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11 days agoI’ve thought a lot about why “corporate Memphis” sucks so much. I think it’s because it comes across as incredibly ingenuine. It communicates a Utopian world free of race and gender gaps, which is demonstrably not the case in reality. In a way, the AI art is more genuine. “We don’t give a fuck, neither do you, buy our stuff”. I feel it speaks to an overall nihilism with the world. I think it’s a part of the disillusionment with the “liberal elite” that we find on the left (and honestly, probably the right too). Corporate Memphis is Nancy Pelosi. AI art is JD Vance. The fact we’re yearning for the former shows how terrible the latter really is.
Here’s the thing. What is it that an LLM does? I would argue, it sumarizes. It’s a probabilistic model of human language. Give it a corpus of text, and it can “understand” that data and extract “meaning” from it. Is that useful? Totally. For a number of uses. Many coding tasks, research, translation, etc are really an effort in summarization. Is it going to solve every problem humans ever had? I doubt it. Language is the human model of reality, and we have a tendency to equivocate our model with the real thing. We’re just THAT hard wired for words. I think the hype and the marketing has overshadowed what I think is a very useful application for machine learning. I think Torvalds is overall correct. I feel his position is inconvenient for political reasons. I think that open source stands in stark contrast to the world the big tech “AI” class want to build. But I don’t really think he’s wrong perse.