"A ship that can navigate space without a computer on board can be constructed in one-fifth the time and at one-tenth the expense of a computer-laden ship. We could build fleets five time, ten times, as great as Deneb could if we could but eliminate the computer."

But this of course is nonsensical with current technology, same as it would be nonsensical to go back to manual agriculture or manual manufacturing - we can achieve so much more with our tools than without them. And the way I see it, as long as we have an incentive to advance the state of the art, people will have an incentive (and curiosity) to learn how we got where we are, so that they could push the envelope.

[0] https://ia803006.us.archive.org/6/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...

I wonder if that was inspiration for Wondercraft.

Of course if you listen to podcasts because you like the parasocial aspect or the celebrity interviews, then yeah... Not really a point.

There are a few podcasts for which I'd have greater interest if the narration were by someone other than the current host....

There are also services such as the National Library for the Blind (UK) and BARD (US) which provide books, including a large number of audiobooks, for the blind. Automated text-to-speech would make a vastly larger library available, particularly of very recent publications, niche publications, and long-since-out-of-print books. Such services do take requests, but tend to focus on works published within the past five years.

The problem is that filtering/searching on that massive catalog and weeding the useless stuff out.

I actually quite often wish I could access a condensed version of a few podcasts in text form. Sometimes there's little nuggets of information dropped by hosts or guests that don't make it onto any other medium.

When I do intentionally listen to podcasts (i.e. as opposed to having to, because that's the only available form of some content), I do so because I enjoy the style of the conversation itself.

I believe (but then again I also want to believe, so make of this what you will) that I'd be holding the AI to only the same standards I hold humans to. It's not like I'm trying to build a relationship to the speaker in either case.

I listen to a ton of podcasts in different niches: Theo Von, all in pod, masters of scale, the daily, some true crime stuff, etc

I found the AI briefing room which is a quick summary done by and read by ai. It’s not as good as a human but I’m completely used to it now.

I am thinking of summarizing the business related podcasts I listen to for myself so I can consume more content in less time.

I wish all podcasts had a shorter ai version

[0] https://narrationbox.com

If I get to control it and I can have it draw in enough interesting angles into something, I think it could be fun. I wouldn't replace one of my favorites, but I'd gladly use something that could generate creative new content.

Why not follow bots on YouTube and Spotify?

"[Transformers .. replaced...] ...the suspects from the time.. recurrent networks, convolution, GRUs".

GRU has no place being mentioned here. It's hallucinated in effect, though, not wrong. Just a misdirecting piece of information not in the original source.

GRU gives a Ben Kenobi vibe: it died out about when this paper was published.

But it's also kind of misinforming the listener to state this. GRUs are a subtype of recurrent networks. It's a small thing, but no actual professor would mention GRUs here I think. It's not relevant (GRUs are not mentioned in the paper itself) and mentioning RNNs and GRUs is a bit like saying "Yes, uses both Ice and Frozen Water"

So while the conversational style gives me podcast-keep-my-attention vibes.. I feel a uncanny valley fear. Yes each small weird decision is not going to rock my world. But it's slightly distorting the importance. Yes a human could list GRUs just the same, and probably, most professors would mistake or others.

But it just feels like this is professing to be the next, all-there thing. I don't see how you can do that and launch this while knowing it produces content like that. At least with humans, you can learn from 5 humans and take the overall picture - if only one mentions GRU, you move on. If there's one AI source, or AI sources that all tend to make the same mistake (e.g. continuing to list an inappropriate item to ensure conversational style), that's very different.

I don't like it.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/greetings-people-of-ear...

> These are stochastic parrots cosplaying as academics.

LOL

"The transformer processes the entire sequence all at once by using something called self attention"

There are hacks everywhere but humans lying sometimes have implications (libel/slander) that we can control. Computers are thought of in general society as devoid of bias and "smart" so if they lie people are more likely to listen.

Physical ones, I scan. Cutting the spine is easiest. But today you can also just take pics with your phone.

Many retailers also sell EPUB. Which is just HTML.

Obviously, that’s all for private consumption only. (Unless you’re OpenAI I guess. :-P)

For all the other papers, assuming they were impactful, they must have been referred by others, highlighting what their contribution is, what is controversial, etc.

In other words: the LLM doesn't have to "understand" the paper; it can simply parrot what others have been saying/writing about it.

(For example: a podcast about Google Illuminate could use our brief exchange to discuss the possible merits of this technology.)

Source?

I've seen YouTubers provide tutorials on auto-creating YouTube videos and podcast episodes on niche scientific subjects, on how to build seemingly-reputable brands with zero ongoing effort. That is all totally novel. Being able to lie or be wrong before is orthogonal to the real issue: scale.

This tech can allow "content creators" to spin hundreds of podcasts with garbage simultaneously, saturating the search space with nonsense. Similar to what is already being done with text everywhere.

What makes one skeptic regarding conspiracionist ideas is access and visibility to more enlightened content. If that access gets disrupted (it already has been), many people will not be able to tell the difference, specially future generations.