Tag: tft

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Bookmarked Project Tailwind by Steven Johnson

Author Steven Johnson has been working with Google and developed a prototype for Tailwind. Tailwind, an ‘AI first notebook’, is intended to bring an LLM to your own source material, and then you can use it to ask questions of the sources you give it. You point it to a set of resources in your Google Drive and what Tailwind generates will be based just on those resources. It shows you the specific source of the things it generates as well. Johnson explicitly places it in the Tools for Thought category. You can join a waiting list if you’re in the USA, and a beta should be available in the summer. Is the USA limit intended to reduce the number of applicants I wonder, or a sign that they’re still figuring things like GDPR for this tool? Tailwind is prototyped on PaLM API though, which is now generally available.

This, from its description, gets to where it becomes much more interesting to use LLM and GPT tools. A localised (not local though, it lives in your Google footprint) tool, where the user defines the corpus of sources used, and traceable results. As the quote below suggests a personal research assistant. Not just for my entire corpus of notes as I describe in that linked blogpost, but also on a subset of notes for a single topic or project. I think there will be more tools like these coming in the next months, some of which likely will be truly local and personal.

On the Tailwind team we’ve been referring to our general approach as source-grounded AI. Tailwind allows you to define a set of documents as trusted sources …, shaping all of the model’s interactions with you. … other types of sources as well, such as your research materials for a book or blog post. The idea here is to craft a role for the LLM that is … something closer to an efficient research assistant, helping you explore the information that matters most to you.

Steven Johnson

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Attempting to understand the ‘Noosphere’ and Subconscious tooling that Gordon Brander is developing results in several questions. Brander proposes a new ‘low level infrastructure’ (subconscious) for sharing stuff across the internet, which should result in us thinking together on a global scale (the noosphere).

I’ve followed the recent Render conference on ‘tools for thought’ where Gordon Brander presented Noosphere and Subconscious. In the wake of it I joined the Discord server around this topic, and read the ‘Noosphere Explainer‘. Brander’s Render talk roughly follows that same document.

Brander says: The internet is already a tool for thought, so we should make it better at it. The tools at our disposal to deal with this new voluminous information environment haven’t reached their potential yet. Learning to think together at planetary scale is a needed ingredient to address global issues. There are many interesting tools out there, but they’re all silos of SaaS. They’re silos because of same origin policy which prevents cross-site/host/domain/port sourcing of material. Subconscious is meant to solve that by providing a ‘protocol for thoughts’.

This leaves me with a range of questions.

  • Subconscious is meant to solve same origin policy. SOP however seems to be a client (i.e. browser) enforced thing, focused on (java)scripts, and otherwise e.g. ignores HTML. Apps are/can be viewers like browsers are viewers. So why isn’t the web suitable, with the app or a tweaked browser on top? Why a whole new ‘infrastructure’ over the internet? That sounds like it wants to solve a whole lot more than same origin to remove the bias towards silos. What are those additional things?
  • The intended target is to make the internet a better tool for thought. Such thoughts are text based it seems so what does Subsoncsious do in contrast to current text based thoughts shared that e.g. the web doesn’t?
  • Assuming Subconscious does what it intends, how do we get from a ‘low level infrastructure’ to the stated overarching aim of thinking together globally? I see texts, that may or not be expressed thoughts, being linked and shared like web resources, how do we get to ‘thinking together’ from there? The talk at Render paid tribute to that at the beginning but doesn’t show how it would be done (and the invocation of the Xanadu project at the start might well be meaningful in that sense), not even in any ‘and then the magic happens to get to the finish line’ fashion. Is the magic supposed to be emergent, like I and others assumed the web and social software would do 20-30 years ago? Is it enough to merely have a ‘protocol for thoughts’? What about non-infrastructure type decision and consensus building tools like Liquid Feedback or Audrey Tang’s quadratic voting in vTaiwan? Those are geared to action, and seem more immediately useful towards solving global issues, don’t they?

I’ll be hanging out in the Discord server, you can too (invite link), and going through Gordon Brander’s earlier postings, to see if I can better understand what this is about.