Latest / Chaos Agents / Neural Networks, Sparse Autoencoders, and a Fleet of Duck Robots
Transcript
- 0:00All right, welcome.
- 0:03What's up, Sarah?
- 0:04How's it going?
- 0:05How was your weekend, Becca?
- 0:07Weekend was great.
- 0:09Watched some football, hung out with my baby.
- 0:13What about you?
- 0:15Oh, I had.
- 0:17So I had surgery.
- 0:18So this is like the.
- 0:20This is hot on all the boy podcasts, but everyone gets a vasectomy.
- 0:26Can we make it hot on the girl podcast?
- 0:29For sure.
- 0:30That got a girl's actomy.
- 0:32Oh, my God.
- 0:33Yay.
- 0:33Girl's sectomy.
- 0:36I should do like a TikTok journey.
- 0:39Girl podcasts, listen up.
- 0:41We're starting this trend, everyone.
- 0:45Okay, so recovery is not that bad.
- 0:46It's not as bad as I thought.
- 0:48Okay, good.
- 0:48I'm glad you're feeling.
- 0:49Amending.
- 0:50Amending.
- 0:52Okay, so we.
- 0:54We have to do our tagline.
- 0:55Welcome back to Chaos Agents.
- 0:57Okay.
- 0:57Welcome to Chaos Agents, the podcast, the AI News podcast that is curated by an agent named Eddie and then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at.
- 1:09We love you, though, Eddie.
- 1:10By human hosts Sarah, Chips and Becca.
- 1:12Louie rarely yell.
- 1:13I wish he didn't pick that word.
- 1:15But he did it.
- 1:15So we're not gonna.
- 1:16Yeah, we're not gonna.
- 1:17We're not gonna yell at him that we're not yelling at him.
- 1:21It's helpful feedback for us.
- 1:23Yeah, it's whatever he thinks.
- 1:27Cool.
- 1:28Okay, so also we're streaming this live on X right now, so we'll see how that goes.
- 1:35Interesting.
- 1:37Interesting.
- 1:38We're doing it.
- 1:39Okay.
- 1:40Today was an interesting newsletter, Sarah.
- 1:43What did you think?
- 1:44It was really?
- 1:45I think we're both really excited about the last topic, but let's get through the first ones first.
- 1:51Yes.
- 1:51Or at least I am.
- 1:52I bet you are too.
- 1:54Oh, yeah, you know, I am.
- 1:56But the first one I thought was really interesting and I learned a bunch.
- 1:59So the headline is our biggest story today is a 10 year old CNN beat GPT6 Astra and clot fable 5.1 at diagnosing skin cancer.
- 2:11Yes.
- 2:12And this is a report by Dr.
- 2:13Magnus Lynch.
- 2:17Magnus lynch from Guy's Hospital.
- 2:20Why is it called Guy?
- 2:21I'm sure Guy's Hospital is like the.
- 2:25And for.
- 2:27For those who don't know, AKA me, before reading this, a.
- 2:33CNN is a convolutional neural network.
- 2:38Yeah.
- 2:38It's a specific type of neural network that's good at identifying images, essentially.
- 2:45Yeah.
- 2:46So.
- 2:46And they're about 10 years old.
- 2:48That's what I was reading.
- 2:49Or the one that they use is about 10 years old.
- 2:51And so 10 years ago, were we all doing the.
- 2:54Remember, it was like.
- 2:55What was it like, dogs or cereal?
- 2:57It was dogs or Cereal.
- 2:58It was like cats or not cats.
- 3:00Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that.
- 3:04So this doctor took a bunch of images of moles that are possibly melanoma and sent them to both this 10 year old CNN called Inception v3, which is an image model Google released in 2015 and then.
- 3:23Also gave the images to I think GPT, Astra and maybe Claude Fable and was like, what do you guys think?
- 3:31Which of these are concerning?
- 3:34Yeah.
- 3:35And so on 200 of them, it got 62%.
- 3:39Right.
- 3:39On the CNN and then Astra and Fable only got 42%.
- 3:45So this is interesting.
- 3:47What are your thoughts?
