I haven’t published so many reader replies in a while. But I’m doing so in this case because I find them very interesting and think some of you will too. But there’s a bit more than that. These discussions help me understand with more clarity some basic discussions we’re having as a society about artificial intelligence. They also help me line these discussions up with my own thoughts about the nature and utility of knowledge, the validation of theories by their ability to predict experimental results, and so on.

From TPM Reader FP …

I’ve worked for decades on language models, as a researcher in academia and industry, and as a research manager whose teams have brought language models into products several years before the current excitement. I’m enjoying your commentaries on the topic, so I’m writing with a bit of historical perspective and connections that might be helpful.

The connection between language models and games goes back a long way, arguably to Turing and Shannon. Consider a reader who is shown the words (or letters, the difference is not significant) one by one, from the books in a library, and has to bet on the next still unseen word. If the reader is sufficiently educated in English language and culture, they have an almost sure bet in continuing “… to be or not … ” However, if the text was “… classical concert goers prefer Beethoven to … ” there are several possible continuations, but there’s still some predictability: the following word is more likely to be “Stockhausen” than to be “Cheetos”: text from the library tends to have some thematic coherence, in this case musical preferences, rather than mixing music and snacks. 

A friend sent me an article from back in March 2016 which provides some interesting perspective on the current resurgence of Social Security politics and the various Republicans vying to be the “post-Trump” candidate for President while Trump refuses to leave the stage. It also has particular relevance to Ron DeSantis, which we’ll get to in a moment.

But first some context.

The piece is a Times article from March 2016. So it is early in the Trump takeover of the GOP but when it still wasn’t entirely clear he’d be able to pull it off. The subtext of the article is that while many Republicans focused either on the power of Trump’s chaotic personality or the red meat of immigrant bans and xenophobia to explain his success, there was something else in the mix. There was a whole population of people who had closed the door on ever supporting Democrats but were left entirely cold by the GOP’s reflexive focus on tax cuts, free trade and cutting “entitlements.”

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Wisconsin Supreme Court primary election, Senator Jon Tester’s (D-MT) decision to run again and President Biden’s clandestine trip to Kyiv.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.