Playing behind the beat

Here’s Spencer Tweedy on the strange new layer of computing that is the large language model : In the earlier styles of computer instruction, the interpretation process could only translate your command into one possible outcome. It was like a dictionary with a single definition for each word. With an LLM, the computer is a dictionary with an indeterminate number of definitions for every input. Spencer traces the LLM through a lineage of computer language, from machine code to assembly and up the ladder of abstraction. Programmers and computer scientists have been climbing that ladder for deca

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