A new edition of my pop-up AI newsletter just landed: where is it like to be a language model? The discussion here is bolstered by an actual experiment, a programmatic probe of many language models. It was my first time doing something like that — fun!
The title is, of course, a riff on Thomas Nagel’s famous What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Recently I crossed the bridge into San Francisco — I was thinking about this piece — and just as the big double-decker bus curled into the Transbay Terminal, I spotted this mural. Perfect:
The new edition poses questions that plenty of people, including many deep in the AI industry, don’t care about; but some of us do — we are preoccupied by them — so this is for you, and for me.
