From Barron's Up and Down Wall Street column, December 28:
It’s 2024, and time to start thinking seriously about the infinite monkey theorem.
First posited by the French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913, the idea is both simple and ridiculous: If you had an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time—or even just one everlasting monkey typing for all of eternity—eventually the result would include every existing piece of text, including the Bible, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the complete works of William Shakespeare. Plus everything I’ve ever written for Barron’s.
Alas, there are no eternal monkey typists. But in the era of generative artificial intelligence, the infinite monkey theorem carries fresh resonance.
I was reminded of Borel’s idea after reading an eye-opening essay by Doug Clinton, managing partner of Deepwater Asset Management, about a concept he calls “infinite intelligence.” The idea is related to, but distinct from, “superintelligence,” or “general artificial intelligence,” which is the much-discussed notion that the current work of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other large language model developers could eventually lead to the creation of sentient AI that might solve all the world’s problems, or alternatively, wipe out humanity. Win some, lose some.
Clinton views superintelligence as “a singular, centralized system capable of extreme knowledge and understanding across any and every domain,” solving problems “through superior intellect and without human involvement.” That last bit—cutting humans out of the equation—is where you lose some people. Figuratively and literally.
By contrast, Clinton defines infinite intelligence as “a massively scaled system with intelligence in a specific field or fields equivalent to a human college graduate.” Clinton positions infinite intelligence as “more specialized and decentralized than superintelligence,” solving problems “with brute force alongside some human guidance.” Kind of like smart monkey typists.
In an interview with Barron’s, Clinton says he thinks infinite intelligence “is the most likely path” to leveraging AI to solve previously intractable scientific problems. Think of ChatGPT and the like as operating at a kindergarten level. Now imagine what happens when they get to graduate school and you can create a million—or a billion—virtual college grads.
As he notes, there are about a million mathematicians in the U.S. He sees a need for more, maybe a lot more, and AI offers the solution. “Imagine a world where AI can do graduate-level math, and we could spin up a billion instances of those digital mathematicians,” Clinton writes.
“We’d have 1,000 times more artificial brains working on mathematical problems than we do now. If we focused a firehose of AI instances with graduate-level math knowledge, we’d probably solve some important problems.” Now imagine extending the approach to biology (there are about 100,000 U.S. biologists), chemistry (even fewer, at 80,000), and physics (just 20,000). You can’t take the Earth’s population from seven billion to 70 billion or 700 billion people—but we aren’t that far from creating an infinite number of virtual, domain-specific supergeniuses.
This is far more powerful stuff than cloud computing, or the internet, or smartphones, or blockchain, or crypto, or autonomous driving. This technology can change everything—literally everything—and solve longstanding problems in every domain....
....MUCH MORE
The author of this piece, Eric Savitz, is one of the very best tech-journos-for-general-audiences. We are fans:
Eric Savitz Turned 15,000 Today
Back in 2008 we called him the "Hardest working man in Show Business", a line we repeated during the Feb. 2009 reporting season: "Eric Savitz , The Hardest Working Man In Show Business! And: Book-to-Bill Ratio at 0.10"
As of 6:32 p.m. PST, I counted 22 posts at Tech Trader Daily timestamped "February 25, 2009..."Here's his "15,000 Posts - And Counting":
and I have a feeling that this time of the quarter is what Mr. Savitz lives for. "I feel good..."
Oh my.
A few minutes ago, I hit the “publish” button on Tech Trader Daily post number 15,000. A little back-of-the-envelope math finds that comes to about 11 posts a day for the last 1,348 days; back out the weekends (but not holidays) and you get about 15 posts a day since the thing got going in late May 2006....MORE
Climateer's "Quote of the Day" Bloggy Style
Update: Solar Shares Crushed On Washington Post Report On Chinese Polysilicon Company Dumping Toxic Waste.
Comment by - March 11, 2008 at 1:00 amRH 2002: That is the silliest thing I have ever heard. This is my blog; no one tells me what to write about. I wrote about solar today because the story was important, and the stocks were getting clobbered. This has nothing to with the oil industry. In fact, if you go back a few years, you will find I wrote a highly bullish cover story about the solar industry - long before any of the China solar plays had come public. Go buy yourself a clue.
Note the timestamp!
PCs, Mobile Phones Can Save The Environment, Says Study Funded By Makers Of PCs, Mobile Phones
We like Eric Savitz.Posted by Eric SavitzBy using more computers and mobile phones, we can cut carbon dioxide emissions by 15% and save $1 trillion in reduced electricity and fuel costs, according to a study from something called the Climate Group.
Bloomberg reported on the study, which it notes was funded by, among other people Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO) and Nokia (NOK), the world’s leading providers of PC software, networking equipment and mobile phones, respectively.
Participating in the study was a group called the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, which is backed not only by Microsoft, Cisco and Nokia, but also other, ahem, totally unbiased parties, like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the world’s leading producer of PCs, and Motorola (MOT), the world’s fastest-disintegrating cell phone company.
Suddenly, I feel like I write for The Onion.
