PODCAST

The Lindahl Letter

Dr. Nels Lindahl

Thoughts about technology (AI/ML) in newsletter form every Friday www.nelsx.com

technology management

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5:04

Machine learning election models

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/22

This might be the year that I finally finish that book about the intersection of technology and modernity. During the course of this post we will look at the intersection of machine learning and election models. That could very well be a thin slice of the intersection of technology and modernity at large, but that is the set of questions that brought us here today. It’s one of things we have been chasing along this journey. Oh yes, a bunch of papers exist related to the topic this week of machine

4:06

Election prediction markets

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/15

We have been going down the door of digging into considering elections for a few weeks now. You knew this topic was going to show up. People love prediction markets. They are really a pooled reflection of sentiment about the likelihood of something occuring. Right now the scuttlebut of the internet is about LK-99, a potential, maybe debunked, maybe possible room temperature superconductor that people are predicting whether or not it will be replicated before 2025 [1]. You can read the 22 page

4:38

Tracking political registrations

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/08

Trying to figure out how many republicans, democrats, and independents are registered in each state is actually really hard. It’s not a trivial task. Even with all our modern technology and the extreme power of the internet providing outsized connectedness between things and making content accessible to searches. Even GPT-4 from OpenAI with some decent plugins turned on will struggle to complete this task.Your best searches to get a full list by state are probably going to land you into the world of

2:56

Econometric election models

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/09/01

It has been a few weeks here since we started by digging into a good Google Scholar search and you know this topic would be just the thing to help open that door [1]. My searches for academic articles are always about finding accessible literature that sits outside paywalls that is intended to be read and shared beyond strictly academic use. Sometimes that is easier than others when the topics lend themselves to active use cases instead of purely theoretical research. Most of the time these searches

5:27

Polling aggregation models

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/25

I read and really enjoyed the book by Nate Silver from 2012 about predictions. It’s still on my bookshelf. Strangely enough the cover has faded more than any other book on the shelf. Silver, N. (2012). The signal and the noise: Why so many predictions fail-but some don't. Penguin.That book from Nate is sitting just a few books over from Armstrong’s principles of forecasting. A book that I have referenced a number of times before. It will probably be referenced more as we move ahead as well. It’s a

6:09

The chalk model for predicting elections

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/18

Last week we started to mess around with some methods of doing sentiment analysis and setting up some frameworks to work on that type of effort. This week we take a little different approach and are going to look at an election model. I’m actively working on election focused prompt based training for large language models for better predictions. Right now I have access to Bard, ChatGPT, and Llama 2 to complete that training. Completing that type of training requires feeding election models in

4:56

Automated survey methods

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/11

I’m still spending some time digging into notebooks. This time around the topic as you might have guessed for that inquiry is figuring out how to automate a survey or more pointedly some sentiment analysis. People are building automated phone surveys with interactive voice response (IVR) systems. The next wave of this technology will be hard to tell if it is a person or a bot. Seriously, those systems are going to keep getting better at a rapid pace. The new wave of generative large language models

5:22

Synthetic data notebooks

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/08/04

Thank you for tuning in to this audio only podcast presentation. This is week 132 of The Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for The Lindahl Letter is, “Synthetic data notebooks.”People are totally working on this one actively which I thought was pretty interesting. I have a general interest in how to create synthetic data using notebooks as it helps to provide people with lessons on how to do it from an educational based

4:59

Bulk imagine improvement

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/28

We are not to the point where some AI agent is going to be able to do this type of bulk image improvement by a verbal command. I really wanted to be able to just say, “ok computer, edit the photos in this folder to improve them and ping me when you are done.” This use case will probably show up at some point, but now is not that point in the timeline. The future of this type of computer usage is close, but not here just yet.Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent some time messing around with

4:09

Build captain fractal using Colab

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/21

We are getting closer and closer to the world envisioned in Star Trek and countless other science fiction universes where you could just ask the computer to complete some sort of task or build for you. We are starting to see what would be like an AutoGPT or a plugin style version of ChatGPT with agents that work to complete some sort of request. It’s not like they have a full built in chron system with scheduling and routines. Really actionable virtual assistants are going to show up here very

4:57

How do you use Colab in a generative way?

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/14

Working out of notebooks is an easy and lightweight way to just mess around with code. One of my all time favorite ways to go about doing that is in the Colab research space provided by the team over at Google [1]. They have an offering for a pro subscription, but you can get in and use things without a payment plan. Sure the promise of faster GPUs, more memory, and longer runtimes is enticing. If you really get deeply into the process of training models, then it might make sense for you to make

5:41

Democratizing AI system security

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/07/07

The topic for this week was a weighty one for sure. It’s one that I think will functionally happen, but I do not believe will be real in terms of actual practice. We are seeing a lot of emphasis on using these new AI systems that are popping up everywhere. People are not able to build these systems from scratch anymore. Using code from somebody else is becoming more and more a part of the process. When you look at how to democratize AI systems it is certainly about spreading usage and making these

3:36

Profiling Google DeepMind

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/30

Things have been happening with Google DeepMind. A lot of news has been dropping since I started crafting this post. I don’t want to write about the news of the moment on this one. The context and analysis within this post is going to try to be deeper than a base reaction to that recent news. The Verge (and a ton of other people) reported that, “Google’s big AI push will combine Brain and DeepMind into one team” [1]. Apparently, some drama exists around those two organizations being combined. We

4:44

Profiling Hugging Face

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/23

Something is going to have to give here pretty soon for Hugging Face or they are going to get left behind by the extended model, plugin driven, and now internet connected GPT models that some of the biggest platforms are working to take mainstream. We are seeing the real time development creating extensibility into actions from companies like OpenAI and their partner Microsoft that are going to be a foundational groundwork for how connectivity works within these models. This ecosystem is going to be

6:13

Profiling OpenAI

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/16

Security professionals the world over are concerned about what people like some of Samsung’s engineers might be doing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT services [1]. Let’s back up just a bit from that very real breaking news security reality and make sure to set the stage. Instead of starting with a complete corporate history about OpenAI, you knew that I would go out and search Google Scholar to find some of the key OpenAI related scholarly works [2]. Alternatively, you could surf over to the OpenAI website

6:02

Pivoting to AI + Security

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/09

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. This is the 3rd year of that type of writing effort. This is week 124 in that sequence and I have yelled

3:54

We are wholesale oversubscribed on AI related content

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/06/02

Substack Week 123: We are wholesale oversubscribed on AI related contentThank 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 this week changed. I called an audible and wrote a different piece of content.All that AI content has hit a

4:10

AIaaS: Will AI be a platform or a service? Auto-GPT...

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/26

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, and task targeted implementation of a GPT model called Auto-GPT. People are using it to do things. You can

5:10

Considering an independent study applied AI syllabus

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/19

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 any one person could possibly read or consume. Before you take that approach it is important to

6:31

That one with an obligatory AI trend’s post

The Lindahl Letter ·

2023/05/12

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 for Human Centered AI. Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina

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