Machine learning and the metaverse
This is a great week to talk about machine learning and the metaverse. You can check back on Substack and see I set this topic weeks ago. All that said, it was just in time for Mark Zuckerberg to change the name of Facebook to Meta this week.[1] One of the best 60 second takes on the name change came from Gary Vaynerchuk, “Facebook’s biggest strength over the last two decades has always been going to where the attention is”
Before we get into the machine learning part of this Substack post it is probably best to acknowledge that people generally agree that the phrase metaverse was coined by Neal Stephenson in the novel Snow Crash (1992).[2] I’ll admit that the eBook is on my phone right now and I’m very slowly reading it. It is fair at this point to note I now recall why exactly I have never finished reading this book from start to finish.
A lot of my writing ends up being about the intersection of technology and modernity. Those of you who have been reading my work for years know that it comes from a combination of my interests in civil society and technology. That is sort of where the idea of a metaverse begins to come forward. I really enjoyed the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011).[3] Within that book a central premise is that people spend a lot of time in a virtual world that is essentially a metaverse called the Oasis. Why did we just run down the journey from 1992 and Snow Crash to Ready Player One in 2011 and Facebook trying to become Meta in 2021? Well, the answer is pretty straightforward and it has to do with a land rush to build an online world in the form of a metaverse. The company who probably is the most invested in winning this land rush toward building an online virtual world is Facebook/Meta.
That effort toward world building is going to include a ton of machine learning. My journey into reading articles this week on Google Scholar that related to a search for “machine learning metaverse” ended up being a strange look at a mix of ethics related concerns and things plus the word metaverse.[4] My guess on that one is that for years now (probably since 1992) authors have figured out that taking a subject they normally publish on and adding the word metaverse in the title of the article helped to get it published. This same phenomenon happened with the phrase machine learning as well. That means that looking for academic articles with both machine learning and metraverse was a strange journey.
Links and thoughts:
Yannic took a look at this paper and provided insights, “Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models (Explained)”
Don’t worry Yannic also shared an episode of ML News this week. You will see that around 10,000 people really care about machine learning and watch these videos each week from Yannic, “[ML News] NVIDIA GTC'21 | DeepMind buys MuJoCo | Google predicts spreadsheet formulas”
This week I did watch the WAN show with Linus and Luke on Saturday morning, “We're Changing Our Name - WAN Show October 29, 2021”
One of the more amazing things in the machine learning space is the idea of translation and what it can do for live conversations. Check out, “AI Show | Oct 22 | Translator now supports 100+ languages and dialects | Episode 36”
Top 5 Tweets of the week:
Footnotes:
[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/facebook-company-is-now-meta/
[2] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/172832/snow-crash-by-neal-stephenson/
[3] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/209887/ready-player-one-by-ernest-cline/
[4] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=metaverse+machine+learning&btnG=
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?
Week 42: Time crystals and machine learning
Week 43: Practical machine learning
Week 44: Machine learning salaries
Week 45: Prompt engineering and machine learning
Week 46: Machine learning and deep learning
I’ll try to keep the what’s next list forward looking with at least five weeks of posts in planning or review. If you enjoyed reading this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend.