>> Looking at early telegraphs doesn’t predict the iPhone, etc. The problem with this line of argument is that LLMs are not new technology, rather they are the

>> Looking at early telegraphs doesn’t predict the iPhone, etc. The problem with this line of argument is that LLMs are not new technology, rather they are the latest evolution of statistical language modelling, a technology that we've had at least since Shannon's time [1]. We are way, way past the telegraph era, and well into the age of large telephony switches handling millions of calls a second. Does that mean we've reached the end of the curve? Personally, I have no idea, but if you're going to argue we're at the beginning of things, that's just not right. ________________ [1] In "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", where he introduces what we today know as information theory, Shannon gives as an example of an application a process that generates a string of words in natural English according to the probability of the next letter in a word, or the next word in a sentence. See Section 3 "The Series of Approximations to English": https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno... Note: Published 1948.