The shape of things only becomes legible at a distance. For instance, history demands temporal distance.

… Although AI is nearing its 70th birthday, it’s been only five years since ChatGPT was launched, eight since the transformer paper was published, and thirteen since AlexNet’s victory on the ImageNet challenge, which implies the deep learning revolution is barely a wayward teenager. I think, however, that we must try to give a clearer shape to the current manifestation of AI (chatbots, large language models, etc.). We are the earliest historians of this weird, elusive technology, and as such, it’s our duty to begin a conversation that’s likely to take decades (or centuries, if we remain alive by then) to be fully fleshed out, once spatial and temporal distance reveal what we’re looking at. — Read More