Lois Clary, a software engineer at a San Francisco robotics company, leads a mundane and solitary life until she inherits a sourdough starter from her favorite neighborhood restaurant. This starter becomes the catalyst for her journey into the world of baking, farmers markets, and a secret market that fuses food and technology. As Lois learns to care for the starter and bake sourdough, she discovers a new passion and a sense of belonging, transforming her life in unexpected ways.
The novel follows Clay Jannon, who takes a night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore after losing his job as a web designer. As Clay delves deeper into the mysteries of the bookstore, he discovers that it is more than just a place to buy books; it is a front for an ancient cult society seeking the secret to immortality. The story involves complex analyses of customer behavior, cryptography, and the blending of old and new technologies. It is a tale of friendship, love, and the power of books and technology to shape our understanding of the world[1][4][5].
An interview with best-selling sci-fi novelist Robin Sloan
One of my favorite fiction writers, New York Times best-selling author Robin Sloan, just wrote the first novel I’ve seen that’s inspired by LLMs.
The book is called Moonbound, and Robin originally wanted to write it with language models. He tried doing this in 2016 with a rudimentary model he built himself, and more recently with commercially available LLMs. Both times Robin found himself unsatisfied with the creative output generated by the models. AI couldn’t quite generate the fiction he was looking for—the kind that pushes the boundaries of literature.
He did, however, find himself fascinated by the inner workings of LLMs
Robin was particularly interested in how LLMs map language into math—the notion that each letter is represented by a unique series of numbers, allowing the model to understand human language in a computational way. He thinks LLMs are language personified, given its first heady dose of autonomy.
Robin’s body of work reflects his deep understanding of technology, language, and storytelling. He’s the author of the novels Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore and Sourdough, and has also written for publications like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and MIT Technology Review. Before going full-time on fiction writing, he worked at Twitter and in traditional media institutions.
In Moonbound, Robin puts LLMs into perspective as part of a broader human story. I sat down with Robin to unpack his fascination with LLMs, their nearly sentient nature, and what they reveal about language and our own selves. It was a wide-ranging discussion about technology, philosophy, ethics, and biology—and I came away more excited than ever about the possibilities that the future holds.
This is a must-watch for science-fiction enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the deep philosophical questions raised by LLMs and the way they function.
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