Archival Images of AI Playbook

Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning, and one of the most celebrated scientists of our time, told a leading AI conference in Toronto in 2016.

LAGOS — Adegunji Kazeem vividly remembers the day his life fell apart. It was December 4, 2019. Kazeem was a final-year student at the University of Lagos and writing his undergraduate thesis, a requirement for graduation.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning, and one of the most celebrated scientists of our time, told a leading AI conference in Toronto in 2016.

This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research. Artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI made headlines again, this time with DALL-E 2, a machine learning model that can generate stunning images from text descriptions.

In Antoine de Saint Exupéry's tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week.

In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world.

There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading papers from Sci-Hub.

We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to. plagiarism

Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]

Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the “I”s aren’t Jonathan Lethem; they’re Jonathan Rosen writing in The Talmud and the Internet about John Donne, or William Gibson in a Wired article about William Burroughs, or David Foster Wallace on a grad school seminar, or Brian Wilson in a Beach Boys song.

by Manuel DeLanda

The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow the rest of the paper. I will then discuss a few of the ideas put forward by open-source philosophers (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond) focusing not on their weaknesses but on their practical consequences. In particular, Stallman's achievements go beyond the creation of programs and involve the design of a contract (the GNU General Public License, or GPL) which has been arguably as crucial to the success of the movement as any piece of software. The spirit of the license is clearly informed by Stallman's moral philosophy but its unintended consequences go far beyond it. Similarly, Eric Raymond's attempts at an ethnography of the movement, and to distill "rules" which capture its dynamics, fall short of success but he has in addition provided good material to study those unintended consequences....