Hoboken pigeons

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis [Not surprising]

MIT proved every major AI model is secretly converging on the same "brain."

It’s called the “platonic representation hypothesis,” and it’s one of the most mind-blowing papers you’ll ever read.

You train a vision model purely on images. You train a language model purely on text.… pic.twitter.com/1fubIZUJuT

— How To AI (@HowToAI_) April 27, 2026

https://t.co/64wCt3dWzt

— How To AI (@HowToAI_) April 27, 2026

In our recent work, we show that representational similarity metrics used to measure such trends can “converge” just because models get wider/deeper. After calibration, we show that the global/spectral scaling trend largely vanishes and propose the alternative Aristotelian view…

— Fabian Gröger (@FabianGroger) April 27, 2026

John Oliver goes off on chatbots

Those new AI metrics: From AGI to bragawatts

Erin Griffith, How Do You Measure A.I. Firms’ Gargantuan Energy Plans? In ‘Bragawatts.’ NYTimes, April 26, 2026

The term started more than a decade ago in the energy industry, used to describe power from a solar or wind project that had no chance of being built. Last year, A.I. executives began boasting with increasing boldness about their plans. A.I. watchers, including Waldemar Szlezak, the head of infrastructure at the private equity firm KKR, repurposed the term in a Financial Times column imploring investors to look past the A.I. hype and focus on the reality of today’s power grid. Since then, the term has popped up in media headlines, analyst reports and on social media, typically with a healthy dose of skepticism about how quickly such projects can realistically be built.

The numbers being announced are staggering. Nvidia estimated that as much as $4 trillion would be spent on A.I. infrastructure this decade. OpenAI said it had committed to spend $1.4 trillion to build data centers around the world. (It later lowered that target to a mere $600 billion.)

Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology, a supply chain services firm, said that projects highlighting a gigawatt or more of energy are the most likely to be bragawatts.

“That’s where you can have some scratching of the heads,” he said.

Likewise for any infrastructure projects announced by companies that haven’t already secured the land to build the project, he noted. “That’s definitely the braganomics.”

There's more at the link.

The play of light on a wall

 

Perhaps Ukraine has replaced America as leader of the free world

David French, Meet the New Leader of the Free World, NYTimes, Apr. 26, 2026.

A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the western alliance, including in the war against Iran.

Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.”

If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.

Events on the ground and in world capitals are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. First, the strategic situation in the Ukraine war seems to have changed. Last week, Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and one of the most astute analysts of the war, wrote that Ukraine has largely stabilized the frontline in eastern Ukraine, deepened its coalition, isolated Russia diplomatically and developed an indigenous arms industry that makes it less dependent on external support.

It’s no longer accurate to think of Ukraine as a desperate underdog; it’s becoming an independent power. Even as it fights for its life against Russia, it’s reportedly reaching defense deals with the Gulf states and with the United States — and this time it’s Ukraine that’s providing military assistance.

In February 2025, Donald Trump mocked Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump said. In April 2026, Ukraine has enough cards left that it’s sharing them.

This might be difficult for many readers to grasp — given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy — but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the western world may well be the Ukrainian Army. While the precise numbers are classified, the Atlantic Council estimated in 2025 that Ukraine had roughly a million men and women under arms, the vast majority of whom serve in the ground forces.

America’s total force is larger than Ukraine’s, but to put the size of Ukrainian land forces in perspective, the combined size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is around 620,000. It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces — especially when it comes to combat with a great power.

There's more at the link.

Lester Bowie - The Great Pretender

Waffles for breakfast

A case for regulating AI

Paul Ford, Can an A.I. Company Ever Be Good? NYTimes, Apr. 26, 2026.

Artificial intelligence can be wondrous, but the technology underneath is more than a little monstrous. It eats up all the words in the world, from blogs to books, often without permission. It burns whole forests’ worth of energy, digesting that raw material into its models, and gulps billions of gallons of water to cool down. These are the same qualities we perceive in Godzilla, but distributed. Is it any wonder that the Japanese word “kaiju,” or strange beast, has “AI” smack in the middle?

Mere greed didn’t get us here. In fact, ethics did. The big A.I. labs’ starry-eyed founders believed that the only way to stop the looming threat of a superintelligence that might kill us all was to create an aligned A.I. that would remain fond of humans. A friendly Godzilla could stop bad Godzillas before they got to Tokyo Bay.

Lessons of recent history:

Over three decades of watching the tech industry and watching big companies grow from tiny teams to global powers, I’ve observed the same pattern: Ethics don’t scale up. Tech companies like to start with a mission. Google wanted to connect the world’s information; Microsoft wanted to put a computer on every desktop; Twitter wanted to give all people a platform to publish their thoughts. These are good ideas — the stuff of TED Talks. But users show up with their own beliefs and ideas, by the millions. As a tech founder, you end up putting enormous work into making users behave (and stopping them from breaking the law). Lawsuits pour in, saying you did wrong, some because you’re a convenient target.

All the while, money keeps gushing in. You start out transparent, sharing your journey, but then before an initial public offering of shares, you must honor the S.E.C.-mandated quiet period and restrict promotional communications. After that, the transparency never quite returns. The market demands a rising stock price. Your company still makes a lot of software, but a huge amount of time goes to tax strategy and compliance.

At that scale, people start to blur together, and human users can become aggregate pools of statistics and growth vectors that go up and down — a mulch into which you plant your products.

