Jonathan Brun

Some thoughts on AI

AI is the talk of the town these days. Though the hype from OpenAI’s ChatGPT has now calmed a bit, there is still a general expectation that AI will revolutionize society, take jobs and solve many of our challenges. I must admit that even I was caught up in the fervor and felt that ChatGPT and large language models were a big step forward towards general artificial intelligence and the automation of many of our mundane tasks along with potential tools to make scientific breakthroughs. After a couple of years, my enthusiasm is more tempered.

AI is a catch-all term for many different techniques and approaches to building a machine that can reason in some form or another. While the current Large Language Models (LLMs) have provided a new and novel way of interacting with extremely large bodies of written material, they remain a specific set of techniques and mathematical tools. My current conclusion today (August 7, 2024), is that LLMs are helpful, but are also fundamentally limited. It is my feeling that LLMs are basically a new and more advanced form of Search. They allow you to interact with very large sets of information and receive responses that have been digested and reformulated in a way that sounds human. Though the responses sound human, they are are just reformulations of information that is already contained within the large dataset. LLMs have not clearly shown an ability to reason our provide material that is not already in existence. Yes, LLMs are taking bits of information at multiple layers and sticking them together to create something that appears new and novel, but it is unclear that it is indeed anything new and novel.

To be completely fair, a large proportion of human work in both business, administration and even the arts is all about taking various bits and pieces of information, various sources of inspiration and then creating derivative works that seem new. The evidence for this int he music industry and in writing are numerous and frequent. In that sense, AI and LLMs will have a large role to play as they are doing tasks and work that humans are doing. However, just because the LLMs can do this type of rearrangement of information does not mean they can reason outside the dataset itself.

Chess is a game with a clear winner and loser and a scale that indicates the strength of players. The scale ranges from about 400 ELO to 3200 ELO for the World Champion. This fascinating study shows how an AI trained on lower level chess games (1000 ELO) can play Chess at a higher level than its training set (1500 ELO). On the surface this may indicate that an AI can move out and above its training set, but upon closer examination this is not correct. Very often 1000 ELO players make a move in chess that is worth a 1500 ELO, but the players do not consistently play at 1500. The AI is basically able to grab the best moves from these low level players and recompose the data to play consistently at 1500. Interesting, but not true intelligence. When the AI is trained on a data set of 1500 ELO, where the higher caliber players tend to be more consistent in their play, the AI cannot really exceed the 1500 ELO level.

Beyond the technical limitations of LLMs and AI, there are a number of social considerations we can think about when talking about AI and its potential adoption. AI is creating interesting artwork, but does it matter? Humans ultimately want a few basic things. They want community, they want to create something and they want to be recognized by their pears. AI has a role to play in society and can in many cases act in helpful ways – everything from online psychologists, tutors and personal assistants – but I am skeptical it can replace our core human needs.

To take the example of Art. Humans love to create things, we see this from a young age with drawings and paintings all the way to full grown adults who have attained enough material wealth to retire but decide to continue to work and create out of pleasure or egotistical need or both. AI can create infinite quantities of art, film, video games and more, but is it worth anything? If we specifically look at the art world for clues, it is clear that humans place value on authentic art work that has a social value. We are willing to spend million of dollars on a piece of work by a famous artists that is a unique piece and is recognized by society as valuable and a status symbol. Instead of buying the expensive artwork you could by a reproduction that is completely indistinguishable from the original work with the exception of its known authenticity. Even forgetting about the million dollar work, many people will not pay for non-unique works of art because they recognize that something that is available in near-free infinite quantity has no value. This is broadly true of AI generated work: it is infinitely available and therefore of little value.

What is true of the value of AI art is also likely true of much of the material AI can and will produce. There is no point in generating mountains of AI marketing material, white papers or other items if there is a set limit on consumption. In the past the cost of creating mediocre quality marketing material was the cost of labour. Today, anyone can create unlimited marketing material at a next to nothing cost. Therefore, the quality of marketing material will come to matter much more than quantity. There are only so many hours in the day for humans and there is now far more material than we can ever consume. Humans will turn to higher quality material produced by reputable brands. More than ever, brand matters. It is critical to not dilute brand through AI shortcuts or else you end up killing the golden goose. Having actual expertise and being able to effectively communicate that to other humans though services and products will become the defining element of success. This is not a fundamental change, expertise has always been highly valued, but the landscape in which we operate has changed with more noise that experts will need to wade through to have their message heard.

