Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: AI
-
A reader named “Nade” came along and posted a pretty interesting comment to Hilary Mason’s brilliant explanation of ChatGPT and how it’s often misunderstood: Most of the key ML/AI papers come from Google Brain and DeepMind. The 2017 paper on transformers “Attention is all you need” came from them too. OpenAI based their GPT models…
-
Hilary Mason, formerly Chief Scientist for Bitly and GM of Machine Learning at Cloudera, recently wrote this fun and incredibly effective explanation for ChatGPT that I highly recommend sharing with, well, everyone: How does ChatGPT work, really? It can feel like a wizard behind a curtain, or like a drunk friend, but ChatGPT is just……
-
Nostr is a new-ish social network project and if I’m being honest, I haven’t thought about it much at all except vaguely as that obscure thing Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is backing. But when Philip Rosedale was telling me about FairShare, he mentioned Nostr as "[the other] thing I'm most excited about right now as…
-
Promptcraft: Guidebook for Generative Media in Creative Work is a new book by longtime XR creator Evo Heyning and as the title suggests, has copious advice for getting the most out of AI image generators like Midjourney and beyond. Evo has a starting YouTube tutorial above, and she kindly shared some helpful image generation tips…
-
Over one billion people use a virtual world avatar of some kind. (Factoring in the half a billion+ on a metaverse platform, and the hundreds of millions who play MMOs and various multiplayer games.) Many if not most of them are such avid users, they frequently share content about their avatars (screenshots, video, blog posts,…
-
This screencap above is not a biography of Cajsa Lilliehook, New World Notes' longtime, beloved Flickr columnist, but a sophisticated, well-funded AI sure thinks it is. It's the result Cajsa got when she asked AI Writer to create her Second Life avatar's biography, and the results are pretty hilarious and a bit insane. The entertaining…
-
Fun comment from reader Ravelli Ormstein, spinning off from my post about how full of fail ChatGPT is when you ask it a question you're an expert on: First, I asked ChatGPT to write a LSL script that would turn on a light when the sun went down. It wrote a nice script, but it…
-
ChatGPT continues to generate incredible hype, buzz around Silicon Valley, and grand pronouncements that its soon going to replace writers and teachers, even accountants and lawyers. But before you believe any of that, here's a simple test to try: Ask ChatGPT about a specific subject that you know very well. And take…
-
You've probably heard about students using ChatGPT to cheat on their essay writing work, and it's something developer Catherine Winters knows about first-hand from colleagues at a local university. "[They are] freaked out because of ChatGPT — it looks like there was a lot of cheating the last couple weeks of last term," she tells…
-
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting Pavel Stransky is doing something really interesting with AI art. He starts with an SL screenshot, then processes it through Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image Artificial Intelligence, fine tunes it with Photoshop and then adds detail and definition with another AI called GigaPixel.…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 