Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930

(resobscura.substack.com)

8 points | by benbreen 2 days ago ago

3 comments

  • pitched an hour ago

    It’s an interesting thought that our LLMs are Professor Oldman from “Man from Earth”, rather than someone more of this age. It probably isn’t actually true because training would reinforce more recent data but an interesting thought that these things are actually impossibly _ancient_.

    • retrac a few seconds ago

      I've encountered several times an argument that goes something like this: corporations and other large economic or political institutions are the "original" AI agent -- slow and human-mediated, but with the same quality of non-human intellect and potential to impact the world through its non-human decision-making.

      And so yes, it began many hundreds of years ago. Whatever it is. The essence or whatever it is, the power of symbols? It came alive as a force of its own when writing was invented, at the latest.

  • janice1999 41 minutes ago

    Asking talkie-1930 about whether communism could succeed in China is flagged as "potentially inappropriate." They use Qwen3Guard-Gen-4B from Alibaba for moderation.