There is mythological reverence for Google’s Tensor Processing Unit. While the world presently watches NVIDIA’s gravity drag more companies into its orbit, there sits Google, imperial and singular. Lots of companies participate in the “Cambrian-style explosion of new-interesting accelerators”[14] – Groq, Amazon, and Tenstorrent come to mind – but the TPU is the original existence proof. NVIDIA should take credit for the reemergence of deep learning, but the GPU wasn’t designed with deep learning in mind. What’s strange is that the TPU isn’t a secret. This research is indebted to Google’s public chest-thumping, but the devices themselves have long been exclusive to Google’s datacenters. That is over a decade of work on a hardware system sequestered behind their walls. That the TPU is so well documented yet without a true counterpart creates a strange asymmetry. Google is well positioned in the AI race because of their decision over a decade ago to build a hardware accelerator. It is because of the TPU. — Read More
Daily Archives: December 4, 2025
Increasing alignment of large language models with language processing in the human brain
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have considerably advanced our understanding of how meaning is represented in the human brain; however, the validity of increasingly large LLMs is being questioned due to their extensive training data and their ability to access context thousands of words long. In this study we investigated whether instruction tuning—another core technique in recent LLMs that goes beyond mere scaling—can enhance models’ ability to capture linguistic information in the human brain. We compared base and instruction-tuned LLMs of varying sizes against human behavioral and brain activity measured with eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging during naturalistic reading. We show that simply making LLMs larger leads to a closer match with the human brain than fine-tuning them with instructions. These finding have substantial implications for understanding the cognitive plausibility of LLMs and their role in studying naturalistic language comprehension. — Read More
First Wap: A Surveillance Computer You’ve Never Heard Of
Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws:
Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley.
It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”
… Much more in this Lighthouse Reports analysis.
— Read More
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