A New Age of Magic

https://vineeth.io/posts/2023/new-age-of-magic/

by vvoruganti • 3 years ago

72 46 3 years ago

Xcelerate• 3 years ago

The real magic will be when we can get to the point where the objective function is “return the answer to the prompt that is optimally satisfying for the specific person asking”.

minimaxir• 3 years ago

You can get pretty close to that now with a) clever system prompt engineering to incorporate user behavioral and personality metadata and b) getting said user behavioral and personality metadata, which is the harder problem.

passion__desire• 3 years ago

I think the real magic will be infusing these natural language systems with deterministic algorithms that have been developed in CS, etc. Imagine doing Dynamic Programming and Kalmal Filter in the domain of thoughts and ideas. A human being only thinks 3-4 recursion deep but these systems will be truly magical. They can very easily write books like "Reasons and Persons" by Derek Parfit

benlivengood• 3 years ago

DeepMind has https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03409 so as long as you can specify an objective scoring function you can get closer than manual prompt engineering.

johnnyworker• 3 years ago

A tool that that tells people what they want to hear is not much of a tool.

jadbox3• 3 years ago

Shower thought: Someone with no knowledge of programming but uses an LLM is a D&D sorcerer, while someone that has the understanding of CS would be the wizard class. In D&D rules, sorcerers can cast "more magic" per day than wizards as they are unencumbered with any thoughts about the technical details. Wizards can cast a vast range of complex customized spells that the sorcerer is unable to perform, and thus are able to maneuver far more complex situations.

dukeyukey3• 3 years ago

I'd say they're more like a Warlock - granted arcane power via a "patron", and powerless once their patron leaves them.

Groxx• 3 years ago

And their patron is capricious and doesn't seem to actually understand anything that the warlock wants. Less monkey paw, more "I wasn't listening, here, have X because I think I heard you say Y"

jadbox3• 3 years ago

I like it! For LLM creators that self-host their modal, they wouldn't have to worry about their patron leaving them. However, the patron only grows in power based on the wishes of other agents other than the warlock. Wizards, in theory, have unlimited power of their hardware environment [cough except DRM].

aussieguy1234• 3 years ago

Speaking of D&D, it's possible for LLMs to act as the Dungeon Master

jadbox3• 3 years ago

I have tried these, but they are all pretty bad. Like at best, they are as structured as a 6yr trying to be a DM for a group of adults.

RandomWorker• 3 years ago

This is a hilarious and fun take on ChatGTP. I can imagine that at some point we have deployed so many of these technologies that we might start living in a Terry Pratchett novel.

senectus1• 3 years ago

He would have loved lampooning LLM's/ChatGPT.

The world is a less fun place without him in it.

yurishimo• 3 years ago

The site is nearly unreadable on my 2nd gen iPhone SE unfortunately.

Given_47• 3 years ago

On my iPhone X I zoomed all the way out and it got the page to render well and scroll to work

mock-possum3• 3 years ago

Oh wow same. The sidebar needs to collapse to a top bar and get out of the way of the content - which needs a sane right margin value.

a_wild_dandan• 3 years ago

Try Reader Mode on Firefox. The article looks great, and renders how I choose — dark mode, font, etc. It’s a godsend when it works (almost always). It’s been an unfortunate necessity for my modern web experience.

Angostura• 3 years ago

... or reader mode on Safari

mortureb• 3 years ago

It’s basically unreadable on my iPhone 13 Pro because of the sidebar on the left.

startupsfail2• 3 years ago

Magic’s just science we don’t understand yet. — Arthur C. Clarke

(It used to be that making a drainage system under a tower required consultations of magicians and terminology used was including dragons.)

er4hn• 3 years ago

Please cite the wizards and dragons comment. Sounds fascinating!

mock-possum3• 3 years ago

It sounds like a reference to “Merlin and the dragons” - I don’t know whether it’s canon or apocryphal, but young Merlin (then called Emrys) has his village invaded by a warlord, who intends builds a battle tower on a nearby mountain. Uther Pendragon eventually shows up to save the day.

I remember my mom reading it to me when I was a kid - and the story itself was framed as Merlin telling Arthur himself a bedtime story when he was a newly-crowned king.

hnfong• 3 years ago

This is the Asian version, not directly related, but you probably would be interested as well. (Warning: the practice is a bit sick)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitobashira

devjab• 3 years ago

(It used to be that making a drainage system under a tower required consultations of magicians and terminology used was including dragons.)

