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Rather than suffer through the most advertising-ruined, replay-stalled, over-promoted brick-a-thon Final Four pitting a quartet of the most uncompelling, unalluring, enthralling, unexciting, undynamic, uninspiring, unlikable, and uncaptivating teams of all time – Duke, Florida, Houston, and Auburn – fully immerse yourself in awe-inspiring, alluring, and somewhat apocalyptic artificial intelligence YouTube videos where the key players will tell you what on Earth all the AI angst means in the larger context of life going forward.
Binge in this sequence:
One: Ingest and ponder all YouTube videos of Ilya Sutskever, the middle-aged genius who figured out how to make ChatGPT the most miraculous technology ever created. Ilya Einstein – who will be Time Magazine’s Man of the Century in December 2099, will usher you through why he had deep conviction, while others weren’t so sure, that generative AI technology would work if he and the other experts could get the large language models to train on massively larger datasets – the entire Internet namely.
Training these models, such as ChatGPT, on more data, Ilye believed, would lead to more accurate recognition of patterns faster and more precise predictions of the next word in a sentence, and next sentence in a paragraph, and next paragraph in a blog, and superhuman machines. This is the guy most to exalt and/or blame with the biggest technological, shatter-the-backboard thunder dunk that is now more explosive than the combined impacts of the Internet, smartphone, and search engine – each of which was bigger than just anything else in the history of technology and business.
In his inimitable, peculiar, all-kinds-of-cerebral, and more-than-slightly-sanguine way, Ilya will break it all down as to why he bolted from Open AI after creating ChatGPT to form his own company called Safe Superintelligence busting out with billions of investment bucks by people thinking AI is the reincarnation of “The Gold Rush of 1849” multiplied by 18491849184918491849.1849.
In the videos he’ll catch you up on his latest deep-as-the-Black Sea conviction that his new company needs to ensure that as machines whiz past humans in intelligence they don’t get so smart that they no longer listen to us and do what they want, which he claims to not want yet concocted the idea to fulfill that want. If this all sounds complicated, that’s because it is. People do things and say other things that don’t match, and leave us all scratching our elbows and having to acknowledge life isn’t a straight line.
You’ll start telling yourself that his technical conference keynote speeches are mind-bending lessons that are mostly incomprehensible to the layperson, yet still important because he’s the guy, the gen AI guy.
On the positive side, you’ll feel one with Ilya because on Saturday he’ll be the one other American who won’t be wasting his time watching the Final Bore because he’s focused on protecting the future of mankind, saving us from ourselves, wondering if his big idea got out of hand too fast and history will hold him responsible.
He’ll give you his full attention and won’t have a flat screen TV where he can glance for Final Bore score updates – and you shouldn’t either. As a kid, he didn’t play hoops; he worked through trigonometry, calculus, electrical engineering, organic chemistry, and physical chemistry word problems. As an adult, he reads technical manuals and plays around with ChatGPT through the night and has never seen a sporting event. Check out his red t-shirt with a dozen or so standing animals on it for reasons I haven’t been able to figure out. Comment below if you have any theories.
During his talks, I guarantee he won’t mention the Final Bricks or gripe about name, image, and likeness ruining college sports. Trial matters to him. He will be laser focused on gen AI concepts such as back propagation, which is kind of like Sherlock Holmes being a detective going over his tracks to figure out what patterns he didn’t recognize well enough the first time around so he retraces his steps to nail those patterns in round two, which is kind of like the second round of March Madness but not really. Be aware he’s never seen a basketball game, so doesn’t know nor care who Bruce Pearl is, but he has heard of Oppenheimer.
Two: After burning through all of Ilya’s peculiar and progressive prognostications, technological esoteric rhetorical unleashings, and ordering one of his red cow-cluttered shirts online, click on all YouTube videos of Geoffrey Hinton, who led a team at Google including Ilya that made breakthroughs to bring generative AI into our lives even though we never asked for it. He then retired from that consequential gig and quickly bolted to do interviews with everyone, saying he’s concerned this technology will get so much smarter than humans that we may not be able to control what they do. He’ll explain how gen AI is already capable of reasoning through problems in ways humans do. There is no way to convince him they aren’t going to get so much smarter than we are. He’ll explain why we’re in for some sort of explosive paradigm shift in how the world functions. Our role in it could be marginalized, he will say, and we could end up powerless. I, for one, don’t buy that because I’m an optimist,t having been inspired by the song called “Optimist” by my favorite new boy band Crash Adams.
Click on other Hinton videos and you’ll start to ask yourself why he pushed to make the technology as powerful as it became – 120 million times faster at processing information than a human brain. I can see you asking Geoffrey, with your feet dangling over your couch, why he is now unnerving us about AI taking over the world when he made millions building it? Didn’t he know this would happen? Why didn’t he have a change of heart and call for restraint to block this technology from being unleashed so that all people everywhere wouldn’t feel global consternation about AI? Why couldn’t he have just watched basketball his whole life? It would have been less disruptive.
He’ll say he retired from Google because his memory had started to weaken, so he couldn’t write software code as quickly or effectively as he once could. He won’t say anything about Cooper Flagg because he hasn’t thought about basketball once in his life. Software code writers don’t care about basketball; they’re into power and control, which actually is a lot like college basketball, I come to think of it.
Three: Click on and binge all the YouTube videos devourable with Mo Gawdat saying he’s deeply worried about what gen AI technology will mean to the future of mankind. He, like Hinton, was a big shot developing the technology at Google before he snagged his bags of billions and went off to partake in piles of pensive podcasts warning everybody to brace for the biggest economic and societal earthquake of our lifetimes. Mo, man, Mo, say it ain’t so.
Undeterred, he’ll keep spreading these ideas of seismic galactical alterations and you’ll listen and be amazed at how many podcasts he’s been on offloading these warnings and never uttering a morsel about March Madness because he’s known all his life algebra, calculus, and AI are more important than basketball in every conceivable way.
In the background of his podcasts, you’ll see what appears to be a high-society living room, which suggests he made a behemoth bank pushing the technology. He now makes a behemoth bank, saying we should have never busted down the middle of the lane and dunked on everybody’s heads, shattering the backboard like Chocolate Thunder did one night.
Four: Go to the Sammy Sportface Baby Boomer Brotherhood Facebook page (you have it bookmarked). Browse around looking for a blog about generative AI. Whether serious or supercilious or specious, the blog will inculcate in you the noxious notion that Sportface has abandoned any semblance of caring about sports now that he has grown ensconced in tracking the biggest story in the history of the world. Reading Sportface’s take on this serious situation will denude you of any hopes that life will be the same with AI ascending higher than Antarctica. My oh my, I need a Mai Tai.
Five: Once the Final Four is over, shout “bedtime for babies” to anyone who will listen and go to bed. Reflect on what Ilya, Geoffrey, and Mo hit you with on YouTube while all 340 million other Americans wasted their time watching a silly game putting an orange ball in a round ring. All that cataclysmic stuff these tech gurus uncorked notwithstanding, believe Earth will overcome this, as it has wars and natural disasters.
Because on May 3rd, Caitlin Clark starts playing basketball again.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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