LLMs and information post-scarcity

While LLMs continue to devour web-scraped data, they’ll increasingly consume their own digital progeny as AI-generated content continues to flood the internet. This recursive loop, experimentally confirmed, erodes the true data landscape. Rare events vanish first. Models churn out likely sequences from the original pool while injecting their own un... See more

The consequence of our content-addicted culture is non-stop diversion from having to come to grips with the big questions of reality, of life. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvi... See more

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more