Tag: San Francisco

• Large Language Models, Models of Language, and the Interview Society

  In July 2024, I visited Amsterdam to speak on a conference panel titled “LLMs and the Language Sciences.” Here’s an adapted version of the talk: Six months ago, I moved to San Francisco to study the Bay Area’s AI communities. I arrived with clear ideas about what my interlocutors would be doing and what I…

• Weathering Driverless Cars (Part 3)

  Whereas it was once noise, meteorological data became signal when lone cars developed into fleets. This post describes how driverless car developers are turning this signal into value as meteorological surplus.

• Weathering Driverless Cars (Part 2)

  This post compares driverless cars’ classification systems to centuries-old cloud atlases. Despite filtering clouds from their road perceptions, driverless cars still sense the road atmospherically–that is, according to the same manner as meteorologists read the clouds.

• Weathering Driverless Cars (Part 1)

  To solve for weather, driverless car developers design systems to manage rain, fog, and snow. Their systems filter these weather conditions from data collected by the cars’ sensors, rendering them invisible in the cars’ models of the world. However, there is more to solving for weather than mere data manipulation. Though filtered from the cars’…