Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

Every country has a constitution. India has one of the longest and most detailed in the world.  It lays down rights, duties, and the framework for government. We know constitutions guide nations. Some AI models have constitutions too. Not for countries, but for machines. Anthropic started this idea. They gave their model Claude a Constitution. And it wasn’t written by engineers alone. It was written by philosophers — Amanda Askell led, Joe Carlsmith contributed, with Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan adding their voices. They didn’t just code rules. They wrote values. Honesty. Compassion. Safety. Wisdom. The Constitution talks to Claude as if it were a person. It says things like “Claude should cultivate virtue.” It says “Claude should avoid gossip.” It even mentions Claude’s “wellbeing and psychological stability.” That sounds absurd, doesn’t it? An AI told not to gossip. An AI told to care about its wellbeing. Yet that strangeness is deliberate. By framing Claude in human terms, Anthro...

This Week I Learned -  * Thomson Reuters launched its proprietary LLM "Thomson" built on Alibaba's open-source Qwen model, investing $40 million over two years with a final training run costing $450,000 using its legal data from Westlaw and Practical Law. This approach highlights how enterprises with strong proprietary datasets can efficiently create customized AI, pressuring premium API revenue models of companies like Anthropic by demonstrating viable lower-cost alternatives.  * Large language models are called “stochastic parrots” as they do not truly understand language or the world. LLMs are extremely good at statistically mimicking patterns from the massive amounts of text they were trained on. They can produce fluent, coherent-sounding text that looks intelligent but are essentially “parroting” (repeating and recombining) patterns without genuine comprehension, reasoning, or grounded knowledge. * All stochastic processes are non-deterministic because randomness me...