Issue #216

September 13, 2023

This week’s Data Science Book, "What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?" by Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram, a prominent figure in mathematics and computation, offers a compelling exploration of ChatGPT's success and the broader implications of artificial intelligence while delving into the inner workings of ChatGPT and its historical context.

The book stands out for its accessibility, making complex concepts understandable to non-computer scientists and non-mathematicians alike. Wolfram provides a high-level overview of ChatGPT's components, such as embeddings and transformers, without getting bogged down in technical details.

While acknowledging ChatGPT's successes, Wolfram candidly addresses its limitations, especially in real-world computational tasks. He critically examines ChatGPT's reliance on neural network weightings and raises intriguing questions about intelligence, drawing parallels with biological evolution.

In conclusion, "What Is ChatGPT doing ... and Why Does It Work?" is a thought-provoking read that demystifies AI for a wide audience. Wolfram's expertise and candid exploration make it a must-read for those interested in AI's frontiers and the complexities of intelligence.

What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?

1. Towards a new SymPy [oscarbenjamin.github.io]
2. Animations from first principles [mathspp.com]
3. Can LLMs learn from a single example? [fast.ai]
4. Playing with genetic algorithms in python [joseprupi.github.io]
5. What OpenAI Really Wants [wired.com]
6. Generative AI and intellectual property [ben-evans.com]
7. From Encodings to Embeddings [towardsdatascience.com]

• World’s human migration patterns in 2000–2019 unveiled by high-resolution data (V. Niva, A. Horton, V. Virkki, M. Heino, M. Kosonen, M. Kallio, P. Kinnunen, G. J. Abel, R. Muttarak, M. Taka, O. Varis, M. Kummu)
• Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance: Towards a Practical Equilibrium (V. Buterin, J. Illum, M. Nadler, F. Schär, A. Soleimani)
• Complex battlefields favor strong soldiers over large armies in social animal warfare (S. J. Lymbery, B. L. Webber, R. K. Didham)
• The computational power of the human brain (P. J. Gebicke-Haerter)
• Estimating the epidemic reproduction number from temporally aggregated incidence data: A statistical modelling approach and software tool (R. K. Nash, S. Bhatt, A. Cori, P. Nouvellet)
• Scoring epidemiological forecasts on transformed scales (N. I. Bosse, S. Abbott, A. Cori, E. van Leeuwen, J. Bracher, S. Funk)
• Large Language Models as Optimizers (C. Yang, X. Wang, Y. Lu, H. Liu, Q. V. Le, D. Zhou, X. Chen)

Creating Geographic Maps with plotly express

September 13, 2023

​