Garbage island - by Rob Horning - Internal exile

This week, in a widely anticipated move, Google and Microsoft both announced their intention to augment search engines with large-language models. It marks a shift away from “organizing the world’s information,” to borrow from Google’s mission statement, to simulating it. Whereas web crawlers once attempted to index the internet to keep up with its expansion, offering an updating map to an actual evolving territory, large-language models arrest and ingest as much of the internet’s content as possible at one particular moment to process it into a static set of statistical probabilities, which can then offer a procedurally generated terrain that is produced only as you navigate through it.

This week, in a widely anticipated move, Google and Microsoft both announced their intention to augment search engines with large-language models. It marks a shift away from “organizing the world’s information,” to borrow from Google’s mission statement, to simulating it. Whereas web crawlers once attempted to index the internet to keep up with its expansion, offering an updating map to an actual evolving territory, large-language models arrest and ingest as much of the internet’s content as possible at one particular moment to process it into a static set of statistical probabilities, which c