It still does. I'm part of a hobby community that builds basically every part of houses from the ground up, but the one thing we never touch is plumbing. A lot of people aren't too keen on electrics which I guess is fair enough considering the dangers of getting it wrong, but the real dragon is water.

colonCapitalDee• 3 years ago

I think the source of LLM magic is not the compute, but instead written human knowledge. The LLM special sauce--what makes an LLM distinct from a compiler or a web server or a linter--is training on human generated input data. In fantasy novels a common trope is that humans generate magic (like a tree generates oxygen) which diffuses into the world to be used fuel for spells. Similarly, written knowledge is created by all of us in the course of our day to day lives, and is omnipresent in modern society. It fits!

paxys• 3 years ago

In fantasy novels a common trope is that humans generate magic (like a tree generates oxygen) which diffuses into the world to be used fuel for spells

Is it? I have read a lot of fantasy and have never come across this. Magic is instead always sourced from some supernatural/higher power that humans struggle to understand. If you have some examples I'd love to hear them, so I can branch out.

corethree• 3 years ago

Depends on the fantasy world. Mana or MP for example is internal.

In Chinese Wuxia mythology there's a concept of Chi. In Naruto (which isn't Wuxia but borrows a lot) it appears as chakra.

In D&D it's the weave which is this higher power.

But this digresses from the point. I think Magic is a bad analogy. When I looked into ML I was surprised to find how trivial it is.

Pretty much all of intelligence can be simplified to this single endeavor of curve fitting. LLMs, GANs, deep learning... all of it are just different ways to find a best fit curve.

What I found is that this knowledge (which is trivial to obtain) reduced the magic. Intelligence to me was no longer magical. Understanding intelligence made it less magical and more mundane.

A better analogy would be those stories about characters walking into this epic void of lovecraftian incomprehensibility expecting only madness and more questions to arise from their journey that spans eons... only to walk back in 15 minutes with the realization that the answer is just 42.

elcritch• 3 years ago

One series I'm listening to has "magic" as generated from all living creatures.

dukeyukey3• 3 years ago

Star Wars for one (midichlorians).

ryandv2• 3 years ago

    I) DEFINITION.

    Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

    (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magickal weapons”, pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magickal language” ie, that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth “spirits”, such as printers, publishers, booksellers and so forth and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)

    In one sense Magick may be defined as the name given to Science by the vulgar.

- Aleister Crowley, "Magick in Theory and Practice."

The "magickal weapons" of the 21st century are technology, engineering, and computing; a newly emerging "magickal language" is the LLM prompt; we are building new machine "spirits" in the form of ChatGPT, LLaMa, and friends.

what-no-tests3• 3 years ago

Yes all that, and also it's worth considering Magick from the psychological perspective, rather than the "magic missile" idea that lots of folks have.

Here is a link[0] to Crowley's definitions of Magick, in his view:

[0] https://sacred-texts.com/oto/aba/defs.htm

ryandv2• 3 years ago

it's worth considering Magick from the psychological perspective

That's right. Israel Regardie ("The Middle Pillar," "The One Year Manual") has more to say on viewing magick and Crowley's work through a psychological, Jungian lens, instead of a metaphysical, or even anti-scientific one.

Frummy• 3 years ago

I recently had a thought that when a meaningful piece of text/image is written/uploaded on the internet, the energy or willpower if you will spent in producing it by a human reduces entropy a bit. Up until now that entropy reduction was unmeasured and unharvested, because really who would browse through 170000 forum pages and combine the bits and pieces to produce an answer on how to do a niche little thing, but by these LLMs being trained on this data and commoditizing it, the "magic" if you will is really harvesting and repackaging informational entropy reduction.

eximius2• 3 years ago

A goal of mine that I currently lack the time or energy to execute on is a simple open world game with most of the game world rules exposed in a Forth-like API/programming language.

Then take some runes/glyphs/circles/shapes and train an NN to translate them into programs using that Forth-like. I think it would make a game world with a significant amount of wonder in the magic. And a bit of unknowability as I'd probably add a bunch of extra features (astrological cycles, environment effects, etc) that slightly affect the spells.

Xymist• 3 years ago

Why Forth, of all available languages? Unless you're riffing on that really weird series of YA fantasy where the guy falls into a world full of demons and starts converting magic into programs because it makes debugging the universe easier. Think that involved Forth. Still not sure why.

eximius2• 3 years ago

Fun book, but no. And I wouldn't describe those as YA. YA doesn't typically rant about ANSI C conferences. It's more like Discworld in that it's quite silly but not necessarily targeted at youth.

My reason for Forth is quite simple: it has extremely little structure which makes it a much much easier output target to work with.

At it's simplest, a series of glyphs could directly transliterate into Forth words. More complicated schemes are more interesting, for this purpose, but it would defeat the purpose of its use to target, say, C.

Also, Forth is easily embeddable and interpretable with only the words I want exposed. Whipping C again, but targeting C would mean a whole mess of sandboxing and C bindings which sounds much harder than Forth words or some such.

I have many other ideas too. Multiple rings of circles represent threads or some kind of concurrency, mana is used like 'gas' in the EVM to naturally denote the cost of spells and prevent abuse, possibly compile from Forth to some WASM target or something for performance, etc.

Edit: put another way, Forth-likes blur the lines between a programming language and a mutable environment of high level bytecodes which makes it a natural intermediary language for some cases.

A New Age of Magic

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