2 ms·
The future will probably have amazing computers and models, but what we already have has the capacity to profoundly change the world. I don't think you are foc
by visarga 3y ago
The future will probably have amazing computers and models, but what we already have has the capacity to profoundly change the world.
I don't think you are focusing on what matters most. It's really the language itself that contains the intelligence, not the AI models. The models are just vessels for absorbing all that knowledge encoded in text. Just like human brains - we can have different neural wiring but learn the same things through education.
So the huge datasets these AI systems are trained on are key. That's how models like GPT-4 gain such language understanding. The architecture matters less than all that linguistic data it ingests. And language has been evolving for millennia, long before AI. It replicates through culture, speech, writing. Now with AI it has a whole new medium.
Fascinating question - how will AI affect language evolution going forward? As models produce more human-like text, which can further train better models, it's like a Lamarckian evolution. Acquired linguistic intelligence gets absorbed by AI then improved and propagated back into the corpus.
So while AI tech will keep advancing, it's language evolution that's most profound. By creating this new way for language to evolve, AI could really reshape cultural evolution. Since language enables intelligence, it'll have big impacts on where AI is headed next.