If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.
Regarding the content of this interview:
>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.
In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)
Lerc 3 hours ago [-]
>but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge.
Do you think that a LLM has the ability to identify a new a priori knowledge?
It seems like it would be a lower threshold to meet but If you combine that with a stochastic process then it seems inevitable that it would be able to ruminate until it came up with new a priori knowledge.
cvz 8 hours ago [-]
Tlön is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember basically anything about it once I've finished reading.
thrance 5 hours ago [-]
Highly recommend his Fictions too. Grabbed a worn copy for 1€ on the street months ago, and I still think about Uqbar from time to time.
kunzhi 9 hours ago [-]
Did you ever read House of Leaves?
7thaccount 8 hours ago [-]
I've tried, but never made it all the way through. Cool to realize the author's sister (Poe) made a hit song "Haunted" when inspired by the same house iirc. There's my random fact of the day.
theshaper 7 hours ago [-]
Let me give you some probably bad advice. Skip the Johnny Truant parts and skim past all the creative layout stuff. It's just decoration, and decoration is often suspicious. Focus on the core story. It’s fantastic. There’s a shot at building a full-on American mythology, Lovecraft-style, from that alone.
Sadly, almost no one talks about it. Ditch the form and embrace the substance. ← It also nods to the mystery behind The Navidson Record.
I wish I had known this when I first read it.
karaterobot 10 hours ago [-]
> If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
Hmm, what if you could recreate, word-for-word, the great works of an author like Borges (or, say, Cervantes) by so thoroughly understanding their life that the words themselves came out of you, not memorized and recapitulated, but naturally and unbidden? What an interesting idea for a story, maybe an LLM will be able to write that one day.
jhedwards 9 hours ago [-]
There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a poet robot. They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their culture, and a culture is programmed by the previous culture, so the robot has to simulate the evolution of the world from the beginning of time in order to produce the AI poet. It's a wonderful and hilarious story.
awithrow 7 hours ago [-]
It could be that Lem was influenced by Borges? The original poster is referencing a specific Borges short story called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which he published in 1939. It influenced a number of other notable authors
QuesnayJr 7 hours ago [-]
The joke the previous comment is making is that Borges already wrote that story. "Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote."
raminism 9 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT, Author of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
kjellsbells 6 hours ago [-]
I see what you did there...should your username be Pierre Menard, perhaps?
uoaei 10 hours ago [-]
This reads exactly like the plot of a story Borges might write, maybe someone more familiar with his ouevre can shine a light on which stories of his touch on this kind of theme.
theobreuerweil 9 hours ago [-]
I think the comment is referring to “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.
dwringer 8 hours ago [-]
Yes indeed. This thread seems to indicate more people should read more Borges!
Borges is totally recommended, of course, but after reading him in the original language I think his English translations lack the poetry and music of his writings. For once I am happy Spanish is my first language.
jtmoulia 3 hours ago [-]
The last few months I've been picking up Spanish language editions of Borges's short stories and poems from used book stores. Two decades ago during school I took two years of Spanish, so reading native Borges would be way beyond my comprehension.
With AI tools, though, I can "read" Borges in his native language: with my phone + OCR + translate I have an English language companion. Or, using the voice interface I can try narrating the Spanish text and ask clarifying questions whenever I'm confused.
An author like Borges makes it well worth the extra effort. And, his puzzles often involve language, so the extra layer of mental translation can mirror the work itself, e.g. in his poem La luna [1]. (though, I envy your native Spanish)
Considering Borges' stories (some written as if they're reports of actual events), I had to wonder for a long while if this is a "reporting" of a "what if" scenario. It would've been a great homage to him.
jl6 9 hours ago [-]
Hofstadter should have written Gödel, Escher, Bach, Borges.
