Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 31 May 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and happy Wednesday! It was a humid mid-80s kind of day with thunderclouds in the distance but no rain for us. Things are really getting dusty and we are hoping for rain soon. All animals are doing well. The most significant report is another lamb born this afternoon. The bottom 3 pics are the newest lamb. It’s another ewe lamb and we think she is really cute with her tan eye patch. The top pic is Makaylah feeding the bottle lambs--we can't decide who is cuter...Makaylah or the lambs! What do you think? She is enjoying taking care of them and is doing an awesome job. We moved the sheep to the pasture across the creek. All went well except for about a dozen lambs that didn’t really want to go. We were able to gather them and the new mom and her lamb and with a bit of gentle coercion, they meandered their way across the creek. The ducks are not laying as many eggs as normal. We expected them to slow down when we moved them in with the rest of the birds. They should pick back up in a few days as they get more comfortable in their new area and the cat seems to have stoped hanging out in their house. We still have more eggs than we can use and are able to take some with us to the market every Saturday. The geese eggs are a big hit when we take them! They are so big that folks can’t help but stop by to ask about them. A couple of weeks ago, we had a gentleman stop by and ask about our eggs so we described the way we do business to include having them on pasture and feeding GMO-free fermented feed. He bought all of the eggs we had—11 dozen of them, and would have bought 15 dozen if we had them!
Well…the AI Large Language Model ‘cat’ is out of the bag. The government has been fretting over how to control LLMs specifically and AI in general. We watched a bit of a Senate hearing with the leaders of the tech giants that had introduced the first LLMs. The focus was on how the government can/should regulate AI, what companies can/should do to ensure it is used for good and not bad, etc. A bit behind the scenes, in February, FaceBook launched its LLM called LLaMA, except it released the code open source. Then the entire model was leaked. That put a powerful LLM into the ‘wild’ with no big tech company to control it nor a government to regulate it. Coders have already slimmed it down to the point to where it will run on a mid-grade laptop without the billions of rules imposed by the other big tech companies. They are allowing it to ‘run free’ throughout the internet to learn realtime. I say “it” as if it’s one thing but that is really a misnomer. Coders are using the source code and model to generate their own version of LLM…so there is really no way to know how many LLMs there are out there based on LLaMA. Not surprisingly, the government is really late to this…so late they need not even try to reign it in. Open source means that anyone from any country anywhere in the world has access to it. Good luck trying to figure out how to regulate that. That leaves us in a precarious position, one I’ve discussed before, where it is more important than ever to know and trust a source of information since AI is now in the Wild!
If interested in more information, check out the Slate article: "Big Tech Isn’t Prepared for A.I.’s Next Chapter: Open source is changing everything." by BRUCE SCHNEIER and JIM WALDO
May 30, 2023
Local Farm Report for 30 May 2023:
Harvest:
22 Chicken eggs
3 Duck eggs
2 Goose eggs
5 1/4 Gallons of milk
Cheers! Psycho & Shelley
Me after trying to figure out if AI in the wild is a good thing or a bad thing: Honey,looks like we will need a deeper root cellar…😗