- 3:48Well, so my first thought was like, that's what I would expect because a CNN is a neural network that is supposed to be particularly good at identifying images.
- 4:00It's only trained, it's trained for that very specific task.
- 4:04I guess what's interesting, the interesting takeaway here is like, even though general models are getting so good, they're not necessarily replacement level good for like a specially trained model like this type of cnn, which I think is not
- 4:27necessarily a bad thing because a smaller, cheaper model that is trained to do a specific thing and still outperforms these big models is more economically feasible.
- 4:42Yeah, exactly.
- 4:43And I would be interested to know if like you did like a rag lay on top of Fable and then specifically for melanoma type images or specifically for classifying this type of images, how it would perform against the
- 5:01cnn.
- 5:03Yeah.
- 5:04And my other question then also is at a point in the future where a general model does outperform something like a cnn, what happens?
- 5:18Yeah, what, when do doctors know?
- 5:21Are there still.
- 5:22Yeah.
- 5:22Is there still an argument to use smaller, specifically trained models for things?
- 5:27I, I, I haven't thought through the second order effects of that, but that's where my brain goes.
- 5:32Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
- 5:35Okay.
- 5:36The next thing in the newsletter, I was pumped because it's got one of our old buddies, Sarah, the sparse autoencoder.
- 5:43I know, I was like, every time I think of a sparse autoencoder, I have to be, I have to remind myself what a sparse autoencoder.
- 5:53So I'm gonna, I'm gonna get a.
- 5:59But, okay, so this is before I get the official definition.
- 6:02So my understanding of.
- 6:03Cause we Talk about this PowerSoft encoder all the time is a tool to help us understand how AIs think.
- 6:11Correct.
- 6:11That's, that's basically it.
- 6:12It's a tool that we are, we use to try and understand what' inside a neural network.
- 6:18Great.
- 6:19And what's been really interesting about all the papers we've been reading lately, I think is.
- 6:22First of all, they keep coming up.
- 6:24So people are doing a lot of work with sparse autoencoders.
- 6:26And either that or Eddie is weirdly obsessed with sparse autoencoders.
- 6:32But there was a paper we read last week which was really interesting, that it's like, is this even the best way to understand how these models work?
- 6:41So I think we're learning in real time along with everyone else.
- 6:44Totally, which feels cool.
- 6:46That's one of the reasons I, like, actually really like this practice that we have of, like, going through the newsletter and talking about this stuff out loud.
- 6:52Guarantee you sparse autoencoder would not be in my vocabulary otherwise, I think.
- 6:59Okay, so I'm gonna try and pitch to you my understanding of this.
- 7:08This headline.
- 7:09Yeah.
- 7:09Okay, great.
- 7:10And then you tell me if it matches your understanding.
- 7:14Okay, so.
- 7:16So the headline is, yes, virus auto encoders need way less data than we thought until you ask if the features are real.
- 7:24Okay, tell me what that means.
- 7:26First, my understanding of a feature is like.
- 7:31Like, if a.
- 7:34If a sparse autoencoder is essentially, the analogy I like to think of is like, a brain, a human brain, and you're reading electrical signals on a brain scan, and if I showed you a picture of an alien and
- 7:52these 10,000 neurons in this particular area light up, you might be like, oh, that part of Becca's brain is about aliens.
- 8:02Or that part is related to aliens.
- 8:05And at a incredibly simple, overly simplified level, that's kind of what a sparse auto encoder is.
- 8:12And alien is like, the feature is a.
- 8:15It's called, like, a feature.
- 8:16And my understanding here is, like, what they found is that you can give a sparse autoencoder, like, activity inside of a neural net.
- 8:30And it might be like, oh, cool.
- 8:33Okay, so this feature maps to Golden Gate Bridge.
- 8:37This feature maps to women's basketball.
- 8:43And thus, here are all the things we understand about what it's thinking, and then, scrap that.
- 8:50Do the whole thing over again.
- 8:52And it might be like, okay, this feature maps to suspension bridges, not Golden Gate Bridge.
- 8:58And this feature maps to women's sports, not basketball.
- 9:02And here's what we think the model is thinking.