I wrote about the connection between Borges, AI, Wikipedia, Kafka (the messaging system, not the author), GPUs, and cryptography in the small print on page 7 of this:
Is there an audio file of this interview? I'd prefer listening to the original (in the background).
gwern 7 hours ago [-]
I see no hint of an audio recording having been made, much less surviving & digitized, in the original article's description: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-histo... It's too detailed to be retroactive notes by Simon or Borges, so I would guess Borges's secretary or a student simply transcribed it as they went.
benbreen 6 hours ago [-]
Gwern and others who have dug into it this far might be interested by this footnote in the Crespo article: "I have tried to lay my hands on the original version of the conversation, as I am sure Simon did, too. I contacted Gabriel Zadunaisky, who, as the article explains, participated in the meeting. He is a professional translator. I asked him for the original version, and he replied on WhatsApp: 'Mr. Crespo: I am very sick. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with the information requested.' My hypothesis is that Zadunaisky translated the conversation directly from the recorded version and that this original version has been lost."
My read is that most likely, it was recorded on an old school reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's entirely possible that the tapes are still sitting on a shelf somewhere in Argentina, though the chances of actually tracking them down are pretty low. I worked with some reel-to-reel tapes that Alan Ginsberg made (now held at Stanford) in the mid-60s (including one where he is talking to Bob Dylan!) and they held up pretty well. Had to use audio editing software to remove tape hiss, but they were not as badly preserved as I expected.
6stringmerc 4 hours ago [-]
Fascinating and very accessible read. While in jail I tried to get through Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (new translation) and some of the big concepts are echoed in this dialogue.
An LLM trained on Sartre would be amazing because the logical extensions of many of his positions and postulations would be uncomfortable in polite society. Even as a human being he quite frequently espoused concepts counter the grain of civility or notions of what ethics are or should be. An unrestrained, uncensored LLM in this vein could be scary and gut wrenching and yet a good reminder of our less-than-ideal state of refinement of thought and behavior as a species.
integralof5y 10 hours ago [-]
Borges and Herbert Simons are two great minds, but their conversation is not deep since is mostly shared view about the meaning of human and machine intelligence. Today, with LLMs we have a tool to explore the relation between intelligence and language, between number of parameters, neural nets architectures and much more. So that conversation give us no new insight but is delightful to share time with such great people.
Rendered at 04:45:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Regarding the content of this interview:
>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.
In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)
Do you think that a LLM has the ability to identify a new a priori knowledge?
It seems like it would be a lower threshold to meet but If you combine that with a stochastic process then it seems inevitable that it would be able to ruminate until it came up with new a priori knowledge.
Sadly, almost no one talks about it. Ditch the form and embrace the substance. ← It also nods to the mystery behind The Navidson Record.
I wish I had known this when I first read it.
Hmm, what if you could recreate, word-for-word, the great works of an author like Borges (or, say, Cervantes) by so thoroughly understanding their life that the words themselves came out of you, not memorized and recapitulated, but naturally and unbidden? What an interesting idea for a story, maybe an LLM will be able to write that one day.
With AI tools, though, I can "read" Borges in his native language: with my phone + OCR + translate I have an English language companion. Or, using the voice interface I can try narrating the Spanish text and ask clarifying questions whenever I'm confused.
An author like Borges makes it well worth the extra effort. And, his puzzles often involve language, so the extra layer of mental translation can mirror the work itself, e.g. in his poem La luna [1]. (though, I envy your native Spanish)
1. https://www.gaceta.unam.mx/la-luna-un-poema-de-borges/
(I agree!)
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01425
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693120
I wrote about the connection between Borges, AI, Wikipedia, Kafka (the messaging system, not the author), GPUs, and cryptography in the small print on page 7 of this:
https://lab6.com/4#page=7
My read is that most likely, it was recorded on an old school reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's entirely possible that the tapes are still sitting on a shelf somewhere in Argentina, though the chances of actually tracking them down are pretty low. I worked with some reel-to-reel tapes that Alan Ginsberg made (now held at Stanford) in the mid-60s (including one where he is talking to Bob Dylan!) and they held up pretty well. Had to use audio editing software to remove tape hiss, but they were not as badly preserved as I expected.
An LLM trained on Sartre would be amazing because the logical extensions of many of his positions and postulations would be uncomfortable in polite society. Even as a human being he quite frequently espoused concepts counter the grain of civility or notions of what ethics are or should be. An unrestrained, uncensored LLM in this vein could be scary and gut wrenching and yet a good reminder of our less-than-ideal state of refinement of thought and behavior as a species.