At my company Nimonik, we have built a Regulatory and Industry Standards AI Chatbot that allows you to interact with laws, regulations, standards and other compliance information. We have built this with a team of two people, open source technology and infrastructure from Amazon AWS and a few other sources. It is an inhouse product and does not use commercial tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT. The tests of our chatbot over the last few months with industry experts shows that it is quite good and helpful, though not perfect. The point of the story here is that it does not take that many resources to build a robust chatbot that is quite helpful. As many AI investors are currently finding out, there is minimal ‘moats’ around these businesses and their ability to stay afloat will come under tremendous pressure from competition and self built tools.

One use case that AI/Computers is really good at is interpolating data from known data sets. This was done for Google’s project around GO and then for the work to map the structure of proteins with AlphaFold. The AI models and software they built has accomplished work that would have taken humans decades. This is very helpful. It is not however quite as revolutionary as we might thing. Google has basically built a giant calculator for protein structures. It is an important milestone that will accelerate medical research and discover and we should celebrate this accomplishment, but the tool remains a human driven tool.

Last, but not least, I recently had the chance to test Tesla’s famous Full Self Driving. I have owned a Tesla for 3 years and love it, but we did not purchase the Full Self Driving due to its cost and our rather infrequent use of our car. Tesla offered us a 1 month trial of this technology that Elon Musk keeps claiming to be near perfect and able to drive us anywhere with minimal human intervention. I was not impressed. On the highway the car did fine, but as soon as we were in town or had some slightly abnormal configuration the FSD stumbled. This is despite the fact that there are a ton of Tesla’s in Québec (maybe about 300,000) and therefore Tesla should have a very good dataset of our roads and infrastructure. From everything I saw, Tesla’s FSD is not capable of extrapolating outside of its knowledge base and really struggles with surprises. This is a fundamental problem that no one seems to have solved. The only true self driving experience is Waymo and they have solved the problem not through complex AI, but through good old fashioned super detailed mapping of roads and infrastructure. It seems that even Elon has not outsmarted a more primitive and basic approach to self-driving.

AI remains interesting and promising, but my main conclusion is that we are still far off from General Artificial Intelligence and it remains debatable whether it is even possible. For now we continue to make substantial progress in computer science, mathematics and computational power. This has produced OpenAI and other helpful products. We have stuck a label of AI on these tools and companies, but in reality they seem to be very much a continuation of our previous work that created all the technology and software we use today. Progress will continue to be made in a progressive and iterative way, the way it has always been done. Do not hope for miracles, but do expect more progress on many fronts.

The Bloodbath Continues

After 300 days or so since the October 7th attacks in Israel, the genocide of Gaza and the Westbank continues largely uninterrupted. Other mass killings in Sudan and elsewhere also continue along with ongoing massacres in Ukraine. None of these conflicts have much hope in sight.

Coincidentally, during these conflicts I have been progressively reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. If there is one message about war that echoes through time it is that it is both horrible and also a self propelling force. Once started, conflict, war, death and self-sacrifice by perfectly normal people becomes a growing snowball that carries forward despite any efforts to slow or stop it. The momentum of a conflict only stops once one side is completely destroyed or a stalemate emerges. Ukraine is leaning towards a stalemate. Gaza is leaning towards complete destruction. In Tolstoy’s Russia, the Napoleonic wars only ended when Napoleon’s 600,000 strong army was reduced to 50,000 thanks to Russian efforts, the scale of Russia and particularly, Russia’s winter. After that debacle, the end of Napoleon was inevitable.

Despite all the protests and all the efforts by Palestinian and Human Rights advocates around the world, Israel continues to erase Palestine from the face of the Earth. As the French Holocaust survivor stated, at this point the only thing we can do is document and bear witness to the genocide so that one day, maybe, some people may be held accountable. Like the genocide in Rwanda, the massacres in East Timor or the deaths by Pol Pot, the current war is a train that cannot be stopped until everyone is dead or incapacitated. There seems to be no one from the outside that will or can intercede and as long as the United States keeps sending money and weaponry to Israel, the Israeli nationalists will continue working hard to fulfill their clearly stated aim of establishing a Greater Israel that includes all of Biblical Israel and maybe more, even if the country is built on the corpses of Palestinian women and children.

There is little hope things will change, but let us at least document those are guilty and those who are complicit in these war crimes. One day we will look back on this massacre in the same way we look back on so many of our crimes.

The shame of it all

Next week I leave for a trip to China. Before COVID and before the war in Ukraine, you could fly direct from Montreal to Shanghai for less than $1,000 CAD. Today, a return trip is about $3,000 and you need to connect in another city, adding a least 10 hours or more to the trip. When I was last in China, about six months ago, you could feel the slow down of the economy and the change in tone. Things are not as buoyant as they once were.

