This is interesting: Talkie is a vintage LLM , trained...
The article discusses the significance of Claude Shannon's master's thesis and its impact on modern research in large language models (LLMs). It suggests that if LLMs like Talkie can replicate Shannon's insights, it would validate their potential in making profound connections in knowledge. Conversely, failure to do so could challenge the current approach to LLM development.
- ▪Claude Shannon's master's thesis established a connection between electric circuits and Boolean logic.
- ▪This connection was considered radical and opened a new field relevant to current LLM research.
- ▪The ability of LLMs to replicate Shannon's insights could validate their capabilities in knowledge exploration.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I'm presently reading a terrific biography of Claude Shannon. In the late 1930s, his MIT master's thesis — "the most important master's thesis ever" — established a direct mapping between electric circuits and Boolean logic. This connection was both very simple and totally radical; at the time, Boolean logic wasn't considered particularly practical — in fact, it wasn't considered much at all. In a stroke, Shannon's insight opened up a new field, basically the same one that all this LLM research is unfolding in today.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at kottke.org.
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