An Intellectual History of LLMs

In this episode, Alina Utrata interviews Amira Moeding, a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Cambridge where they held fellowships with Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. They talked all about Amira’s research on the intellectual history of Large Language Models, and other types of AI. They began by asking: why is it so shocking to begin with a history and philosophy of linguistics when talking about LLMs? Why did IBM want these natural language processors to be so energy intensive (hint: to make money)? What is machine empiricism, how does it relate to the invention of Big Data, and why does it limit the way we see and understand the world around us? 

Amira has worked on critical theory, philosophy of science, feminist philosophy, post-colonial theory and the history of law in settler colonial contexts before turning to data and Big Data, and their paper “Machine Empiricism” together with Professor Tobias Matzner is forthcoming. Until June they were employed as an Research Assistant at the Computer Science Department (Computerlab) at the University of Cambridge in this project. 

For a complete reading list from the episode, check out the Anti-Dystopians substack at bit.ly/3kuGM5X.

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Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-land

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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