Hello from mid-June, a time dense with events. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
New on the blog, from the archives: a process diary from my first encounters with generative AI in 2022.
Here are five fragments that caught my eye last week…
Many people have reported finding Claude 3 to be more engaging and interesting to talk to, which we believe might be partially attributable to its character training. This wasn’t the core goal of character training, however. Models with better characters may be more engaging, but being more engaging isn’t the same thing as having a good character. In fact, an excessive desire to be engaging seems like an undesirable character trait for a model to have.
– “Claude’s Character,” Anthropic, June 8, 2024. “An excessive desire to be engaging seems like an undesirable character trait for a model to have” sounds like a perfect premise for a science fiction novel. (One we might be living soon.)
Technicolor brought us the ominous red skies in “Gone with the Wind,” the impossibly yellow rain slickers in “Singin’ in the Rain,” and a city of Emerald Green in “The Wizard of Oz.” In short, [John] Belton says, it helped create Hollywood.
– Edgar B. Herwick III, “How MIT And Technicolor Helped Create Hollywood,” WGBH, July 31, 2015. Got curious about Technicolor this week thanks to this post on Twitter/X and ended up here thanks to a footnote on the Wikipedia entry. Two gems from this piece: 1) the “Tech” in “Technicolor” comes from “Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” where the creators of Technicolor met 2) they set up their processing plant in a railroad car so that it could easily go wherever it was needed.
Are books the most efficient way to store information / ideas long term? If not, what is? Books are certainly not the best way to teach information — then what is?
– Carmen Gutierrez, “Open Questions,” April 7, 2024. Published on her personal website as #41 in a list of (so far) 48 questions—“I will list the questions, however small or large, that have occupied me. Ideally, each of these questions is one day linked to a corresponding essay exploring it, or at least a link to the relevant answer that sated my curiosity about the question.” Don’t miss her virtual bookshelf, which already prompted me to read Born Standing Up at last.
The novelty was in learning the deformations on vertices instead of triangles, as done in older models like SCAPE and BlendSCAPE (our lab’s own, very heavily used parametric body model). Making this switch to vertices meant this model could finally work with standard 3D blend weight rigging used in all graphics engines. The second important thing was to make the deformations linear. Making them linear meant the model could finally work with standard 3D blendshape deformations used in all graphics engines. We called this concept the “character compiler”. This was the first time we talked to our group about the idea that evolved into what we now call SMPL.
– Naureen Mahmood, “The Story of SMPL,” June 8, 2024. I love working with and learning from the whole Meshcapade team, and it’s a treat to be able to go back in time and live vicariously through the moment of inception of a technology that’s transformed an entire field.
You always know where you are, and what remains, because at the beginning you learn about the six signs, and you know by the end you’ll have collected them all.
– Robin Sloan, “Just give me a checklist: The simplest suspense,” about the checklist effect in fiction and how he wove it into his new novel, Moonbound—out tomorrow, June 11th! This passage refers specifically to Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising—“Early on, our protagonist, young Will, discovers an odd object, a sort of proto-cross as wide as his palm, carved from wood — a sign. He learns that he will collect six of these signs: wood followed by bronze, iron, water, fire, and stone.” Moonbound’s companion site is a thrill…like DVD extras for a movie you haven’t yet seen. For those in San Francisco: see you tonight at the launch?
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com