2023-02-11
Ted Chiang is one of my favorite science fiction authors. Exhalation is sublime. Here he writes about ChatGPT as like being a photocopier for the web. Photocopiers are “Lossy” which means they don’t make an exact copy, It’s a little blurry. And when you make a photocopy of a photocopy…well, you know. This is beautifully written and is one of the first articles to get over the hump in the Gartner Hype Cycle of Inflated Expectations and start the curve toward the Trough of Disillusionment. It’s a New Yorker article, and they have a strong paywall, so if you can’t get to it, try your private browser page (Incognito Mode).
He is getting at a problem that I am not sure Microsoft will be able to overcome with their new integration of Prometheus, a new LLM based on ChatGPT3. Is this all getting too “lossy”?