The awesome thing about language is that, well, we all mostly speak it, to some extent or another. This gives us an immensely powerful tool to manipulate transformational tasks. For the purposes of this post, I consider a transformational task to be essentially anything that takes an input and is largel intended to return some version of the same thing. This is not a very precise definition, but it will have to do for now.
It’s not every day that you find out you have climbed the exalted heights of another discipline. My work is pretty interdisciplinary, but it shocked me, too, that I’m apparently holding forth on neoliberalism and the epistemic question in African universities (archive link): This, of course, came at some surprise to me, as I have never written anything on the topic.
In the first four entries (1 2 3 4) of this sequence, I have focused primarily on what LLMs aren’t, can’t, won’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t. It’s probably time to conclude this series by that much awaited moment in all stories, where the darkest night finally turns into a glorious dawn, where we finally arrive at the promised land, where we finally get to talk about what LLMs could be. What I see as the most successful potential model of
There’s a style of visual design I’m inordinately fond of called Raygun Gothic. It’s hard to describe what the hell exactly one needs to be on to enjoy it, but think of it like the aesthetic from the latter Fallout games with a more optimistic outlook on the future. Gibson described it as “the future that never was”, and I think that’s a pretty apt description. We get these competing futures in technology all the time.
There’s something special about language. It is ‘our own’, it is ‘us’, in a profound way, and quite surprisingly, more so than art. I was deeply struck by this when I first saw reactions to large generative language models that created realistic, human-ish prose.
Over at the work blog, I’m discussing what knowledge means for large language models (LLMs), and the ways in which we can leverage this knowledge dividend for better inference. Read the full post here.
Over at the work blog, I’m discussing what knowledge means for large language models (LLMs), and the ways in which we can leverage this knowledge dividend for better inference. Read the full post here.