is said that there are 1 million (!) surnames in the German speaking area of some 95 million people (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Alsace, Luxemburg, Eupen in Belgium and some 1 million remaining in Poland). I leave aside the many millions of German immigrants in America etc., such as the notorious politician Witzel in Rio de Janeiro. Also, many Jewish names are the same as “regular German” names (;like Schuster =Shoemaker, head of the German Jewish Central Committee).
What I found is that almost all (hair) colors, animals, etc. are used, just as are designations of occupations, etc.. etc.
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Following up on Rapscallion, here's another culinary pun with a lexico-musical connection:
When two names far apart
Share a PIE start
That's a *móri…— New-Cleckit Dominie (@ncdominie.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 11:57 AM
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A recent Bluesky post by George Takei, re-skying (?) @GraniteDhuine:
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 10:00 AM
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Jonathan Weisman, "As Trump Arrives, Aurora Insists It’s Not the ‘War Zone’ He Sees", NYT 10/11/2024.
And today's xkcd:
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A recent email from Jean Gallier to the members of Penn's Department of Computer and Information Sciences included this picture
…under the comment "Apparently the Greeks had already figured that there was a connection between wine and linear algebra." The connection to Linear A(lgebra) is provided by Jean's two-volume 2020 book Linear Algebra and Optimization with Applications to Machine Learning.
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Elle Cordova offers an update from ChatGPT on the number of Rs in "strawberry":
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From George Takei, on Bluesky:
This left me in stitches.
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 10:00 AM
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