Nearly twenty years ago in 2006, I made my first trip to China to work for Danieli Corus, a steel equipment manufacturer. That year I was a junior engineer working with the team in Beijing and helping in the small ways I could to support the senior engineers and sale staff. It was a truly remarkable experience. At that time the steel industry in China was red hot, with rapid expansion of capacity and modernization of equipment across the country. Beijing had only three metro lines and China had no high speed rail. Barely 20 years later, Beijing has 20 metro lines and China has twice as much high speed rail than the rest of the world combined. China was growing at insane rates and it was an exuberant atmosphere. Today, China is a modern and advanced country that offers a high quality of life to the vast majority of its citizens. The world around us has unfortunately changed somewhat.

With all the conflicts in the news – Gaza and Ukraine notably – it is easy to think the world is falling apart. I however took great solace in this article entitled “Beware of the Polycrisis” that outlines all the conflicts, wars, issues and nonsense we have survived in just the past 50 years. In short the world has muddled through innumerable conflicts from the cold war to genocide in Rwanda, conflict in the DRC, environmental disasters, rigged elections and much more. Are things worse than they were in the 1970s, 80s, 90s or 2000s – not really. For some people things are indeed much worse – notably Gaza and Ukraine today, but broadly speaking things are better for the vast majority of people. That is not to say that there are not tremendous problems in the world, but perhaps things are better than they seem?

What seems most worrying however is the apparent escalation in violence between large countries who have vast arsenals of weapons. The war in Ukraine is killing hundreds of thousands of people and is keeping Europe on the precipice of a broader conflict that is not prepared to fight. China is being pushed into a corner through trade wars and is turning towards Russia and the global south. Gazans are being exterminated and the support of the western political class for this massacre is creating a generational divide in many western countries. The violent suppression of student protests is making it abundantly clear that western governments have little tolerance for meaningful dissent and even less moral high ground. It certainly feels like the world is changing in a substantive way.

Geopolitical predictions are notoriously unreliable, but the person I currently most respect in geopolitics is John Mearsheimer who has laid bare the situation around the world. According to him, Ukraine will likely lose the war and cede parts of its territory. Gaza will be destroyed and its people will be killed or expelled. China will continue to rise and challenge the US. As for US domestic politics – who knows. Trump could very likely win, though that may help calm tensions on the geopolitical side. In Europe, the rise populist leaders and the right is real and scary. Debt is rapidly increasing due to interest rates. In short, we seem to be escalating unnecessary conflicts in a scary way.

What can be done? De-escalation needs to be our focus across the board. We need to de-escalate the actual violent conflicts in the world – notably Ukraine. This means negotiations and this is not appealing to western elites who think they can win, but it remains the only realistic hope for stopping a broader escalation or a long term problem in Europe. Gaza, sadly, is hopeless and the United States and the West seems intent on supporting Israel no matter what it does. Until that changes, there is not much that can be done. The biggest risk is of course US-China. This is where de-escalation matters most. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely this will happen, but we should aim to build greater bridges between the major powers in the world. In this respect, I do think China has a major role to play and I hope they take more leadership and leverage their relationships in the developing world. For my very small part, I continue to hope we can somehow calm the entire situation down. At home, we need to advocate for dialogue at the political levels and abroad we need to continue to travel, meet, discuss and attempt to build bridges wherever possible.

On Genocide and Human’s Social Nature

Before I got married I travelled to Scotland with my brothers, uncle, cousins and father. This was a form of bachelor party where we basically travelled the the country and drank some great scotch. Like many nations, Scotland has a long history of violent conflict. While Scotland’s historic conflicts with England are well publicized, what marked me most was the savage violence between the various Scottish communities or clans.

To be fair, murderous genocidal violence between neighbours is much more common than we care to imagine. Today, our desire to crush our neighbours is carried out in small claims courts, in passive aggressive comments and perhaps a bit on social media. However, a few hundred years ago, neighbours often engaged in cycles of raving violence that would lead to raids and massacres where no one was spared. This is of course not specific to Scotland in any way. European wars of religion, the genocide in Rwanda or even the massacres between North American native tribes are well documented. Sometimes, simply standing in a place reinforces the memory of our past sins.

