The personal website of Joshua Ballanco.
There are certain phrases that we use without thinking much about their deeper meaning. How often have you said “it’s like riding a bike” without considering that the bicycle wasn’t invented until 1817. One has to wonder what, for example, Mozart might have said to indicate that a thing was easy to remember how to do even after a period of absence. Perhaps he would have said “it’s like playing the…
In the first post in this series I made an extraordinary claim about research I’ve been doing into a potentially revolutionary adaptation of the transformer architecture. Before we can look at the details of what I’ve been researching and how, and more importantly why, it has been able to achieve these results, we need to take a step back all the way to the beginning of AI research. Actually, we…
I have found it!
One of the most wonderful things about kids is all the ways in which they force you to look at the world anew. Take, for example, the first time a kid asks about a seed in their food. The pure amazement in their eyes when its explained to them that this tiny thing, that they were about to chomp down on, could instead be planted into some soil and grown into a whole new tomato, or cucumber, or corn…
My second programming job was with Patch, a small startup that had been acquired by AOL. Shortly after I started that position, AOL also acquired Huffington Post. At Patch we focused on local, small-town journalism, compared to Huffington Post which had a much larger, national scope. We also had completely separate technology stacks. Still, on the off chance that they might have something we could…
The concept of “play” is incredibly interesting. If you’ve ever had a kitten or puppy, you know that play is not unique to humans. Evolution would suggest, then, that play must serve some purpose, or at least that it must confer some sort of advantage sufficient that it was not selected against.
It is not uncommon for popular culture to pick up on a concept from science and twist it until it is nearly unrecognizable. The concept of the “technological singularity” is no exception. Still, when the singularity is talked about as “the machines taking over” or the point at which we all “upload our consciousness to the cloud”, we have strayed so far from the term’s original meaning that it is…
In two earlier posts I covered a bit of the history of the current batch of AI models, what they are good at, and what they’re not so good at. Had I published those posts a year earlier, we probably could have left the story there, but unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s clear that the situation has evolved rather rapidly. I will try, then, with this post to conclude the story of how we…
I had just wrapped up my Ph.D. dissertation defense and was waiting outside the room while my committee conferred. After a few minutes, they called me back in to hear their verdict. The head of our department addressed me directly. “We are going to grant you your Ph.D.,” he began, “on one condition: you have to promise to continue this line of research.”
Forty is an interesting number. It seems to show up throughout literature, be it Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves, the Israelites wandering for forty years in the wilderness, or Jesus fasting for forty days and nights in the desert. One Thousand is a similarly interesting number. In literature we have Helen of Troy’s face that “launched a thousand ships” and Juliet wishing Romeo “A thousand times…