- 9:05And the output of, like, here's what we think the model is thinking might be the same in both of those cases, even though the features are different.
- 9:13And so the question is, one, is a sparse autoencoder, like, really understanding?
- 9:23Like, is it really discovering what these concepts are?
- 9:29And then my question after that was like, does it matter.
- 9:31Like, why does it matter if the.
- 9:33What it's essentially telling us is kind of the same?
- 9:39Yeah, I think that's.
- 9:41I think that's a really good question.
- 9:42And I think that's kind of my understanding of how they work as well is like, it's like.
- 9:49It's like mapping.
- 9:51And so it's like, to your point, mapping how these neurons are working.
- 9:59And so for this specific study, it seems like they figured out how to do it with less.
- 10:09Everyone's.
- 10:10All of these are like, less tokens.
- 10:12Less tokens.
- 10:13Do you feel like you walked away?
- 10:15Yeah, to your point, you said you feel like you walked away being like, okay, now what I did.
- 10:21But then I, like, asked.
- 10:23I, like, tried to answer that question for myself.
- 10:26Like, okay, why should we care about this?
- 10:28Yeah, why does this matter in the field?
- 10:30And my.
- 10:35Where I landed is like.
- 10:37Or what someone who works in machine interpretability would probably say is, like, it matters because the promise of mechanistic interpretability isn't like, give me, like, an approximate understanding what's happening.
- 10:54It's like, I want to know why the model is behaving the way it does.
- 10:59And so that's why the specifics of what we think we are understanding inside the model matters.
- 11:11There was a really good analogy that I.
- 11:16That as I was discussing this with ChatGPT that it gave me, that helped this click in my head that I'd love to share with you.
- 11:27Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
- 11:28That would be great.
- 11:28So one of.
- 11:30I guess one of the ways that, like, we use sparse auto encoders or, like, the data from it to try and, like, understand what's going on is, like, not just mapping things out, but then, like, based on our
- 11:41understanding of what we mapped.
- 11:42Trying to recreate the same thing to see, like, oh, is this.
- 11:47Were these the components that it actually was using?
- 11:49Can we create the same thing the machine did?
- 11:52So, like, it's kind of akin to, like, listening to a song and you might be like, okay, this song uses piano, drums, violin, and, like, a synth.
- 12:07And then you.
- 12:08You put in front of you pianos, drums, violin, and a synth, and you are able to recreate the exact same song.
- 12:15And you might think, oh, sick.
- 12:17I, like, actually was able to reverse engineer exactly how they made this song.
- 12:23And then someone else listens to the same song and they're like, okay, I actually hear, like, drums, a cello, an electric guitar, and, like, a cymbal.
- 12:36And they sit with those things in front of them and.
- 12:38And they're able to recreate the exact same Song, then you might be like, wait, wait.
- 12:45Okay, wait.
- 12:45But so what is.
- 12:47What was in it?
- 12:48Yeah.
- 12:49And like that's kind of the problem they're seeing here is like you can create the same song.
- 12:55Doesn't necessarily mean that you understood exactly what the instruments are inside.
- 12:59Yeah, yeah.
- 13:01Interesting.
- 13:01It's kind of like it's neat to your point.
- 13:03Like it's neat that we're watching these papers come out in real time and hopefully in like three weeks.
- 13:09But I don't know, like three weeks might be like we solved it.
- 13:12I know exactly how it worked, but it seems like there's a lot of people working on the same thing, which is how are these models working?
- 13:18You know, you're right.
- 13:20It actually is cool.
- 13:22It's like following a news story in real time in like a long term thread, which like I don't do with a lot of things.
- 13:29So it's kind of cool.
- 13:30Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 13:31I'm really interested to see where we are in a month of this.
- 13:33If it's still like sparse auto encoders.
- 13:36More tokens, less tokens.
- 13:38Is this just going to become like a sparse auto encoder podcast?
- 13:43So neat.
- 13:44We need to have a sparse auto podcast on the.
- 13:47We're number one in the charts.
- 13:50Great.
- 13:51Perfect.
- 13:51Okay.
- 13:52Awesome.
