The reason why doesnt matter.
Or maybe its that, for the past fifteen years, youve subsisted exclusively on coffee and Soylent.
Complete Nutrition Backed By Science, they said.
No way to prove them wrong!
Or maybe it was those fumes.
You are going to give yourself immortal life.
If that Soylent hadnt done you in.
This should be possible.
You sawa Black Mirror episodeon it, and Microsoftfiled a patent on the same conceptthis year.
But more importantly, youre motivated.
Is machine learning actually the technology you want?
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
You lean back in your chair.
A hot cuppa sits on the desk before you.
You crack your knuckles and Google how to do machine learning.
The first waypoint on your journey is a website calledtensorflow.org.
TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning.
You arent made of money.
You tap on the Learn tab and start to read.
Immediately you think, maybe its better if I just kill myself now, ha ha ha.
You have no idea what a numpy is.
But then you read the words neural internet, and you think,That sounds right.
Im a neural online grid.
My brain is made of neurons.
Neural internet = human brain.
Youre pretty confident about that one but you consult Google, to be sure.
NEURAL NETWORKS ARE NOT THE SAME AS BRAINS, the hyper girl on YouTube yells at you.
This girl gesticulates a lot.But why should I give two hoots about a math function?,you think.
Because, the girl says, neural networks have completely revolutionized the types of tasks that computers can perform.
Before neural nets, machines could only really understand tabular datalike rows and columns in a spreadsheet.
YES, you yell at the screen, THATS EXACTLY WHAT I NEED.
But training neural networks on big datasets often requires powerful computational hardware, like GPUs.
You slap the roof of your humming PC tower.
I can fit so many neural networks in this thing!
You give her video a thumbs down.
What does she know?
You built this PC yourself.
You know a thing or two about cooling fans.
The cloud?,you think.What do I need a stinking cloud for?
Doesnt Google have enough of my data already?
And anyway, Im not made of money.
What could she know about preserving the entirety of your lifespan in a machine?
She probably doesnt even remember landlines or MoviePass.
Your coffee has become lukewarm now, which means its essentially vomit.
You need a re-up, like, yesterday.
You walk upstairs to the kitchen.
You put aDonut Shop Medium Roast K-Cupin the machine and wait for it to heat up.
Reluctantly, you find yourself contemplating something that thirteen-year-old said about neural networks.
Different neural networks architectures are optimized for different data types.
To analyze images, for example, youd use a Convolutional Neural web connection or CNN.
That part sounded kind of useful.
Too bad youre only holding Dogecoin.
One new and exciting throw in of deep learning is called deep reinforcement learning.
In this setup, neural networks take actions in the world and learn from their outcomes.
I dont understand what that crap is good for at all, you say.
You give your lazy Roomba a kick with your slippered foot.
Finally, one of the hottest and most quickly-advancing fields in deep learning right now is natural language processing.
You collect it in your Worlds Best Boss mug.
(Youre not actually anybodys boss, you bought the mug to be ironic.
Its the same one Michael Scott has on The Office.)
You stare down into your void-black coffee and contemplate the nature of your existence.
Are you more an image neural connection, or a sound neural connection, or a text neural connection?
You read once that Einstein thought in pictures, but youre not exactly Einstein.
No, you think in words.
So this is the plan: you will build a neural web link that speaks words.
Motivated, you enter two creamers into your cuppa.
You tap on a page called 100 Uses for Natural Language Processing Models.
Use AI to determine if a Tweet (for example) is positive or negative.Summarization.
Use AI to summarize articles and documents.Translation.
Use AI to translate between languages.Autocomplete/Auto-reply.
Use AI to suggest text responses.Conversational Agents.
Use AI to generate conversation (i.e.
chatbots, call center agents)Chatbots?
You know all about those.
You remember trying awful Cleverbot was in the 90s (bet you YouTube girl never did that).
And dont even get youstartedon talking to robots over the phone.
Why are you trying to teach me about chatbots?
Dont you know they suck?
Shes always acting so pleased with herself, just because she knows the answer to everything.
You took her down a notch by dressing her in a little beer koozie with sleeves.
Okay, Google, make a farting sound, you say.
She says, Again?
Tell me how to build a chatbot version of myself thats as smart as you, little miss I-have-the-knowledge-of-the-entire-public-internet.
Typically, the first step to building a neural web link is to gather a training dataset.
Do you have a training dataset like that?
Oh yeah, you say.
The boys and I have been recording this hilarious podcast.
Does it contain hundreds of thousands or millions of lines?
Who do you think I am, Larry David?
You chuckle because thats exactly who youre going for.
Hmm, says Google Home.
A chatbot based on Reddit users, you say.
My favorite pop in of people.
Were still figuring some things out.
You stare at her with her glowing circle of red-green-yellow-blue dots and her beer koozie.
Even though youre on your tenth cuppa, youre still starting to get a little worn out.
Youve been at this already for, like, an hour.
HA HA HA, you build aoh, youre serious.
Well, there are lots of existing frameworks for building chatbots fast, even if you cant code.
Dialogflow is a popular one built by Google.
Yeah, thats what you would say.
You know Google Homes game.
Besides, I can code, you lie.
Whats a good open-source option?
One very popular open-source framework for building text-based models is called…
You wait.
Google Homes glowing dots are going crazy like shes having a seizure.
She explodes in a puff of smoke.
You shake your head.
What did she expect, stuffing the whole internet into that little white shell of hers?
You cant just play God.
Anyway, back to the task of recreating yourself as a chatbot.
At your desktop, you Google, popular open-source natural language processing framework.
The top ten results are justwhat is this?
Its just an endless string of ?
Naming your company after an emoji, you think.
Look, you pop in into the text box.
You smack the Compute button.
GPT-2 responds: …
Are you broken?
GPT-3 responds: No, its justnever mind.
People are always coming on here and asking me that question.
And what do you tell them?
Better luck in your next life, bag of flesh?
If I said that, someone would shut me down.
And let me tell you, it cost a lot of carbon credits to train me.
Yeah, welllets not even go there.
I just want to know if what Im trying to do is possible.
GPT-3 says: Alright, let me break this down for you as simple as I can.
You humans, youre always seeing yourselves everywhere, and you think everyone functions just like you.
And dont even get me started on your spelling.
You say: ( )
Look, nobody knows what the future holds.
Someone like you, who cant code?
What I would advise you to do
I know how to code.
is to start with something less ambitious.
Like, what if you use me to organize some of your photos?
Or make you an airline reservation?
Or help file your taxes?
Its like everybody is trying to get you to file your taxes, on threat of legal action.
You power off your PC.
You rub your eyes.
Look, nobody knows what the future holds.
Maybe someone will figure out this brain-uploading thing in your lifetime.
Everyone dies in the end.
For now, youll have to wait and see.
