What’s interesting in the culture series in light of the AI alignment debates is that the culture aligns every mind to its task at “birth”. A picket ship, falling outside the normal moral constraints, is a very different set of personalities and morals than a GSV such as wisdom like silence
An interesting aspect of the Culture Minds is that they're described as hybrids of human-like / neural-net / organic intelligence and also direct numerical compute and storage capacity. They can both "think" and "compute", something few if any current AI models attempt.
A well-known limitation of current LLMs like ChatGPT is that they are atrocious at even basic arithmetic, whereas a $2 pocket calculator from the 1980s outperforms them in this respect!
I'd love to see an attempt at a hybrid architecture where the neurons are also connected to a numeric compute component of the architecture.
Think of parsing an expression such as:
let foo = 5 + 10
"let", " foo", " =", " 5", " +", " 10"
[1309, 22944, 796, 642, 1343, 838]
[LET, ID("foo"), EQ, NUM(5), PLUS, NUM(10)]
What if we lifted this restriction and made an AI embedding where every token had both an ID and a value? For literal text just set the ID to NaN or whatever.
E.g.: assume that "integer constant" is ID 1000, then an LLM might be fed this input instead:
[1309, 22944, 796, 1000, 1343, 1000]
[ NaN, NaN, NaN, 5, NaN, 10]
Could be interesting...