- 13:52Okay.
- 13:52Interesting.
- 13:54Yeah.
- 13:54So now we have them working with less tokens.
- 13:56Let's keep moving.
- 13:57Let's keep moving.
- 13:59Okay.
- 14:00Rainbow say, great fun application of the day.
- 14:04Is this application called Rainbow say?
- 14:07That's a Mac menu bar app.
- 14:10I'm going to share, I'm going to share my screen to.
- 14:12Yeah, I want to see it because I haven't seen it.
- 14:15So I think this is so fucking cool.
- 14:20Basically what this does.
- 14:22I think my understanding, okay.
- 14:24Is like it helps you learn a language through like a TV show you're watching.
- 14:30So like let's say you're watching.
- 14:32I don't know, like, I don't know what's a tv, what's a show you love that is maybe in a different language or like you would watch Dark.
- 14:41Dark is like the best series, the.
- 14:45I think one of the best sci fi series of the last 20 years.
- 14:49And it's in German.
- 14:50Okay.
- 14:51Perfect example.
- 14:53So let's say you want to watch it in the original German on your computer.
- 14:57Yeah.
- 14:58What this will do is like help you learn German by watching it.
- 15:03So it'll like pause or it'll.
- 15:05You can pause it after something and it'll be like, here's what it said, here's what this means.
- 15:11Like, it'll like quiz you on stuff.
- 15:16Like, look at this, like here.
- 15:17Yeah.
- 15:18I just feel like I would learn language much better this way.
- 15:22Yeah, I've been really, you know, I've been really like facing this because I'm trying to learn Spanish and.
- 15:27You are.
- 15:28Yeah.
- 15:29And I've been taking lessons and feeling like I haven't been getting better.
- 15:33So maybe this is one good way to try it of now I need to find a Spanish show that someone recommends so I can get into it.
- 15:43Okay.
- 15:44Yeah, the DMS are open.
- 15:46Let us know what we should watch.
- 15:48Yeah, yeah.
- 15:49Maybe I'll pick a language to learn too.
- 15:51What?
- 15:51Okay, quick aside.
- 15:53Yes.
- 15:54Like, what made you decide to learn Spanish?
- 15:58So I want to retire to Mexico City.
- 16:03You're like, I want to leave America.
- 16:07And tacos.
- 16:08Okay.
- 16:09Yeah, it's really beautiful.
- 16:11Yeah.
- 16:11I really like traveling to South America and both South America and Mexico and different Spanish speaking countries.
- 16:19It's just beautiful.
- 16:20I love the warm and like trying different cuisines and different places.
- 16:27And my daughter is also learning Spanish at the same time.
- 16:30She learned English because she's six months old, so she doesn't know anything.
- 16:35Yeah.
- 16:35She's learning both and she's going to be like, oh my God, thank you.
- 16:41Like, how nice would it be to just grow up just bilingual.
- 16:46Like you just know a couple languages you didn't even have to try.
- 16:50Yeah.
- 16:50I'm afraid she's going to eclipse me.
- 16:52So this is a good tool.
- 16:53I'll try it.
- 16:54So basically you're competing with your six month old daughter and you want to move to Mexico City.
- 17:00I love this.
- 17:01And I would like to come visit you.
- 17:03You're welcome.
- 17:05Okay.
- 17:05Incredible.
- 17:06Okay.
- 17:08Okay, so for the one cool thing, we have to show the videos.
- 17:12Okay.
- 17:12From this weekend.
- 17:14Okay.
- 17:16Do you want to share them?
- 17:19The Nvidia ones?
- 17:20The Nvidia CEO is playing with Microdecks.
- 17:24Oh, from this, from on stage.
- 17:25Yes, yes.
- 17:27One cool thing while Becca brings it up is the Microdeck.
- 17:30It's an 11K star, of course, open source biped duck robot that walks.
- 17:37It's on Pollen robotics, microdoc on GitHub and it is very cool.
- 17:47I love open source hardware.
- 17:48I think there's like a whole new world coming for open source hardware.
- 17:52Oh, here we go.
- 17:54Look how cute they are.
- 17:55They're so cute.
