The Lindahl Letter

It's all happening. I'm pivoting to AI + Security as the central topic for The Lindahl Letter. The next weekly modules I'm going to create are all going to be pivoting to a clear security based focus each week. Content for this year of The Lindahl Letter was packaged into posts encompassing weeks 105 to 156 or 52 total blocks of content. Think year divisible by week with production spread evenly....

Substack Week 123: We are wholesale oversubscribed on AI related content Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 123 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “We are wholesale oversubscribed on AI related content.” You may have noticed that the topic for the post t...

I spent some time over the last couple of weeks looking for scholarly articles that reference AI as a service (AIaaS) [ 1 ]. Then I realized that things are changing so quickly in the landscape of AI these days that none of those articles even consider Auto-GPT [ 2 ]. Unless you have been on vacation and hiding from AI news recently you have been hearing about the advent of this plugin, multiagent...

My initial take on writing an independent study based syllabus for applied AI was to find the best collection of freely available scholarly papers that somebody could read as an onramp to beginning to understand the field. That I think is a solid approach to helping somebody get going within a space that is very complex and full of content. It’s a space that is perpetually adding more content than...

Right now at the start of 2023, I would probably highlight 3 AI trends: generative models, automation, and legislation. Before we get into those specific topics let’s zoom out for just a second and look at two different reports you could read to get a sense of what is going on right now. One of the great places to start would be with the recently released 2023 AI Index report from the Institute fo...

Flooding and astroturfing abound at the moment. Both of those things were happening before the advent of large language models (LLMs), but they have increased in frequency now that bad actors are able to just open the floodgates for content. Making large swaths of the internet that is just designed for search engine placement and self-referencial boosting has become so much easier recently. Sure a...

This is going to be an interesting edition of The Lindahl Letter. Please pardon the self-indulgence of working with ChatGPT to write a paper and ultimately expand that into a full book using prompts and the model. Sit back and relax as this will be a long one. I was able to give OpenAI’s ChatGPT a prompt of, “A paper on political debt as a concept vs. technical debt.” That created the following ou...

This week I ended up trying to find some solid academic articles to read. This time around I found a few that have publicly available downloads to share. Digging around literature related to non-mail polling methods opens the door to a lot of different directions. You will get a sense from the journals listed below that a lot of literature exists and research is benign conducted about public opini...

Searching around on Google Scholar is something that I’m pretty adept at by now. This happens to be the 116th Substack post and almost all of them have involved some type of research. Trying to get a set of the best articles on mail polling methodology was actually really challenging [ 1 ]. I know that modern polling has moved away from mail polling in general. It’s expensive. The response rate ha...

Earlier today I did end up getting ChatGPT Plus for a cost of USD $20 a month. That apparently will provide me better availability during high demand, faster response speeds, and priority access to new features [ 1 ]. I’m not sure if this subscription will be worth keeping. I’m about to open up the latest model GPT-4 and see what it is able to accomplish in terms of advanced reasoning, complex ins...

Imagine you move part of your workload to an environment that you don’t fully own. That used to be a datacenter and more recently it is probably a cloud environment. Sooner or later you might think about how to secure that environment in terms of hardware-based security or other ways to secure things. Most of the promotional pages on the internet covering this one try to bring forward the idea of...

You may remember that I listened to an audiobook during a road trip back to Kansas about AI.  Kissinger, H. A., Schmidt, E., & Huttenlocher, D. (2021). The age of AI: and our human future . Hachette UK.   Former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt has had a lot to say about the future of AI and a lot of that has been grounded in the implications of AI on society. It’s important to set the foundation of any...

Lectures related to this topic are mostly about convolutional neural networks and visual recognition systems. My searches were explicitly for autonomous vehicles and did not directly include any of the methods being deployed. That in part was due to my interest in going into higher levels of analysis this time around. My searches of Google Scholar on this topic of autonomous vehicles returned resu...

We have reached the 7th installment of the new series for 2023 related to AI. In just a couple of weeks we are going to venture out of these framing topics into the heart of my journey back into polling and sentiment analysis. Toward the end of that journey it will be very clear on the relationships between AGI, AI, and sentiment analysis. Processing to the point of understanding then adding a deg...

In total the largest knowledge graph ever created on the shoulders of giants happens to be the college academy of knowledge compiled as a part of our higher education traditions. That knowledge graph is inherently built on connections and the learning patterns of academics. It would have to be considered to be a very human based aggregate not a computer based one. It’s possible that could change o...

Right before sitting down to work on this post I recorded the audio for week 108. My voice has almost recovered all the way from catching that pandemic thing in December. It’s interesting that sustaining vocal quality would be one of the last things to stabilize from that distinctly unwanted experience. You have probably been able to hear that within the last few recorded podcasts. I just did not...

Part of what made Twitter so interesting is the diversity of argument and the townhall nature of it being the first place things show up in the feed. I’m not sure any other company or social platform could attract the same amount of hyperactive content creation users geared at news and coverage of the moment. People are arguing and I’m sure papers will soon be arriving to describe the end of socia...

This week it seemed like a good idea to take a look at some of the most highly cited AI papers. Back during week 81 of this journey into writing on Substack, I took a look at some of the most highly cited ML papers [ 1 ]. I was expecting a lot more overlap, but was pleasantly surprised at the differences. One of the papers really stood out based on the total number of citations and it’s up first....

You probably were wondering how long into the new year before a bunch of focus and attention were placed at the efforts of Hugging Face. You won’t have to wait any longer as this missive will dig into BigCode and some other efforts to use AI to build out code generating systems [ 1 ]. I was reading a TechCrunch article from Kyle Wiggers and wondering about how many different systems existed [ 2 ]....

We are now starting the third year journey of The Lindahl Letter on Substack. You can find the first two years worth of that effort combined into one manuscript right here or at any other online retailer: Lindahl, N. (2023). The Lindahl letter: 104 Machine Learning Posts. Lulu Press, Inc. https://www.lulu.com/shop/nels-lindahl/the-lindahl-letter-104-machine-learning-posts/ebook/product-y244ep.html...

My appreciation for you reading this sentence right now is very real. That holds true in the moment of writing and within my intentions moving forward. At the start of this project a bit of writing on Substack happened two years ago now. During the course of starting that effort, I had not considered the amount of effort sustaining it would require. Probably the single most sustained writing proje...

You probably have gotten a sense of the tremendous and overwhelming flood of publishing that is happening in the machine learning space. So much content is being created right now that nobody could possibly consume it all. The flood of content is real and overwhelming. That is one of the reasons that I work really hard to distill the complex topics I select into a readable format for people to con...

You end up with people who are working in a field and people who study the field of inquiry academically. Sometimes and especially within the machine learning space you end up with people who are actively working as a practitioner. Those very same practitioners of the craft of machine learning are publishing academic articles at a rate never before seen within any field of study at large within th...

One of the core topics within the machine learning space that I have studied happens to be ROI or, more to the point, an examination of just how well spent money would be in the space. You can certainly spend money on machine learning and AI related efforts as a part of a think tank, an independent lab, or a pure research institution. Within corporate spaces, pure research and development is one t...

You might remember back to Week 75 when I tried to explain the nature of overcrowding within the machine learning space and what exactly that is doing to engineering colleges. Back in 2020, Igor Susmelj wrote a piece in Towards Data Science, “How to Keep up With the Latest Research and Trends in ML” [ 1 ]. Within that paper, Igor raised awareness of a chart from Jeffrey Dean that showed machine le...