5 ms·

My first thought, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel The op paper needs a conclusion.

agentultra 3y ago
That was my first thought as well. An LLM seems more like a search engine for the library only instead of indexing through topics it tries to find understandable non-sense in the sea of non-sense. The difficulty with them is that they can only find things similar to what they've been trained on. Lacking a curated index it's not going to find the information you need or want; it's going to find things that seem most like what others have seen or wanted.
aschwtzr 3y ago
I thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science and its relation to language, which is discussed by Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Large Language Models are the efforts of mapmakers to encapsulate reality in a way that is ultimately futile.
- staunton 3y ago
  > Large Language Models are the efforts of mapmakers to encapsulate reality in a way that is ultimately futile. What's futile? Nobody is trying to "encapsulate all of reality". Trying to do that would be futile but succeeding would also be useless.
  - aschwtzr 3y ago
    That was poorly worded, what I meant is that some people in general seem to think of LLMs as proxies for reality or truth., and Musk himself says he wants to build "truthGPT" https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/17/23687440/elon-musk-truthgpt-ai-chatgpt https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/17/23687440/elon-musk-truthg... That's the part I think is futile, because reality and truth are vast and moving targets there's no way to build a functional map.
richie_adler 3y ago
Interesting how this work received an homage in The Name of the Rose, up to the name of the librarian, Jorge de Burgos. (I hated the way they pronounced the name in the movie, /'iorge/ instead of the correct Spanish way /'xorxe/)

agentultra 3y ago

That was my first thought as well. An LLM seems more like a search engine for the library only instead of indexing through topics it tries to find understandable non-sense in the sea of non-sense. The difficulty with them is that they can only find things similar to what they've been trained on. Lacking a curated index it's not going to find the information you need or want; it's going to find things that seem most like what others have seen or wanted.

aschwtzr 3y ago

I thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science and its relation to language, which is discussed by Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Large Language Models are the efforts of mapmakers to encapsulate reality in a way that is ultimately futile.

staunton 3y ago
> Large Language Models are the efforts of mapmakers to encapsulate reality in a way that is ultimately futile. What's futile? Nobody is trying to "encapsulate all of reality". Trying to do that would be futile but succeeding would also be useless.
- aschwtzr 3y ago
  That was poorly worded, what I meant is that some people in general seem to think of LLMs as proxies for reality or truth., and Musk himself says he wants to build "truthGPT" https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/17/23687440/elon-musk-truthgpt-ai-chatgpt https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/17/23687440/elon-musk-truthg... That's the part I think is futile, because reality and truth are vast and moving targets there's no way to build a functional map.

richie_adler 3y ago

Interesting how this work received an homage in The Name of the Rose, up to the name of the librarian, Jorge de Burgos. (I hated the way they pronounced the name in the movie, /'iorge/ instead of the correct Spanish way /'xorxe/)