The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale. Truly ethics-bound organizations — the U.S. justice system, the American Medical Association, the Catholic priesthood — have hard scaling limits. Their rules run deep, and their requirements to serve are so onerous that only a few people can do the job. Punishments for transgressors include losing their licenses, being defrocked and being disbarred. Software industry people might have good degrees and are often good people, but they are making it up as they go along. They take no oath, are inconsistently certified and can only be fired, not exiled from the trade.

What to do? Regulate:

But regulation is absolutely in the interests of both America and the big A.I. companies themselves. Let me add two more terms people should know: “Google zero” and “model collapse.” Google zero (coined by Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge) is when Google stops sending traffic to websites and just provides an A.I. answer instead. When that happens, websites get less traffic, sell fewer ads and make less money. As a result, they may not be able to produce as much content. Model collapse is related: It’s when the A.I. models run out of knowledge to digest. What then? Do they excrete their own prose to redigest? Do they just give up?

Silicon Valley types like to say that data is the new oil. I think that’s right in two ways: Data is valuable, but it’s also a commodity, and these new A.I. tools are infrastructure. We regulate the electric grid, so why not these?

In this new world, there are so many new things to regulate: Deepfakes, A.I. liability, copyright rules, model bias concerns and ecological costs top the list. And we will also need to protect the digital commons and incentivize people to write and do things online.

There’s more at the link.

Pink cherry blossoms

Remarkable though they are, LLMs aren't all that, and probably never will be. But they capture part of the formula.

Are LLMs really more important than fire or electricity?

“Honestly, a ton of what we’ve developed in my lifetime amounts to scaling up the delivery of information and entertainment and the frictionlessness of certain financial transactions. These are real improvements! ... But…

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) April 24, 2026

When the cat chooses you

I do not have a cat. I’ve never had a cat, and yet this cat came by randomly (no idea where from) and came into my house. Do I now have a cat? Is that how it works? pic.twitter.com/nTT6wSgNMQ

— Sara Mary ⭐❤️ (@saniyafatma1278) April 25, 2026

Moving Beyond Trump to a Brave New World

Some Young People Think No Kings Is Old News, NYTimes, April 24, 2026.

On April 14 Thomas B. Edsall published an op-ed entitled, Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?. It provoked a number of interesting responses. Here is one of them:

To the Editor:

Re “Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, April 14):

As a Gen Z participant in No Kings who has been dismayed to find myself quite alone, demographically speaking, at each protest, I have thought long and hard about how this came to be. I believe that Mr. Edsall’s essay accurately underscores many of the contributing factors. Here are two more to consider.

First, the protests evoke an America that my generation feels we don’t know. The No Kings movement centers largely on the idea of restoration — of democratic principles, political normalcy and American decency. Gen Z, having come of age in the Trump era of political discord and the erosion of democracy, has hardly known any of these things.

Second, precisely because the No Kings protests evoke the past, they fail to appeal to our appetite for change. Young people by nature desire to reform, rectify, reshape. We want to tear down the existing structures we deem unjust and build better ones in their place. To stand against apartheid, sexual harassment or police brutality is to dismantle the present and construct the future.

While the notion of restoration is a noble one, it simply does not motivate people my age in the same way the promise of radical change does. It implies a return to the status quo, and for a generation that considers the status quo one of great injustice, it is fundamentally unpalatable.

Juliana Birkenkamp Boulder, Colo.

I understand that response. A year ago I, when the depredations of the second Trump administration were becoming obvious, I published an article in 3 Quarks Daily, Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. That title alone makes Ms. Birkenkamp's point. Here are my opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I understand her second point as well, and share it. I don't want to return to the world of my youth. That's gone, forever. I want to move forward. Just how we are to do that, that is not at all clear to me. The best I can manage at the moment is to imagine where we might be over a century in the future. Here's a glimpse of what might be: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper. Here is the abstract from that paper:

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a "Fourth Arena" of existence-beyond matter, life, and human culture-that emerges through human-AI interaction. Through speculative narrative (first section) and philosophical dialogue with Claude 3.7 (second and third sections), I argue that play, rather than economic utility, will become the defining characteristic of human value and meaning in an automated future. As AI systems assume utilitarian functions, humanity's capacity for non-instrumental play becomes increasingly central to our identity and contribution. The manuscript represents preliminary work toward a larger project titled The Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising, which envisions play as the essential bridge into a post-economic society where human flourishing transcends productivity-based value systems.

Recursive Language Models, a very clever workaround

MIT just made every AI company's billion dollar bet look embarrassing.

They solved AI memory. Not by building a bigger brain. By teaching it how to read.

The paper dropped on December 31, 2025. Three MIT CSAIL researchers. One idea so obvious it hurts. And a result that makes… pic.twitter.com/swjYo2WagY

— Elias Al (@iam_elias1) April 24, 2026

Friday Fotos: To and from

Yann LeCun Clarifies the record

1. I never said LLMs were not useful. They are, particularly with all the bells and whistles that are being added to them. I use them.
2. A robot-rich future can't be built with AIs that don't understand the physical world and don't anticipate the consequences of their actions.…

— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) April 24, 2026

LOL! 

Of course he's right about LLMs, especially about all those bells and whistles. Those add symbolic control to the core neural net capabilities of LLMs. And of course he's right about the need to predict what's happening in the physical world. Robots need that and LLMs cannot provide it. Next-token prediction is a different beast, even if those tokens are about things happening in the physical world.