What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?


Douglas Adams would have us believe that the answer to life, the universe and everything is forty-two. However he clearly hadn't anticipated the challenges of training large language models where an answer of such succinct elegance would have caused the LLM to stop dead in its tracks pretty quickly. On the other hand, assuming that the model was already trained and that even though Adam's supercomputer took seven and a half million years to come up with the answer forty-two, perhaps he was more prescient than even he realised at the time. It's quite a conundrum. Maybe his model was simply too large? Or maybe it was just the right size and it was the compute that was the issue? If Deep Thought had followed a distributed compute model perhaps involving all the planets of the universe, rather than simply relying on the Earth, which always seemed like a single node build, then perhaps his answer would have been richer in its philosophical content. Then again, perhaps a distributed model would simply have arrived at the answer forty-two a lot faster before the first micro-organisms showed up on earth and we wouldn't be here trying to answer this question now.