Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. - BERTRAND RUSSELL, Study of Mathematics

 

This makes me a little sad. The essay in the visual is not trending today. Nor last year. Nor ten years ago. Possibly not even when it was written. Though I doubt that. Because I’m reasonably sure people read more and talked less in 1960.

 

The reason this essay should be trending today is because it simply holds the keys to our future. Yeah, just those keys.

 

In short, something of supreme power, cosmically pervasive, and still not fully understood holds the key to our future. This force, despite providing us will nearly all the gifts we attribute to “civilization,” is none other than math. 

 

The opening words of the Bible might well have been, “Let there be Pi.” If there was a universal language that connected us more directly to a supreme power, we have no proof of it.

 

Which brings us back to AI. For those who are just beginning to understand AI, such as myself, the vocabulary can be a little misleading. 

 

LLM, we know, is short for large language model. One would assume they are about words. Also, machine learning seems to indicate something mechanical at play. Even neural networks suggests something about the inner working of our brain. So we jump to neurons and dendrites and electrical impulses as the recipe for AI.

 

And this is all true, but below the surface, it is all mathematics. 

 

Mathematics, too, sounds like something we can all understand, but, truthfully, even the greatest minds don’t fully get math. Minds like, say, Einstein:

 

“How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality?”

 

Einstein was talking about how math perfectly describes not only the things that we can see, but the things we cannot see – electrons, for instance, that cannot be seen.

 

We build 15-billion-dollar accelerators and then learn, drumroll please, it’s exactly what was predicted on a chalkboard.

 

The most shocking and mystical part of mathematics is that it often returns a little more than we gave it.

 

We are thankful. But perplexed. With generative AI something happens the black box that we cannot fully explain. Yet we are delighted by the outcome.

 

So we move on. Happy with the output.

 

In the 13 billion years the universe has existed, we have been around for a very short amount of the time. When the universe was born, it came with a lot of stuff, including 118 known elements, and a programming language. That language is math.

 

It is something humans discovered, but crucially, possibly did not invent.

 

In this second scenario, math is a property of the universe. We’ve uncovered all sorts of mathematics, and strangely enough, they can all be twisted and turned and manipulated and always drive us back to pure reason.

 

If we get lost in the thicket of math, it is operator error, not math itself.

 

So math came before us, and it will be here after us. In this sense, our human existence is bookended by math. In between lies the story of humanity, maybe most clearly told by allowing math to number crunch the data of our existence.

 

Lately, there has been talk of something called Q* at OpenAI, and that it may place us on the doorstep of Artificial General Intelligence.

 

If we are there, it is probably because we are realizing that when we provide AI with massive computing power it can manipulate and manufacture new maths the likes of we have never seen. And they just may be above our ability to ever understand.

 

With this new math it doesn’t seem far-fetched that AI can turn our simple man made constructs like encryption into shambles.

 

Soon many of our biggest questions can be impartially answered. And they are probably many truths we simply do not want to hear.

 

It is much like the genie that gives three wishes, or Midas; if we were given this all-knowing superpower, would we really want it? If AI can give us the truth about everything, would we listen? Or would we rather return to a maybe more pleasant state of naivete?

 

If the future, people will probably wonder why we didn’t instantly opt for the pure truth. But for now, most of us, whether we admit or not, find comfort in our biases and hallucinations.

 

When AI says, “Let there be light,” we may not like what we see.

Today AI is advancing so rapidly that it almost makes no sense to talk about specific tools. Yet, in the last month or so, a few have achieved a level of power and usability that will potentially make them long-term players.

 

What Eleven Labs is doing lately is mind-bending. Gone are the tiny metallic sounds of previous AI voices. Now, voices sound just like voices—full of quiver, breaks, tremolo, modulation, and variation. The possibilities are endless.

 

In the commercial space, this revolutionizes—or potentially kills—the voice acting industry. Now, I can take the commercial I wrote and demo various voices virtually. I can then rewrite my script to reflect the flavor of the voice.

 

There is a phenomenon in advertising called “demo love” where one becomes enamored with the demo track or voice. It’s a by-product of familiarity. After playing any of these voices, I think they frequently become the right voice, and the search for the perfect voice actor is over.

 

 

The final legitimate video tool is Stability.ai. While their interface is not as friendly as the others, but their output is of the same quality.

 

Some of this comes down to personal taste and artistic goals. For example, Runway really nails out-of-focus background elements, while Stability.ai seems to excel at camera movement. It’s all about experimentation and seeing which tool fits your creative sensibility.

Krea brings instant generation to the party

 

 

HeyGen makes generating avatars easy, and almost appealing

 

Smari Asmundsson is a photographer, entrepreneur and Icelander who wants you to experience the magic of Iceland and its way of life through a foil pouch weighing 175 grams.

