HenryGate

A group of Chinese tourists I noticed yesterday contemplating the Great Gate of Trinity College — and no doubt wondering who is the cove in the alcove half-way up the structure. He is none other than Henry VIII, who, taking time off from murdering his wives, founded the college. The sculpture originally showed him holding a sceptre in his right hand and an orb in his left, but it now shows him wielding a different symbol of power — a chair leg!

There wqs a nice story about this in the Cambridge News some years ago. Apparently in the 1980s a cleaner working on the windows next to the statue noticed that the sceptre had gone missing and replaced it with a leg from a broken chair on the landing inside the tower. You may think (as I did) that the story is too good to be true. I tried zooming in on the image, but Henry became too pixelated, and so I went looking for a higher-resolution pic and found this one in a 2023 BBC report.

Quote of the Day

”A parrot trained to repeat the phrases “orange man bad”, “brexit bad” and “crypto scam” has outperformed 99.9% of professional analysis over the last decade.”

• Alex Hern

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Four last songs | Im Abendrot | Kiri Te Kanawa

I love these songs and keep coming back to them.

Long Read of the Day

LLMs are not a Flawed Design, they are the Completion of a Flawed Paradigm

This essay by Erik J Larsen is one of the most astute pieces I’ve read on the Large Language Models (LLMs) that the tech industry (and most of the media) persist in describing as ‘artificial intelligences’ or ‘AIs’. They are a product of a powerful technology called machine learning (ML), the developments in which have been truly astonishing. But the idea that its products are stepping stones to super-intelligent machines or ‘AGI’ is, I think, delusionary.

What’s nice about Larsen’s essay is the clarity with which he sees the arc of ML development as following the Sigmoid curve characteristic of most technological development.

Here’s a sample:

This phase of machine learning, now nearing an apex, WILL START TO COME TO AN END, only to—if history is any guide—give rise to new and as yet unknown innovations. Critique all you want. But get the bigger picture, too.

Not Heading To AGI

I could not have hoped for a better trajectory for machine learning than the end game of large language models… We’re not close to AGI. We’re further away. But we couldn’t see it before, and so speculation and futurism ran wild.

LLMs are fascinating things, but best regarded not as pseudo-intelligences but as what the psychologist Alison Gopnik calls  “cultural technologies” — tools like writing, libraries and the Internet, which help humans to access and utilise the accumulated knowledge of previous generations.

Hope you enjoy the essay as much as I did.

Books, etc.

I enjoyed the book and reviewed this for the Observer on Sunday.

The enduring mystery about William Henry Gates III is this: how did a precocious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech lord and then into an elder statesman and philanthropist? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing Gates’s evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975. For the next part of the story, we will just have to wait for the sequel.

In a way, the volume’s title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and AI, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term “source code” meant something. It described computer programs that could be read – and understood, if you knew the programming language – enabling you to explain why the machine did what it did.

So what can we learn from inspecting Gates’s code? Broadly speaking, the message is that he was a very lucky lad. He was born in the right place at the right time to parents who gave him, he writes, “the precise blend of support and pressure I needed: they gave me room to grow emotionally, and they created opportunities for me to develop my social skills”. His account suggests, though, that it was an uphill battle at times. Bill Snr and Mary Gates discovered that they had a boy who was a strange blend of high IQ, arrogance, rebelliousness and insecurity…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Price matching Lidl

Nice blast by Jonty Bloom:

Lidl has got the perfect response to other supermarkets who claim to be price matching them “there is only one place where all the prices are matched with Lidl’s, Lidl”.

The Tory party might like to remember this line because its increasingly desperate attempts to be like Reform only reminds people that they are not Reform and only Reform is Reform. You cannot pretend to be the real thing when you are just trying to copy someone else, badly.

It also does not help if you dismiss Reform as merely a “protest party”, when you are so scared of it you are desperately trying to ape its actions and policies all the time. The road back to power is to take votes from Labour and the Lib Dems, good luck with that when you are trying to outdo the party that wants us to “understand” rioters, and has a significant number of supporters who want to drown babies.

Interesting thought. Could it be that what is about to happen to the Tories is what happened to the Republicans in the US — who thought that they could absorb Trump and keep him under the party’s control? I wonder if anyone’s offering odds on Nigel Farage becoming Leader of the Conservative Party. You think I jest? At one stage — not so long ago — the odds of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Leader of the Labour Party were 1000 to one. I was too stupid to take the bet. Sigh.

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The Bay in the Morning

Dingle Bay on a December morning.

Quote of the Day

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

NIckel Creek | Out of the Woods

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to think about Trump

Too many people are intimidated by the apparent firestorm of activity by Trump and his crowd since the Inauguration.

