by tucnak | 2026-01-21 23:16:37+00:00
My writing could be erratic sometimes, but "flip flopping" is a bit unfair, don't you think? When they say "AI," I assume they mean LLM technology and its applications above all else; the so-called "intelligent agent" discourse is a big one, but it's important to remember why it works in the first place. Well, because the pretraining stage is already capturing all the necessary information, right? Moreover, mechanistic studies show that most significant info is preserved in the dense layers, not attention heads. So there's something very fundamental, albeit conceptually simple—going on that allows for a whole bunch of emergent behaviour, enabling much more complex discourses.

> Why would "LLM technology" be important to philosophy?

Well, because it has empirically proved that Wittgenstein was more or less right all along, and linguists like Chomsky (I would go as far as saying Kripke, too, but that's a different story) were ultimately wrong! To put it simply: in order to learn language, and by extension, compute arbitrary discourses, you don't need to ever learn definitions of words. All you need is demonstrations of language use. The same goes for syntax, grammar, and a bunch of other things linguists were obsessing about for decades, like modality. (But that's a different story altogether!) Computer science people call this the bitter lesson, but that is only a statement on predictive power, not emergent power. If it only ever were the case for learning existing discourses, that wouldn't be remotely as surprising. Computing arbitrary discourses is a much stronger proposition!

> Did "LLM technology" "happen in philosophy"? What does it mean to "happen in philosophy"?

LLM's were a bit of a shock, and a lot of people are not receptive to this idea that Wittgensteinians won, basically, game over. There will be more flailing, but ultimately they will adapt. You can already see this with Askell and other traditionally-trained philosophy people adopting language games, it's only that they call it alignment. Neither a coincidence she went to Cambridge. It will take a bit of time for "academic philosophy" to recognise this, but eventually they will, because why wouldn't they?

Game over.

> Linguistics would appear at least one other of the applicable humanities to large language models.

Yeah, not really. All the interesting stuff that is happening has very little to do with linguistics. There's prefill from grammar, but it would be a stretch to attribute it to linguistics. In linguistic literature, word2vec was big time for the time being, but they did fuck-all with it ever since. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, either.

> Wittgenstein was famously critical of Turing's claim that a machine can think

I never understood this line of reasoning. So what Witt. and Turing had disagreements at the time? Witt. never had a chance to see LLM's, or anything remotely like it. This was unexpected result, you know? We could have guessed that it would be the case, but there were no evidence. We still don't have a solid theory to go from Frege to something like modern LLM's, and we may never will, but the evidence is there—Wittgenstein was right about you need for language to work.

> Wittgenstein also disliked Cantor. and even the concept of 'sets'.

I don't see what this has anything to do with?

> So, "AI" exploits weaknesses in institutions, but this is different from "destroying institutions", and its a good thing because we can improve the institutions by fixing the exploitable areas; which is also a wholly speculative outcome with many counterexamples in real life.

I never said AI "exploits" anything. I only ever said that being able to compute arbitrary discourses opens so many more doors than what's a pigeonhole insinuation like that would entail. What wasn't obvious before, is becoming obvious now. (This is why all these people are coming out with "revelations" on how AI is destroying institutions.) And it's not because of material circumstance. Just that some magic was dispelled, so stuff became obvious, and this is philosophy at work.

This is real philosophy at hand, not some academic wanking :-)