Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world. The rank-and-file developers at these companies, in their naivete, do not see that distinction…So, as these LLMs become increasingly but asymptotically fluent, tantalizingly close to accuracy but ultimately incomplete, developers complain that they are short on data. They have their general purpose computer program, and if they only had the entire world in data form to shove into it, then it would be complete.
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Given the piece’s roping in Simulators and Simulacra I highly recommend this piece looking at the same topic through the same lens but in the other direction to balance it out:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators
Just in case anyone lucker than I am hasn’t read that work:
Because of our mastery over information the copy of something is often seen as more real than the original. If you saw a movie poster of Marilyn Monroe you would identifier that image as her, but the real Marilyn Monroe is a decomposing skeleton. The simulacra has become the reality.
Also every viewpoint is now binary for some reason and porn is fun to look at.
The rest is just 20th century anti-structurlism post modern garbage about the breakdown of meta narratives. As if I am supposed to give a fuck that no one wants to spend four years of their life reading Hegel and some people enjoy fusion cuisine.
Something you might find interesting given our past discussions is that the way that the Gospel of Thomas uses the Greek eikon instead of Coptic (what the rest of the work is written in), that through the lens of Plato’s ideas of the form of a thing (eidelon), the thing itself, an attempt at an accurate copy of the thing (eikon), and the embellished copy of the thing (phantasm), one of the modern words best translating the philosophical context of eikon in the text would arguably be ‘simulacra.’
So wherever the existing English translations use ‘image’ replace that with ‘simulacra’ instead and it will be a more interesting and likely accurate read.
(Was just double checking an interlinear copy of Plato’s Sophist to make sure this train of thought was correct, inspired by the discussion above.)
Hmm
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Traditional Translation: “When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images (eikons) that came into being before you and that neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!”
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New Translation: “When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your simulacra that came into being before you and that neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!”
I think I see it. Jesus in this gospel is arguing that “y’all are so happy when you look in the mirror, just wait until you meet all platonic forms of yourself. Your mind is going to get blown because you will know that the distance between you and your mirror image is far smaller than you and your platonic forms.”
Is that what you are driving at?
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That’s easy. The people profiting from it are pushing it hard.
And other companies who had something half-baked just threw it out to both say “me too!” and to ingest as much user input training data in order to catch up.
That’s why “AI” is getting shoved into so many things right now. Not because it’s useful but because they need to gobble up as much training data as they can in order to play catch up.
Going further, they’re like magic. They’re good at what takes up a lot of human time - researching unknown topics, acting as a sounding board, pumping out the fluff expected when communicating professionally.
And they can do a lot more otherwise - they’ve opened so many doors for what software can do and how programmers work, but there’s a real learning curve in figuring out how to tie them into conventional systems. They can smooth over endless tedious tasks
None of those things will make ten trillion dollars. It could add trillions in productivity, but it’s not going to make a trillion dollars for a company next year. It’ll be spread out everywhere across the economy, unless one company can license it to the rest of the world
And that’s what FAANG and venture capitalists are demanding. They want something that’ll create a tech titan, and they want it next quarter
So here we are, with this miracle tech in its infancy. Instead of building on what LLMs are good at and letting them enable humans, they’re being pitched as something that’d make ten trillion dollars - like a replacement for human workers
And it sucks at that. So we have OpenAI closing it off and trying to track GPU usage and kill local AI (among other regulatory barriers to entry), we have Google and Microsoft making the current Internet suck so they’re needed, and we have the industry in a race to build pure llm solutions when independent developers are doing more with orders of magnitude less
Welcome to the worst timeline, AI edition