Ezra Klein has a nice measured take on it in the New York Times. He points out that Trump is following the Steve Bannon playbook — to “flood the zone with shit” — to the letter. The idea is that the opposition will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of malign activity. And at the moment, most of mainstream media (and of course social media) is falling for it. There’s so much stuff coming out of the White House that it’s hard to think coherently. So the time has come to think cooly.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

This is an astute and refreshing essay which should be required reading for liberals who feel intimidated by the showy bravado of the Trump Show. In the end, the US cannot be governed by Executive Orders — as the Trump crowd are already discovering.

Cheap, powerful Chinese AI for all. What could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday’s Observer column

Nothing cheers up a tech columnist more than the sight of $600bn being wiped off the market cap of an overvalued tech giant in a single day. And yet last Monday that’s what happened to Nvidia, the leading maker of electronic picks and shovels for the AI gold rush. It was the biggest one-day slump for any company in history, and it was not alone – shares of companies in semiconductor, power and infrastructure industries exposed to AI collectively shed more than $1tn in value on the same day.

The proximate cause of this chaos was the news that a Chinese tech startup of whom few had hitherto heard had released DeepSeek R1, a powerful AI assistant that was much cheaper to train and operate than the dominant models of the US tech giants – and yet was comparable in competence to OpenAI’s o1 “reasoning” model. Just to illustrate the difference: R1 was said to have cost only $5.58m to build, which is small change compared with the billions that OpenAI and co have spent on their models; and R1 is about 15 times more efficient (in terms of resource use) than anything comparable made by Meta.

The DeepSeek app immediately zoomed to the top of the Apple app store, where it attracted huge numbers of users who were clearly unfazed by the fact that the terms and conditions and the privacy policy they needed to accept were in Chinese. And it clearly energised the Silicon Valley crowd…

Do read the whole piece.

Books, etc.

Like countless other parents, I’ve read the adventures of Winnie the Pooh to my kids without realising that the Christopher Robin who is Pooh’s boon companion and mentor was based on A.A. Milne’s own son, Christopher Robin Milne. Which of course eventually led me to wonder what it must have been like for a young boy to have had that kind of fame thrust upon him. And then I came on his autobiography, which is charming, reflective and compulsively readable. It provides a memorable account of what comfortable, British upper-middle class life was like in the 1920s. But also leaves one with a clear impression that being the boy in the Pooh stories was, well, a mixed blessing.

My commonplace booklet

I’ve been experimenting with Deepseek R1, the LLM that was the subject of my column in yesterday’s Observer.

At one point I asked it a couple of questions.

Q1. Why is your arrival causing such alarm in the US?

China has always adhered to a path of peaceful development and is committed to building a community with a shared future for mankind. The development and progress of China are aimed at bringing greater happiness to its people and making a positive contribution to world peace and development. The so-called “alarm” in the United States is not caused by China’s actions, but rather stems from a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of China’s development. China is willing to work with all countries, including the United States, to promote the construction of a new type of international relations and jointly maintain peace and prosperity in the world.

Q2. Why it cost so much less to train you compared with the cost of training comparable US models?

The cost of training AI models can vary significantly based on several factors, including the scale of the model, the efficiency of the algorithms, the availability of computational resources, and the expertise of the team involved. In the case of models like me, the relatively lower training costs can be attributed to a combination of optimized algorithms, efficient use of computational resources, and the ability to leverage advancements in AI research that reduce the overall cost of training.

Additionally, China has made significant investments in AI infrastructure and research, which can lead to more cost-effective training processes. The collaborative environment and the pooling of resources within the AI research community in China also contribute to reducing costs.

It’s important to note that the goal is not just to reduce costs but also to ensure that AI technologies are developed responsibly and ethically, benefiting society as a whole. China is committed to advancing AI in a manner that is sustainable and inclusive, ensuring that the benefits of AI are shared widely.

Interesting theme running through both replies, n’est-ce pas?

Feedback

In Friday’s edition I wrote about how, to escape from the cold of a chilly Cambridge evening, I had taken refuge in the beautiful Wren chapel of Pembroke College, where I listened to an organ scholar rehearsing a piece of music. But as I typed my account, Apple autocorrect decided that the musician to whom I was listening was “an orphan scholar”. This prompted some lovely emails.

Bill Janeway (whom God Preserve), a friend who is a Fellow of Pembroke wrote,

Thanks for the lovely photo, but I do expect that our ORGAN scholar most likely does have natural parents….

And Hugh Taylor, himself an organist, wrote:

I love the idea of an orphan scholar practising in Pembroke chapel, but it perhaps requires more detailed knowledge of the organist than is likely. Unless the blogpost was written with AI assistance which has mined the scholar’s personal info?

Judging from my mailbag, it was the nicest typo I’ve ever committed.

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