Wikipedia Explorer
Wikipedia Explorer was meant as a throw away experiment but became an interesting tool that I returned to many times.
As part of an experiment on fast retrieval I stored embeddings of the most popular 1/4th of English Wikipedia on a single consumer grade GPU.
From my discussion on chasing a ball of linguistic yarn as it rolls around a thousand dimensional space:
Through the lens of this language model I can search for the emotional residue of great works distilled into phrases I would never have been able to explicitly search for. It's not the language model that's bringing us this knowledge, it's simply connecting threads of an intricate web that we've assembled both implicitly and explicitly over thousands of years, billions of observations, and a multitude of encoded emotions.
The model was trained from scratch using a simplistic language model yet the results still opened worlds to me.
Examples include:
Harold Holt
Harold Holt was an Australian Prime Minister who disappeared when he went out swimming.
Walter Reuther, one of the most progressive labor unions in American history, survived two attempted assassinations, only to die in mysterious plane crash:
The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that the plane's altimeter was missing parts, some incorrect parts were installed, and one of its parts had been installed upside down, leading some to speculate that Reuther may have been murdered. Reuther had been subjected earlier to two attempted assassinations.
Zachary Taylor, the second US President to die in office:
Almost immediately after his death, rumors began to circulate that Taylor had been poisoned by pro-slavery Southerners, and various conspiracy theories persisted into the late-20th century. The cause of Taylor's death was definitively established in 1991, when his remains were exhumed and an autopsy conducted by Kentucky's chief medical examiner. Subsequent Neutron activation analysis conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed no evidence of poisoning, as arsenic levels were too low.
William Tolbert, 20th President of Liberia:
Undisputedly, Tolbert was dead by the end of April 12, 1980, the day of the coup d’état. There are competing stories as to the time and manner of his death.
Thomas Francis Meagher, Irish nationalist and leader of the Young Irelanders in the Rebellion of 1848, first sentenced to death, and then sentenced to life in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in Australia, who escaped and made his way to the US:
Sometime in the early evening of 1 July 1867, Meagher fell overboard from the steamboat "G. A. Thompson", into the Missouri River. The pilot described the waters as "instant deathwater twelve feet deep and rushing at the rate of ten miles an hour." His body was never recovered.
Some believed his death to be suspicious and many theories circulated about his death. Early theories included a claim that he was murdered by a Confederate soldier from the war, or by Native Americans. In 1913 a man claimed to have carried out the murder of Meagher for the price of $8000, but then recanted. In the same vein, American journalist and novelist Timothy Egan, who published a biography of Meagher in 2016, noted that his political nemesis, Wilbur Fisk Sanders, was in Fort Benton at the same time. Egan hypothesized that Meagher may have been set up for murder by his Montana political enemies or powerful and still active vigilantes.