An AI Pause?

Few events have made me feel so much afloat upon the tide of history as the recent revelations in what is called “Artificial Intelligence,” which is not such a bad name, all things considered. Any of you who haven’t played with chatGPT-4 really should do so, right now. Just pay the $20 per month and get the whole treatment. Given how much you spend on Starbucks, unread web subscriptions and the Y, it’s worth it, believe me. 

Before I forget, however, let me mention that you must not give the slightest credence to the cries of “let’s just hang on a moment now!” arising from Sam Altman, Elon Must, and Max Tegmark regarding the pace of the AI contagion. I suppose they can make all the noise they want, but Messrs. Altman and Musk and all the other geniuses have already unleashed upon the world their remarkable discovery of Large Language Models. The logic of the metaphor implies that lions, wolves, or bears perhaps, or perhaps even some alien dinosaur from another planet, have slipped their reigns of conventional understanding.

It really is a remarkable discovery. Literary sorts should be thrilled, as should linguists of all sorts, and historians of culture. At least as I’ve understood it, what the Boffins have created is a sort of great soup of minds, if one uses that term loosely.  Or better, stew of minds. You access these minds by what is called prompts, but can better be thought of as incantations. J.K. Rowling is going to be even richer than she already is. Change a word, or use certain code phrases and you draw forth different answers to your query, from different personalities, spoken from different times.