History Rhymes: Large Language Models Off to a Bad Start?
New York Times, Saturday, June 19, 1880
New York Times, Saturday, June 19, 1880
Welcome to a new CU series, History Rhymes, where I bring key perspectives from the distant past to bear on present events.
While mining old newspapers on a quiet Saturday – a hobby of mine - I came upon a story from June 19, 1880, that I found relevant to our modern anxieties about AI.
It is the story of Melville Ballard, who, as a child without language, spied with his eyes a tree stump and asked himself if the first man rose out of it.
This 144-year-old case study – presented at the Smithsonian Institute no less - provides a potentially devastating critique of today’s Large Language Models and the spending behind them. With a simple human story, it boldly announced that complex thought exists in the silence before words.
Today, well into the 21st century, by putting language before the capacity for reason, we are not building intelligence; we are building an increasingly sophisticated mirror.
There are actually two stories of interest in that old newspaper. Let’s start with the one in the middle. This is Page 3 of this edition of the New York Times, and I see a story called Thought without Language.
Of course, Large Language Models, Small Language Models, and Reasoning are the topic du jour.