Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world. The rank-and-file developers at these companies, in their naivete, do not see that distinction…So, as these LLMs become increasingly but asymptotically fluent, tantalizingly close to accuracy but ultimately incomplete, developers complain that they are short on data. They have their general purpose computer program, and if they only had the entire world in data form to shove into it, then it would be complete.
Errrrm… No. Don’t get your philosophy from LessWrong.
Here’s the part of the LessWrong page that cites Simulacra and Simulation:
This last quote does indeed come from Simulacra (you can find it in the third paragraph here), but it appears to have been quoted solely because when paired with the definition of simulation put forward by the article:
it appears that Baudrillard supports the idea that a computer can just simulate any goddamn thing we want it to.
If you are familiar with the actual arguments Baudrillard makes, or simply read the context around that quote, it is obvious that this is misappropriating the text.
I’m guessing you didn’t read the rest of the piece and were just looking for the first thing to try and invalidate further reading?
If you read the whole thing, it’s pretty clear the author is not saying that the recreation is a perfect copy of the original.
Baudrillard is always a joy to read.
Glad someone enjoyed him. My overall impression was some random guy getting high on a bus that was driving around the Midwest/Southwest US and he was copying stuff in a journal. With emphasis on the getting high part.
Over the last fifteen years of having read him, I find myself coming back to him to gain clarity of our current situation. At first, I couldn’t tell if he was a genius or mad man. I tilt towards genius now.
Edit … Isn’t that Hunter S. Thompson?
In my head canon they are now together. Trying to find the American Dream and the Hyperreal