What AI debates have to do with alchemy
What AI debates have to do with alchemyA review of Adam Becker’s bookHenry FarrellOct 02, 2026632511Share[How backpropagation actually works: an artist’s rendition]The next couple of weeks are going to be incredibly busy for me: multiple talks and workshops that require me to write memos. But I’m not going to get much writing done until the frenzy abates. Our epoch is quite as strange as Rudolf II’s Prague.
- ▪What AI debates have to do with alchemyA review of Adam Becker’s bookHenry FarrellOct 02, 2026632511Share[How backpropagation actually works: an artist’s rendition]The next couple of weeks are going to be incredibly busy for me: multiple ta
- ▪But I’m not going to get much writing done until the frenzy abates.
- ▪Our epoch is quite as strange as Rudolf II’s Prague.
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/what-ai-debates-have-to-do-with-alchemy |
| Publication time | Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:15:18 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-04T13:19:53.454Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-04T13:19:53.454Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
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| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
What AI debates have to do with alchemyA review of Adam Becker’s bookHenry FarrellOct 02, 2026632511Share[How backpropagation actually works: an artist’s rendition]The next couple of weeks are going to be incredibly busy for me: multiple talks and workshops that require me to write memos. Two of the talks are in the Bay Area. If you are going to COLM (the Conference on Language Modeling) in San Francisco, you can see me giving a talk next Thursday at 9am (also: make sure to catch my co-conspirators James Evans and Alison Gopnik in discussion with two other great scholars at 2.30pm on Wednesday) If you are interested in LLMs and social science, you can register for my talk at UC Berkeley the following day. But I’m not going to get much writing done until the frenzy abates.
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