When we were in Scotland, I can recall standing at the bottom of a grass knoll reading one of those historic plaques that commemorates a place. Those plaques that we often walk right by often do carry powerful stories and lessons. On that plaque, somewhere in the hills of Scotland, there was told the story of two warring clans that fought for generations and centuries. One clan attacked another and in vengeance, the other clan retaliated – sometimes decades later – by coming to the village and killing man, woman and child. They burned each other to death by locking them in churches and burning the church down with everyone inside. Human’s have many great attributes, but our ability to carry out vengeful acts and carry hate is truly remarkable – it should not be underestimated.

A few years later I visited the Cathare region of France. This region borders Spain and includes a part of France that was once inhabited by a Catholic sect. As Wikipedia outlines,

The Cathars originated from an anti-materialist reform movement within the Bogomil churches of the Balkans calling for what they saw as a return to the Christian message of perfection, poverty and preaching, combined with a rejection of the physical. The reforms were a reaction against the often perceived scandalous and dissolute lifestyles of the Catholic clergy.

Wikipedia

In 1206, a Crusade was called on the Cathars by Pope Innocent III. This Crusade led to the massacre of most of the Cathars, with testimonies at the time speaking of the streets being filled with the blood of women and children who were all unceremoniously killed by raving mobs looking for land, wealth and power. Beyond the massacre itself, what is interesting is the fact that the build up to the violence took over two hundred years and ultimately exploded onto the scene with a single event. Not unlike the killing of Archduke Ferdinand that led to World War I or the attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 6th or the events of September 11th, 2001, a single event leads to the unleashing of a torrent of unrequited violence. Of course, the event is the proverbial straw that broke the camels back and some other event, eventually would have triggered the pent up rage and lust for land. Wikipedia explains

Between 1022 and 1163, the Cathars were condemned by eight local church councils, the last of which, held at Tours, declared that all Albigenses should be put into prison and have their property confiscated. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 repeated the condemnation. Innocent III’s diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism were met with little success. After the murder of his legate Pierre de Castelnau in 1208, and suspecting that Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse was responsible, Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars. He offered the lands of the Cathar heretics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms.

Wikipedia

The Cathars are no more, their land, castles and wealth now belong to France and the Catholic church. This story is far from unique. What can we learn from our ability to inflict great harm on our fellow man? Why has so little in over the course of the centuries. As Israel carries out its massacre of Gaza (now over 30,000 dead or so), likely with the plan to occupy the land and seek vengeance, what can we do? What is most remarkable is not so much that human’s have not fundamentally changed, I think that is obvious, but rather that our institutions and the live-streaming of the violence in Gaza has not led to meaningful action by power brokers. No country is sticking its neck out for Palestinians, just as no people stoke out their neck for the Cathars, those Scottish villages or the nameless other communities that have been massacred over the centuries.

My main lesson from having looked at these disasters is a rather simple one. Humans, at their heart, are social creatures. More than anything else, we want to by part of a group. This is our core and most important desire. Breaking free from that group to contradict the group’s beliefs is something very few of us do – whether we care to admit it or not. Perhaps 1% of us do it in some meaningful way. It is said that if 3% of the population protests a policy, a genuine revolution can happen. The long and short of it is we just want to fit in. Historically speaking – Social homo sapien survives and the annoying homo sapien fact checkers get killed or banished.

If we want to reduce violence and massacres, we have to take into account the social bonds that link groups together and that pit groups against each other. Thomas Hobbes famously proposed the Leviathan which meant centralizing force in the state and taking it away from local communities and warlords. This has generally worked quite well for maintaining peace within states. However, since to Leviathan has been created to regulate states and it seem unlikely states would relinquish the ultimate power of violence, alternative methods must be developed. Bodies such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court play important roles, but these organizations are broadly speaking reactive. They react after the fact to events and conflicts, they are not particularly good at preventing or interceding during an active conflict.

While it would be nice to hope that governments and para-national institutions might create systems to help prevent group violence, my strong suspicion is that is is wishful thinking. Who is ultimately responsible for what is happening in Palestine, in Myanmar, in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in other conflict areas. The short answer is of course no one is solely responsible, it is a collective failure. Civil society has a unique role to play in this light. The only groups that may be able to reduce group violence are other groups of people who share a common interest and purpose. The groups we need to help reduce unnecessary violence are people who are knowledgeable and trained in human nature. C

Civil society has peace advocates and they can generally be divided into two categories – broad peace groups that do not target a specific cause (i.e. World Beyond War) or those that do have a specific conflict in mind (i.e. Jewish Voices for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices,…). However, as far as I can tell, all of the groups that I have found seem to focus on spreading the Truth about a conflict and its costs in the hope this will reduce violence. The thing is, there is no Truth when we look at it through the prism of a social organization. When we view an issue through a social lens, the opinion of our unit matters as much, if not more, than any objective truth. If we ignore this reality, we will not succeed in affecting change.

