Posts on Paul Payne

My Programming Career is a Historical Artifact

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m calling it. My entire 30 year career in technology is a historical artifact. My current work with AI has convinced me that, in a few short years, humanity will look back and think how funny it was that people once actually programmed machines.

Wild Cloud

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the beginning of the year I became increasingly concerned with the state of civil society here in the U.S. and around the world. Polarized online discourse, mental health crises, centralized control, challenges to privacy, continued ecosystem degradation, run-away growth, shifting political landscapes, attacks on civil liberties, and an overall disappearance of civil society as a whole in the face of government and corporate power grabs.

The Artificiality of "Intelligent" LLMs

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For now, the intelligence in our systems remains distinctly human.

Eighteen months ago, I wrote about building thinking machines using LLMs, driven by curiosity about whether these systems could help us understand human consciousness. What I’ve learned building LLM applications since then fundamentally changes that original question.

Towards Reclaiming Digital Independence

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How the 2025 presidential inauguration reflected a breach of social contract by big tech and one person’s first steps at reclaiming their digital autonomy.

A Brief Survey of Consciousness

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“an abstract illustration of consciousness studies, timeline, gradient” –Midjourney

Early Investigations
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In our investigations of creating machine minds, let’s start with a quick survey of previous thinking on the topic. Machines have only relatively recently come on the scene, but our investigations of mind and consciousness trace back thousands of years. This article is a very simple roadmap of our collective journey so far with significant points marked along the way. In future articles, I’ll reference this map and dig into various points in more depth as needed.

Memory

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“a beautiful photo of a memory system, neurons, warm and comforting” –Midjourney

Imagine for a moment life without memory. Each moment is a fresh experience of the world. Where are you? There would be no concept of narrative, how you got here. What is this place? There would be no firm semantics, what is here? Who is the other person in the room? What is a person? What is other? Who are you? Perhaps what we would experience would be a pure state of egoless flow, of being absolutely present in the moment, with no memory of the past and no imagination of the future. Maybe this is nirvana?

LLMs in Thinking Machines

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about the suitability of LLMs (Large Language Models) for exploring thinking machines. Are they all we need? Where do they fall short? What areas are they especially suited to? But first, a bit of LLMs background to get a better understanding of them.

A Brief History of LLMs
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LLMs were developed from the academic field of natural language processing (NLP), which studies the interface between machines and human language. Three main advancements in NLP over the past decade brought us to the LLMs we use today and help us understand the properties of LLMs: Word embeddings, attention, and scaling.

Agents. Where to begin?

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“surrealist painting of the creation of an autonomous agent, machinery, consciousness” -Midjourney

The simplest agent one can build might be:

def hi(): 
  print(“hello”)

This exhibits the behavior one would expect of an agent in the world. In response to an external stimulus, a function call, it reacts, printing “hello” to the console from which you called it.

It's Time

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cover: “photo of a boy on the floor reading an old encyclopedia, sunlight, scattered toys, 80s” –Midjourney

I hope these articles will open collaboration with others of you who share my interests. And, if we’re going to be working together, then you should know something about me. To that end, before we dive into the philosophy, theory, and technology, I want to give a bit of background of how and why I am interested in investigating consciousness by building thinking machines.

Investigations in Mind

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“A beautiful technical drawing of artificial cognition architecture. muted pastel lines with neon accents on a white background…” -Midjourney

This newsletter will chronicle my research into understanding consciousness, specifically through the lens of crafting it using the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.

I am Paul Payne, a Principal Research Engineer in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft. My colleagues and I currently work on augmenting generative artificial intelligence with the aim of creating new classes of software to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Synthetic Memories

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“a blueprint of a synthetic memory machine” –Midjourney

ChatGPT is Forgetful
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ChatGPT is forgetful. More specifically, it doesn’t remember anything. It responds to your messages, so it feels like it remembers you. It even uses some of the history of your chat as it crafts new responses, so it can be a convincing charade, but if you’ve ever tried to have a long chat with ChatGPT, or almost any LLM-based chatbot, you’ll find that it doesn’t use any information in your chat history that doesn’t fit into the underlying models prompt token limit. Only a limited sliding window of recent chat history is used. This gives users the unsettling feeling of talking with a chatbot that doesn’t seem to care enough to actually get to know them.

Posts on Paul Payne

My Programming Career is a Historical Artifact

Wild Cloud

The Artificiality of "Intelligent" LLMs

Towards Reclaiming Digital Independence

A Brief Survey of Consciousness

Early Investigations #

Memory

LLMs in Thinking Machines

A Brief History of LLMs #

Agents. Where to begin?

It's Time

Investigations in Mind

Synthetic Memories

ChatGPT is Forgetful #

Early Investigations
#

A Brief History of LLMs
#

ChatGPT is Forgetful
#