To the technologist belong the spoils!

Technology AI Education Productivity

I spent a considerable part of my day playing with this repo. It shows video summarization using llama-3 running on Groq. The interesting thing to me is what happens when you combine with performant LLMs like llama-3, and fast speech-to-text like Distill-Whisper, and accelerated inference hardware like Groq.

The time taken to watch, analyze, and study a 3-hours lecture is brought down to less than 30 seconds (3x orders of magnitude faster).

It is difficult to me to imagine what will happen when these tools become more widespread. When information processing cost is brought down by 3x orders of magnitude, then education becomes a lot more targeted. It doesn’t matter as much what you remember, it matters a lot more how do you connect the pieces together. In other words, educated traversal becomes more valuable.

I’m still working on developing an insight on how to know if two nodes can be connected. Developing a value function to connect the nodes of the individual’s knowledge graph would certainly become a lot more valuable given that the cost of adding new nodes become lower.

Another thing to remember is that when the information processing cost is brought down, it’s a lot easier to get distracted and accomplish nothing. We saw a glimpse of that when social networks and Youtube first appeared. Everyone got excited about the endless opportunities for education. The same source for education (and no-doubt that it has contributed a lot to education), also caused major attention deficit. It became a lot harder to develop a long-term attention span required to get important things done.

A value function for the individual’s knowledge graph not only would require knowing what to connect, but also would require enough attention and effort to obtain and process this knowledge, and implement the ideas that come off the merger of the nodes.

Thus, we end up with two contradicting forces. On one hand, it’s a lot faster, cheaper, and easier to obtain, process, and analyze knowledge than in the past. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to get distracted and overwhelmed by the insurmountable amount of information out there that you don’t get much done.

Meditation can help mitigate distraction.
Focus can help mitigate the overwhelming effect of the information flow.
Technology and AI can help bring down the cost of obtaining new information.
& Thus, to the focused, contemplative, and technologist belong the spoils!!