After all, some English words have a shockingly ancient vintage: Flow, mother, fire, and ash come down to us from Ice Age peoples. Every notion expressed in those protolanguages-and many languages that followed-is likely lost for all time, although it gives me pleasure to imagine that a few of their words are still with us. More than 100,000 years have passed since radically creative Africans transcended the emotive grunts of our animal ancestors and began externalizing their thoughts into extensive systems of sounds. It should be noted that only a slim fraction of humanity’s total linguistic creativity is available for reading. Without new text to train on, AI’s recent hot streak could come to a premature end. A team of researchers led by Pablo Villalobos at Epoch AI recently predicted that programs such as the eerily impressive ChatGPT will run out of high-quality reading material by 2027. (It’s best not to think about one’s Twitter habit in this context.) When we calculate how many well-constructed sentences remain for AI to ingest, the numbers aren’t encouraging. It is not in infinite supply, and for AI, not any old text will do: Large language models trained on books are much better writers than those trained on huge batches of social-media posts. The trouble is that, like other high-end human cultural products, good prose ranks among the most difficult things to produce in the known universe. With enough data, this approach could perhaps even yield a more fluid intelligence, or a humanlike artificial mind akin to those that haunt nearly all of our mythologies of the future. These successes suggest a promising way forward for AI’s development: Just shovel ever-larger amounts of human-created text into its maw, and wait for wondrous new skills to manifest. DeepMind’s Ithaca AI can glance at Greek letters etched into marble and guess the text that was chiseled off by vandals thousands of years ago. They can churn out pastiche in a range of literary styles and write passable rhyming poetry. People with the most linguistically supple minds-hyperpolyglots-can reliably flip back and forth between a dozen languages AIs can now translate between more than 100 in real time. When AIs surface from these epic study sessions, they possess astonishing new abilities. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they’ve finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster.
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