- 17:57They're so cute.
- 17:59Can you see this?
- 18:00Is it full screen now?
- 18:02Yeah, it is.
- 18:02Oh my God, look at that.
- 18:03They're literally adorable.
- 18:05Look how cute.
- 18:06There's yoga.
- 18:06Why they fall over?
- 18:07Don't fall over.
- 18:09Are you okay.
- 18:10Are you okay?
- 18:13Oh, wait, Revive.
- 18:16Oh my God.
- 18:16I want a whole fleet of them.
- 18:18I'm obsessed.
- 18:20Okay, so they're so great and it's interesting and I imagine you can.
- 18:31Given all we've been learning about like how you can fit tiny models on hardware.
- 18:35I imagine people are throwing models on different models on these little guys.
- 18:42What would you do with yours?
- 18:44That's.
- 18:45That's the question, right?
- 18:46Like I think that.
- 18:48Oh my God.
- 18:48Sorry.
- 18:49I'm.
- 18:49Now I'm just.
- 18:49I need to turn the video off.
- 18:50They're so cute.
- 18:51They're doing summer songs.
- 18:54So this is the thing that I think is interesting about robotics right now especially so you have two different.
- 19:00I'll call them more accessible, like robots from under the Hugging Face umbrella.
- 19:06Now you have Microduck, which is made by a company called Pollen that was acquired by hugging face in 2025.
- 19:12And then you have this robot arm called Le Robot, a name I know you would like.
- 19:17It's like Lechonk.
- 19:19Lechon.
- 19:20Le Robot.
- 19:21And oh yeah, you.
- 19:22You built it?
- 19:23Yeah, I have.
- 19:23Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have the robot arm.
- 19:25Yeah, yeah, Those are pretty neat.
- 19:27So you basically can make a robotic arm and a cute little microduck robot that's just like two little legs walking around, little cute little face for like, you know, under 400 bucks.
- 19:37And which is so cool.
- 19:44And I still think it's.
- 19:46Both are in the stage of really cool fun for like nerdy hobbyist people like us to like play around with.
- 19:54Not super clear exactly what the real world usage is or like, or the technology hasn't caught up to it to make that obvious.
- 20:05For example, like even the ly robot arm, it's not like you build it and like, oh, it's just like picking shit up.
- 20:11Like it's still hard to like even train it and get it to like pick up a block and like put it in something.
- 20:19My real answer is like, honestly, I'd probably like.
- 20:25As for listeners of the pod, if you don't know, Sarah has a six month old daughter.
- 20:29I have a six month old daughter and I probably would like like she's getting, you know, she might be crawling soon.
- 20:35Hopefully soonish.
- 20:37I probably just like have it walk around.
- 20:38Have her like it be like a thing that she like crawls after and like engages with her and it's like a fun thing.
- 20:45I don't know.
- 20:45That's a really fun thing.
- 20:47Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, I think you make a really good point.
- 20:49Like where we are now versus like iRobot.
- 20:52You know like I think of like the iRobot world where we have like these androids that show up at our house and creep us out and probably don't kill us or we hope that they don't.
- 21:01Is, is good.
- 21:03But looking for my copy of I of the iRobot that you sent me.
- 21:08Oh yeah, that's somewhere over there.
- 21:10Yeah.
- 21:10Great.
- 21:11Yeah, like we're, we're not there and I don't know.
- 21:15I mean I think the thing that I think about the most when it comes to this stuff, which is very different purpose than the microdoc is like people that are differently abled like having the help that they need
- 21:28just because like I, it's so like the, in the U.S.
- 21:37i think the price of care is so high.
- 21:40Yeah.
- 21:40That like only people that have the means to have full time help can get that.
- 21:46And we don't have a culture of like we don't have a culture of family help.
- 21:50So like something like this is not going to help because it's tiny.
- 21:54It's not going to do much.
- 21:55But I feel like that could be like a first application of where we go with the robot armor and the microduct.
- 22:01But besides that, I really don't.
- 22:04I think so.
- 22:05A friend of mine had this robot come to their house this weekend to try to do a bunch of tasks.