 

In it, you will find a powder that is a blend of nutrients and spent barley that is an essential part of the Icelandic diet. Inside could be the secret to long life.

 

It comes in chocolate flavor.

 

Smari’s journey is not unlike many others who have come to America, then, many decades later, still find themselves here.

 

“I was born and raised in Iceland, and I moved to the US at age 20. I went to university in Santa Barbara, and I have a BA in photography. And I’m still here 30-some years later.”

After college, Smari moved to Boston where he understudied with a successful commercial photographer. After a year, he felt he had learned enough to strike out on his own.

 

This became a pattern in his life.

 

“My first job was for Volkswagen, and I ended up winning almost every conceivable award and became very well-known very quickly.”

 

After he achieved what he set out to do, he found the dream came with a few strings attached.

 

“And, you know, I had a child, and I started thinking this is not going to work. I’m traveling 2, 3, 4 weeks at a time.”

 

There’s a long pause here, where you can very much feel the angst 15 years later.

 

“And so I kind of decided to do a complete pivot and launched a company making organic yogurt. And we ran that for 10 years. And now I’m doing my second venture, which is a plant-based protein powder called NØRSE CØDE.”

Without leaving Petaluma, California, Smari has gone back to the old country.

 

“The main product is upcycled barley. And barley has always been important to us in the Norse countries, all the way back to the Vikings.”

 

Iceland is an exceptionally robust country. One of the healthiest in the world, where 81% of the inhabitant’s report being in excellent health. Diet and exercise are key. There is a way of life, here, unique in all the world. There is a code to all of it.

 

“We think about nutrition and health, and the fact that health is more than what you eat. It’s about what you do, how you live your life, how you spend time with community and family. The code comes down to what is a good reasonable way to be a healthy human being?”

 

But coming up with a product is only one part of success. There’s the hard, grinding work of the entrepreneur that offers very little glamor. For most successful founders there is a pre-existing foundation.

 

“My parents had a flower shop slash gift shop. And that was sort of our life growing up. As soon as I was able, I was helping them in the store.”

Iceland is a place that was nearly forgotten. It wasn’t settled until 874, and currently then less than half a million people call it home.

 

“Sometimes I jokingly say I have Icelandic stubbornness. Iceland is an incredibly hard place to live. The winter’s never good. The growing season is very, very short. And long dark winters. There was even a time where Denmark proposed to move every Icelander off the island because it was too miserable.”

 

I can see Icelanders at the dock, worldly possessions in tow, boarding ships for Copenhagen. But this obviously didn’t happen.

 

“And my thought is it must have been like “Hell, no! This is our land and we’re staying here.” So it’s like a 1000 years of a very stubborn stock that survived on this little island.”

 

But there’s also something else that drives every startup. It’s an essential piece to the puzzle, if not the essential piece. It’s the mission. It’s why you will get up every morning, even in the dark, dead of winter to make things happen.

 

“I think, for me, there is a lot of crap food out there, pardon the expression, and I want to make something that’s better for people. I think there’s a lot of issues with climate change also. And my thought in life is to do more good than bad. That’s my North Star.”

 

In the end, creative people have tremendous advantages in starting businesses. Never before has creativity been so key, and the world so accepting to learn of new products that can potentially change our world for the better. It’s a flywheel we can all appreciate.

 

“It’s using your creativity to magnify your ethos. And then it goes back to your creativity. And it’s kind of like this loop.” 

 

 

 

http://kck.st/47iWszk

Physics, the natural sciences, and now, AI, have always had a curious relationship with mathematics.

 

For as long as people have been doing science, math has predicted things that people could not observe until proven by complex experiments.

 

Einstein predicted that light would curve around dense objects like the sun, but it wasn’t proven until a team of experimenters were dispatched to the South Pacific 4 years later to witness a total eclipse of the sun.

 

This Eugene Wigner essay, written in 1960, gets at the heart of this strange circumstance. 

What is eerie about math is that it makes connections sometimes in entirely unexpected places. It is often more accurate in these connections than even science could have predicted.

 

It is a classic chicken and egg scenario. Did math predate us, or did we invent it?

 

Most who take math seriously and understand its profound powers believe that it is something, almost supernatural. Many great minds have simply concluded the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics.

 

In its power to make predictions far more accurate than we can conceive, and make connections beyond our understanding, math may quite possibly deliver what we have always wanted: The Ultimate Truth.

 

To some this can sound incredibly disquieting, but the author doesn’t want to end on a somber note:

 

“Let me end on a more cheerful note. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning."

 

Written only four years after Artificial Intelligence was given a name, it provides the keys to understanding AI (the Ultimate Mathematician), and, perhaps, simultaneously, our place in the universe.

 

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