1/ Mon Sept 26, 1977, 45 years ago today, I rode my bicycle up Page Mill Rd in Palo Alto, under 280, right on Arastradero, then up a driveway to a delapidated semi-circular wooden building. I walked through the front door at one end and entered the future. I have never left. 2/ I was at my new workplace, SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where we had facilities unimagined elsewhere, and where I got to rub shoulders with the greats of AI and Computer Science.

The fetish that everything should be learned from big data sets rather than developing algorithms for intelligent systems seems like Soviet Lysenkoism where it was believed that all properties of crops were absorbed from the environment. Millions of people starved to death. 1/4 The wait in the first half of the 21st century for Level 5 autonomy to be practical for automobiles is starting to feel like the wait for practical nuclear fusion reactors in the second half of the 20th century. Oh, yeah, and also in the first half of the 21st century. 2/4

1/7 It is good to be aware of the literature. Shannon and McCarthy describe a `neural network' doing what GPT-3 does in their intro (pg vi) to Automata Studies, Princeton University Press, 1956. 2/7 `Such a machine, in a sense, for any given input situation (including past history) merely looks up in a "dictionary" the appropriate response. With a suitable dictionary such a machine would surely satisfy Turing's definition but...

1/13 How to revolutionize AI and become famous. First consider a) through e), then follow the instructions. 2/13 a) In second wave neural networks in the 1980's back propagation was invented (twice) but computation power was low and there were no good competition ready training sets.