※ I wrote an oral history of how LLMs ate NLP, AMA
Hey there,
Lots of acronyms going on in that subject line. LLMs, we all know by now. NLP stands for “natural language processing”: the field of science/engineering that made it possible for you to yell at Siri. And AMA means Ask Me Anything, which you can do on Reddit tomorrow when I’ll be answering questions with fellow science writer Ben Brubaker. Here’s the goofy photo they made me take with the details:
Ask me anything about what, you ask? This whopper of a story I spent the last 4 months reporting for Quanta (as part of their special issue on AI in science). It’s an oral history of how large language models locusted their way through NLP, the field that birthed them. 19 scientists tell the story of what that was like in their own words—from the invention of transformers in 2017, to the bolide impact of ChatGPT in 2022, to our current hype-scorched moment. One of my favorite quotes:
It’s sometimes confusing when we pretend that there’s a scientific conversation happening, but some of the people in the conversation have a stake in a company that’s potentially worth $50 billion.
And that’s from someone who likes LLMs!
This is what we wanted the story to be about: not results and findings (which we’ve heard ad nauseam for the past five years), but the personal stuff. What does it feel like to live through a paradigm shift? This.
To set the tone, here’s an informal “magazine cover” I doodled up as a home for some of the juicier quotes that we left on the cutting room floor. (Don’t worry, they were all on the record; we only cut them for length.) I’m no George Lois, but this really captures the wide (and wild) range of perspectives I heard:
Enjoy the story, and maybe I’ll see you on Reddit.
Take it easy,
J