Extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A) in action

Extended Planning and Analysis (xP&A), is not a new concept for IBM clients who use IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, formerly known as Cognos TM1. For the past several years, clients have embraced the need to tie operational decisions to the financial impact from both planning and analysis perspectives. For instance, a Director of Operations …

a vast herd of cute kittens

The Kitten Effect

One thing I’ve noticed with image-generating algorithms is that the more of something they have to put in an image, the worse it is. I first noticed this with the kitten-generating variant of StyleGAN, which often does okay on one cat: alternative for shocked_pikachu.png but is terrible at a crowd of kittens. A few years …

a message written in tea leaves

Reading tea leaves

DALL-E (and other text-to-image generators) will often add text to their images even when you don’t ask for any. Ask for a picture of a Halifax Pier and it could end up covered in messy writing, variously legible versions of “Halifax” as if it was quietly mumbling “Halifax… Halifax” to itself. Since the AI is …

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Interview with a squirrel

Google’s large language model, LaMDA, has recently been making headlines after a Google engineer (now on administrative leave), claimed to be swayed by an interview in which GPT-3 described the experience of being conscious. Almost everyone else who has used these large text-generating AIs, myself included, is entirely unconvinced. Why? Because these large language models …