Photon-based chips vs electron-based chips? It's interesting that photons and electrons are closely related: two neutral photons can become an electron-positron pair and vice versa.
The paper mentions that their photonic chip is less precise than an electronic one, but this looks like an advantage for AI. In fact, the stubborn precision of electron-based processors that erase the quantum nature of electrons is what I think is preventing the creation of real AI. In other words, if a microprocessor is effectively a deterministic complex mechanism, it won't become AI no matter what, but if the quantum nature is let loose, at least slightly, interesting things will start to happen.
There are certainly infinitely non-halting automata on deterministic electronic processors.
Abstractly, in terms of constructor theory, the non-halting task is independent from a constructor, which is implemented with a computation medium.
FWIU from reading a table on wikipedia about physical platforms for QC it would be possible to do quantum computing with just electron voltage but typical component quality.
So phase; certain phases.
And now parametic single photon emission and detection.
"How do photons mediate both attraction and repulsion?" (2025) [as phonons in matter] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42661511 notes re: recent findings with photons ("quanta")
The energy level involved for pair production is astronomically far away from the application discussed here, not to mention the intensity required due to the infinitesimally tiny cross section.
This is more using matter as an intermediary for interaction at far lower energy levels, along the lines of Kerr or Pockels.
Corporations don't need human workers, they need machines, the proverbial cogs that lack their own will and implement the will of the corporation instead. AI will make it happen: human workers will be managed by AI with sub-second precision and kill whatever little creativity and humanity the workers still had.
> The underlying theory in all of these cases is that while color is sensory, unstable, and chaotic, form is rational, stable, and pure.
And pure reason is inhuman.
Color represents emotions, form represents reason. Since emotions is a big part of human nature, the loss of color means the western society has been sliding into a depression, and the west is depressed because it's falling under the influence of the origin of this colorless stereometric brutalism.
I get this feeling when I visit certain places with beton brute architecture, and I always wonder what kind of suffering did the architect go through to design something like that?
The historicity of those events is a distraction. What matters is this is a symbolical story of how any soul can ascend from the prison of its own persona, with all its egocentric thoughts and desires, to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus most likely walked this path to prove it's possible, but it shouldn't distract you from the fact that this symbolical struggle and crucifixion is taking place in every human. It's also important to realise that this story isn't unique to Christianity. All major religions of the present and of the past tell the same message, using different symbols appropriate for the culture of the time. This message is, in fact, the only reason religions exist at all.
> Monetized “brainrot” reels is generative AI’s killer app
These images provoke dark, negative emotions. This type of emotions are heavier and thus they feel more intense. This is why many users (Instagram addicts) have the backwards desire to repeat these emotions, even though they understand that this will do no good for them. So they find more images like that, their mind reflects the images in thoughts to provoke the heavy emotions. Slowly their mind warps to adapt to the kind of "content" it's trained to watch and the users get stuck in this warped thoughts <-> dark emotions loop. In the near future these Instagram reels will become interactive and we'll get the ultimate AI soul killer app.
Internet unites the world. It must be united, but there are two ways to do that: it can be a union of the free or it can be a tyranny of one. The two futures may happen simultaneously, but for different people, based on their preferences. This is what's fueling the feeling of doom for many. Moreover, the world must be united at three levels: mental, emotional and physical. The grand empires of the past tried to unite the world with armies at the physical level. The hierocraties of the mediaeval ages tried to do the same with religion at the emotional level. The Internet is trying to do this now at the mental level. Just like in the past, some want to inspire the people with a common ideal, while others want to unite the people by force, only this time it will be mainly applied to our thoughts.
The real test for image generators is the image->text->image conversion. In other words it should be able to describe an image with words and then use the words to recreate the original image with a high accuracy. The text representation of the image doesn't have to be English. It can be a program, e.g. a shader, that draws the image. I believe in 5-10 years it will be possible to give this tool a picture of rainforest, tell it to write a shader that draws this forest, and tell it to add Avatar-style flying rocks. Instead of these silly benchmarks, we'll read headlines like "GenAI 5.1 creates a 3D animation of a photograph of the Niagara falls in 3 seconds, less than 4KB of code that runs at 60fps".
Why is that “the real test for image generators”? I mean, most image generators don't inherently include image->text functionality at all, so this seems more of a test of multimodal modals that include both t2i and i2t functionality, but even then, I don't think humans would generally pass this test well (unless the human doing the description test was explicitly told that the purpose was reproduction, but that's not the usual purpose of either human or image2text model descriptions.)
The paper mentions that their photonic chip is less precise than an electronic one, but this looks like an advantage for AI. In fact, the stubborn precision of electron-based processors that erase the quantum nature of electrons is what I think is preventing the creation of real AI. In other words, if a microprocessor is effectively a deterministic complex mechanism, it won't become AI no matter what, but if the quantum nature is let loose, at least slightly, interesting things will start to happen.
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