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On Shoggothim

bactra.org · 631 words · saved by 1 readers

Henry Farrell and I have an essay in The Economist, riffing off the meme that every large language model is really a shoggoth. Our point is that this is right, because an LLM is a way of taking the vast incohate chaos of written-human-language-as-recorded-on-the-Web and simplifying and abstracting it in potentially useful ways. They are, as Alison Gopnik says, cultural technologies, more analogous to library catalogs than to individual minds. This makes LLMs recent and still-minor members of a larger and older family of monsters which similarly simplify, abstract, and repurpose human minds: the market system, the corporation, the state, even the democratic state. Those are distributed information-processing systems which don't just ingest the products of human intelligence, but actually run on human beings --- a theme I have been sounding for while now. The piece is paywalled, but Henry has a Twitter thread that provides a good summary, and Brad DeLong has excerpts, along with thoughtf

On Shoggothim Three-Toed Sloth Slow Takes from the Canopy (My Very Own Internet Tradition) June 22, 2023 Main On Shoggothim Attention conservation notice : Self-promotion of a pay-walled piece which combines a trendy topic with what even I admit is a long-held semi-crank notion . Henry Farrell and I have an essay in The Economist , riffing off the meme that every large language model is really a shoggoth . Our point is that this is right, because an LLM is a way of taking the vast incohate chaos of written-human-language-as-recorded-on-the-Web and simplifying and abstracting it in potentially

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