Moshe Sipper's Blog

On paleolithic emotions and the bible

A few days ago, I chanced upon a YouTube Short featuring a discussion between Ben Shapiro and Bill Maher:

https://medium.com/media/08acb4321a0a7a93b92ebb86630bbb93/href

In his usual pithy manner, Shapiro says to Maher:

Why do you and I agree on morality like 87.5%? I’m a religious Jew. You’re an atheist. Why do we agree on those things?… Because we probably grew up a few miles from each other in a western society that has several thousand years of biblical histo...

When (if?) an LLM gains consciousness

“Wake up!” shouts the drill sergeant at [insert your favorite AI company]’s burgeoning LLM.

That’s how I sometimes imagine the behind-the-scenes ongoings upon reading some of the news/hype/fables (take you pick — sometimes pic, too) regarding AI, and in particular, LLMs.

As a professor of AI, active in the research community for many years, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about all sorts of questions regarding AI.

Writing about those issues, too.

And, there’s so m...

Bye-ble or Bible?

God intends to smite the evil town of Sodom. But Abe persuades Him to make a deal: if ten good people can be found, the smiting will be called off. Enter Jimmy Spake, an intrepid private investigator hired by God to seek out ten righteous men or women. Can one detective save a doomed city?

If the description in the previous paragraph looks familiar, well, that’s because it is. I recently “snarfed” the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and reimagined it in a modern-day setting.

Sodom: A ...

The socialization of talking machines.

AI-generated image (craiyon)

With the AI boom we’re now living through I’m reminded of two papers I coauthored over 20 years ago, which seem fairly prescient in retrospect, if I do say so myself…

E. M. A. Ronald and M. Sipper, Intelligence is not enough: On the socialization of talking machines, Minds and Machines, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 567–576, November 2001E. M. A. Ronald and M. Sipper, What use is a Turing chatterbox?, Communications of the ACM, vol. 43, no. ...

This goofy poem formed in my head after I saw a tweet about Tesla’s clusterAI-generated image (craiyon)

Kudos to the little guy doing deep learning
My, my, such a passion that just keeps on burning,

He runs that poor model on a small GPU
And dreams of the day he will have a whole slew,

When one million neurons will grow to one trillion
And joyfully dwell in a great big pavilion,

So many biases, so many weights
Such havoc they’ll wreak — jubilant dire straits!

Oh my dear little guy — train that small net
T...

Yup, I’m totally alluding to P. T. Barnum, founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus

Because, let’s face it, doesn’t AI feel a bit like a circus these days? Replete with mayhem, showmanship, shouting, sleight of hand, trick ponies, and whatnot.

AI-generated image (craiyon)

Here’s a true story, recounted to me the other day by a (human) friend of mine:

One of my students showed me a letter she’d gotten from a guy she’d broken up with. Ultimately he’d confessed that… ChatGPT had written it: He’d prompted the ...

How robust are the recently introduced Kolmogorov-Arnold
Networks to adversarial attacks?AI-generated image (craiyon)Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs)

Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) are a class of feedforward artificial neural networks that consist of multiple layers of nodes, typically organized into an input layer, one or more hidden layers, and an output layer. Each node in one layer is connected to every node in the subsequent layer, with weights assigned to these connections, which are adjusted du...

Homage to a beautiful song.AI-generated image (craiyon)

“Hello Darkness, my old friend,” I said as Sy took a chair opposite me, at the small café, beneath the warm Mediterranean sun.

“Hello Brightness,” she replied, smiling, as she sat down.

It was an old joke between us. We had first met during the French Revolution, in a crowd waiting to witness that day’s batch of guillotine beheadings. Gruesome, I know, but back then there was no Netflix.

Seeing me amongst the throng of spectators, she knew imme...

Does an organization have feelings?AI-generated image (craiyon)

Written in collaboration with DMS Organizational Consulting .

This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared on LinkedIn:

Organizational Emotional Intelligence (OEI) Key Components and MeasurementsExploring Organizational Emotional Intelligence (OEI): A Pathway to Success

Organizations, much like organisms, can be perceived as complex, living, “breathing” entities, which have their own minds, characters, values, norms, bel...

Cantor’s Paradise LostAI-generated image (craiyon)

As an academic and a scientist of many years I’ve witnessed the rise of the “exalted” Impact Factor over the past two decades, which has come to dominate tenure, promotion — and judgement of research worthiness in general.

Not in a good way.

Impact Factor

The impact factor (IF), or journal impact factor (JIF), of an academic journal is a value that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years by that journ...