Robin Sloan:

I'm presently reading a terrific biography of Claude Shannon. In the late 1930s, his MIT master's thesis — "the most important master's thesis ever" — established a direct mapping between electric circuits and Boolean logic. This connection was both very simple and totally radical; at the time, Boolean logic wasn't considered particularly practical — in fact, it wasn't considered much at all. In a stroke, Shannon's insight opened up a new field, basically the same one that all this LLM research is unfolding in today.

If you could coax Talkie, or a future version that's larger and more capable, into making Claude Shannon's connection — without simply giving it away, of course — it would provide evidence that modern LLMs might be able to make connections of that power at the real frontier of knowledge today.

Conversely, if no amount of coaxing or even coaching could get Big Talkie anywhere near a robust approximation of Shannon's thesis ... it would raise questions about this whole game plan.

Meg Conley:

I’m eager to read up on this. I’m so curious about the impact the modern language prompt has on the response. The prompt creates the network that produces the response, so it also taints its 1930s accuracy/authenticity. But the acc/auth problem really starts with the prompter before they’ve prompted. We can’t think outside our context - no matter how we try. Even if we know every 30s cadence, slang, etc. God, I wish Walter Benjamin were alive to dissect all this. Aura in the age of LLMs etc

It is also fascinating that the model knows information up to 1931, but, at least in some science topics, seems very stuck in the early 1900s. For example, it defends the lumiferous aether hypothesis & has a distrust of special relativity

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:flxq4uyjfotciovpw3x3fxnu/bafkreifmgg2w4zuq7wosdsv7h7pf7txevlf3pp7bl2giwoukizrvhq6cqu