The most helpful tools I have found to address this challenge are those of Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institute. Gene Sharp pioneered the academic work on non-violent struggles and he makes many valid points about the prospects of peace movements and disarmament. One point that stood out was his insistence that groups will never give up violence if they believe it will lead to subjugation. The possibility of genuine subjugation is not that important, but it is critical if there is a perception of genuine subjugation. No amount of rational discussion, sharing of facts or highlighting of atrocities will change the outcome of a conflict if a party still feels threatened by subjugation. The only way to break through a logjam of emotional social bonds is through some form of political jujitsu where you leverage social and emotional reality to affect change. This is difficult.

If we want to reduce unnecessary violence, we must address the gap in our toolkit that is preventing us from slowing or stopping the massacres we see unfolding under our very eyes (or computer screens). The end of national conflict is not possible, not is it desirable. The end of violent war is possible. Conflict, group behaviour and social dynamics will be with humans forever and we must therefore create groups and institutions that can work towards affecting change in society that will break through the social bonds that lead to genocide and massacres.

The Failing Struggle of Palestinian Human Rights Groups

The ongoing massacre in Gaza marks an unprecedented chapter in Palestine’s tragic history. With over 11,000 civilians brutally killed, half of whom are innocent children, and tens of thousands left physically and emotionally scarred, there’s no comparable violence in Palestine’s past. The closest parallels lie in the horrific massacres of Rwandans in the ’90s, the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the Indonesians under Suharto – hardly humanity’s proudest moments. Though the current Gazan death toll hasn’t reached the hundreds of thousands, as a percentage of the population, it rivals the scale of those atrocities.

Despite this staggering loss of life, Palestinian human rights groups have, regrettably, failed to shift the political landscape, and no state has taken meaningful action to aid the Gazans facing death. Why? After 75 years of conflict, it’s time to ask what’s going wrong. Massive protests, sit-ins, blockades, and media campaigns by these groups have yielded next to nothing.

Having collaborated with some of these groups for the past 15 years, my primary observation is their profound lack of understanding of how political change occurs. They seem oblivious to power structures, influence dynamics, and the intricacies of lobbying. Their view of politics is overly simplistic, fixated on government officials, while they disregard the influential corporations, non-profits, pro-Israel lobby groups, and individuals shaping governmental decisions. Despite advocating for training and research into societal power structures, many Palestinian human rights groups claim to be too occupied with petitions, emails, meetings, and protests. The remarkable failure to recognize that 75 years of effort has fallen short is baffling.

The core issue lies in the human rights groups’ reliance on tools and communication tactics that preach to the choir, missing the mark with the broader audience. In contrast, pro-Israel groups have adeptly engaged across society, working within existing structures to shape a narrative that aligns with mainstream voters and party donors. It’s like the two groups are playing tennis, but the Palestinian human rights groups find themselves on a different court, continually hitting the ball against an impenetrable brick wall. The brick wall may return the ball, but victory against it is impossible.

The primary challenge faced by Palestinian groups is that pro-Israel advocates have successfully shaped a narrative convincing the public that there’s no alternative to the current situation. Politicians and mainstream voters often side with Israel, believing it has a right to defend itself, justifying Israeli aggression – even when it goes too far. This narrative is deeply embedded in Western societies’ power structures. Non-Western societies often view the conflict as not their problem or feel powerless due to the American influence. Until Palestinian human rights groups offer a narrative positioned as a credible alternative to violence, they are destined to fail.

Numerous examples demonstrate alternatives to violence. One crucial mistake made by non-violent advocates is the use of the term “non-violence,” which often conveys pacifism or subjugation. Gene Sharp, years ago, highlighted that given the choice between subjugation and violent resistance, people will choose violence. No population will indefinitely surrender their right to dignity and independence. However, alternatives to violent confrontation exist. The terminology is critical, and I prefer the term “counterviolence.” It implies action and fighting, yet rejects violence as the solution. Numerous examples, from Gandhi and King to the Maori in New Zealand and Mandela, demonstrate the effectiveness of counterviolence. Even the Indian response to the terrorist attacks by Pakistani groups underscores this (link).

To advocates of Palestinian human rights groups, I wish you the best. But more importantly, take the time to understand how politics truly works. Yelling, screaming, email campaigns, and protests are futile unless they disrupt the existing power structure. Ask yourselves: Are your actions challenging the power structure of the society you operate in?