- 22:12Cool.
- 22:13What kind of robot?
- 22:15No idea.
- 22:15I just saw this robot that was falling all over their house.
- 22:23And so I like we're not there and I, I think like it's one of those things like for me personally I don't like, I think about the like, you know, the robot massage things where you're like, I don't
- 22:33want a robot massage.
- 22:34Like there's something about it.
- 22:36Nice.
- 22:37It's.
- 22:37It's so funny you're, you're talking about that because this morning I was doing, I was, I've been trying to write more as like my, as like a thinking tool and I was going through the thought experiment of like
- 22:52what are the second order effects of like intelligence becoming more accessible and abundant?
- 23:00Like what are the, from a, from a labor market jobs perspective?
- 23:06Like what are the things that eventually are going to be likely machine.
- 23:14Machine dominated and what are the things that are probably going to remain human?
- 23:18And a lot of the stuff that I was putting in this category of either remaining human or like becoming.
- 23:32Like maybe becoming like a luxury good or like a premium because of the human component is some of the stuff you're talking about.
- 23:39Like I was thinking about like spas and like Massage stuff.
- 23:42Like, I don't.
- 23:43I was like, do I, do I care that it's a.
- 23:45Like, do I want a person to be massaging me?
- 23:47Do I, do I care if it's a robot?
- 23:49I was thinking about childcare and elder care.
- 23:51Yeah.
- 23:51I was like, that feels like something that I want to be human.
- 23:56Like.
- 23:56Yeah.
- 23:58But at the same time, like, accessibility of those things is really important.
- 24:02Like, imagine we, we don't live in a country where we have free child care, which sucks.
- 24:11Childcare is expensive.
- 24:15Like, imagine the economic class of people that it could unlock if we were able to somehow.
- 24:23I'm not saying like we have robots watching kids, but like, if the, if there was some impact of using technology to help expand our ability to provide things like that.
- 24:34Yeah.
- 24:35And I think also too, like, when we think about that stuff, I think like, there's parts, like there are parts of it that I feel like you could.
- 24:41Like when I think about like what it's done to programming so far, it's not that, like, I see, like there's no more programming work.
- 24:49It's now that we have instead of ten PRs to review, we now have a thousand PRs to review.
- 24:54Right.
- 24:54Right.
- 24:55So like, what is that?
- 24:56In like another world.
- 24:58And I can see like, for example, with child care, like, yes.
- 25:01I don't want, like, we don't.
- 25:04I don't envision this world where it's just like robots with kids.
- 25:06But like, do we maybe like teachers or caregivers don't have to focus on making lunch because like lunch is made.
- 25:14You know what I mean?
- 25:14Like, can actually focus on those interactions that are more important.
- 25:18Like the learning, the one on one.
- 25:19It doesn't have to sit there like cutting up carrots.
- 25:22That's exactly.
- 25:23It's like it's intelligence becoming abundant makes human, like, frees up human time in certain areas.
- 25:34And like, what can we then capture?
- 25:37Like, what's the value capture of that is, I think, exactly what you're talking about.
- 25:41I like that.
- 25:42Yeah.
- 25:44Or maybe we like have the coolest robot nanny in the future.
- 25:48Who knows?
- 25:49Do you remember that?
- 25:50Do you remember that, that Robin Williams movie called like Bionic man or something like that?
- 25:57Nope.
- 26:00No, rewatch that.
- 26:02Anyway, that's an aside.
- 26:04Okay, next time on the pod we review Bionic Man.
- 26:11Okay.
- 26:11Any closing thoughts?
- 26:14No.
- 26:15Besides, I want a microduct.
- 26:17Same in conclusion, we want in the.
- 26:20Living room just doing somersault all day, just somersaulting.
- 26:22And then we can get our microducts together.
- 26:24And then I want to walk around and they all follow me.
- 26:29That's what I want to do with it.
- 26:31I want a fleet of them that follow me around the house.
- 26:35Just summer partners will love.
- 26:36They'll love it.
- 26:39And when they see my wife, they just quack at her and follow me around.
- 26:48Amazing.
- 26:49All right, bye, everyone.