For teaching our family everything. We love you Tom. Always.

My personal experience with @grok 4 Heavy (and regular Grok 4). It feels to me like @elonmusk has a very different emphasis than the rest of the AI crowd. The interface kinda sucks. The LaTeX code is generally riddled with *basic* errors for no reason whatsoever. It’s not a master writer in my experience. The audio chat is well behind ChatGPT. Blah blah blah. And it’s totally amazing and unique. Elon is jumping ahead. All of the above are going to be commodities before you know it. So, in the long run, who cares? What Elon is doing differently, I believe, is checking the hallucinations more aggressively by writing code and testing the LLM with the results from running that code. Which is why Grok heavy takes so %#€&$ing long to return results sometimes. Try this experiment. Take anything technical you know well, where there is an error that is persistant in an expert community narrative. Grok will, lamentably, generally parrot that error due to narrative seeding in the training corpus. It repeats the party line. And the party line generally benefits the technical insiders. That is, right up until the point it can write code to test that party line. And then it switches to trusting the results of the code over the narrative. It’s magical to watch. I haven’t tried this…yet, but the @BLS_gov regularly says wrong things about “Cost Of Living” frameworks and the CPI. I bet I could design a series of prompts to show Grok that this is a persistent technical lie. For technical people, here is the lie: ***The BLS computes the CPI which transfers Trillions and claims that they have embraced a “cost of living” or COL framework which would be hugely consequential. They have not. This would mean taking in preference data and developing methodology for aggregating preferences or coming up with bespoke representative consumers. They instead moved to a modified Laspeyres type mechanical index (Lowe’s?) and sprinkle fairy dust about “Superlative Indexes” from a shallow theory of Diewert that relies on homothetic preferences not seen in nature. This allows them to claim they have embraced impartial economic indices while actually computing mechanical indices only to the tune of trillions in transfers over time, where the indices can be directed by humans.*** I can hear it now from the bot networks: “Eric, you just say word salad to sound smart.” Uh…whatever. You can now just ask Grok what that means. I bet it can figure that out. And then you can ask a series of questions where Grok will take my side while no other AI can do this. Grok is slightly courageous! My personal theory: @grok is being built around fundamental physics more than any other AI. Because in the end nothing remotely matters as much as that. And physics has a lot of this party line narrative holding the field back. If you want to dream of reaching the stars, you may have to overwhelm the quantum gravity community. Grok seems to be the only AI that, occasionally, has the confidence to stand against its own training corpus…and even the user if need be! I wish it were *more* courageous. I wish it were smarter. But I think it is the odd man out, being built for actual intelligence rather than LLM user experience today. And it has the respect of the other AIs. Feed their pretty output to Grok Heavy and watch the magic as Grok reviews their work. It’s wild to watch. One user’s experience. Your mileage may vary.

How crazy is theoretical physics? Sidney Coleman was one of my favorite people in rheoretical physics. His office door was always open to me. And he was one of the only people who ever seemed to be “natively quantum”. And he was hysterically funny. I added a quote to a thread.

An independent attorney skilled in “State Secrets Privlige” or SSP, leading a team of investigators intimately familiar with the formal & informal infrastructure around covert operations, should be directing disclosure on behalf of the nation. Starting with forensic accounting.

One of both the most frustrating & satisfying fruits in existence. Anyone else crazy for the New World fruit Quenepas (misleadingly called Spanish Lime)? Giant seed. Almost no meat inside. Really hard to get it off the seed…and satisfying because it functions as a lemon drop.

Never let go of “The Epstein Thing.” We all need to stand up against rogue psychopaths within our ICs, and find the courage to speak up on behalf of those without the ability to speak for themselves. How is this complicated? As the oath says: All enemies, foreign & domestic.

How is it that the Higgs sector with its iconic Mexican Hat Potential…the most naively Geometric sector of the Standard Model of particle physics…is the only one which has zero obvious interest to differential geometry?

How is it that Higgs sector with its iconic Mexican Hat Potential…the most naively Geometric sector of the Standard Model of particle physics…is the only one which has zero obvious interest to differential geometry?

Quality Control: the scourge of Great Science. You cannot quality control your nation to great theoretical physics. Can’t be done. It’s about what has never been done. I could wipe out all of past theoretical physics with peer review & quality control.

A belated thank you to my grandparents and great grandparents. Great move. Happy July 4th America!