Hacker Remix

When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI

166 points by benbreen 4 days ago | 60 comments

viccis 4 days ago

If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.

Regarding the content of this interview:

>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?

This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.

In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)

f1shy 4 days ago

> Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break.

Yes, his writings are short, but man they are dense!

To anyone who cares, do this exercise: read short story by Borges, probably the shorter the better. Then go ahead say, next day, and try to write it down again in your own words. I tried a couple of times, and I ended with at least twice the number of pages. Amazing.

viccis 3 days ago

There's definitely a Pierre Menard joke in here somewhere

Kiln6125 3 days ago

Somewhat relevant to this overall conversation is "pierre menard author of the quixote". Which takes the concept of death of the author in an amusing direction.

cvz 4 days ago

Tlön is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember basically anything about it once I've finished reading.

lou1306 3 days ago

Starting with TUOT is definitely an interesting suggestion! I think most people would recommend The Library of Babel or The Garden of Forking Paths as a first read. But TUOT is probably my favourite, and a very apt recommendation for a post-truth world.

karaterobot 4 days ago

> If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?

Hmm, what if you could recreate, word-for-word, the great works of an author like Borges (or, say, Cervantes) by so thoroughly understanding their life that the words themselves came out of you, not memorized and recapitulated, but naturally and unbidden? What an interesting idea for a story, maybe an LLM will be able to write that one day.

jhedwards 4 days ago

There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a poet robot. They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their culture, and a culture is programmed by the previous culture, so the robot has to simulate the evolution of the world from the beginning of time in order to produce the AI poet. It's a wonderful and hilarious story.

awithrow 4 days ago

It could be that Lem was influenced by Borges? The original poster is referencing a specific Borges short story called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which he published in 1939. It influenced a number of other notable authors

QuesnayJr 4 days ago

The joke the previous comment is making is that Borges already wrote that story. "Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote."

raminism 4 days ago

ChatGPT, Author of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

uoaei 4 days ago

This reads exactly like the plot of a story Borges might write, maybe someone more familiar with his ouevre can shine a light on which stories of his touch on this kind of theme.

theobreuerweil 4 days ago

I think the comment is referring to “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.

dwringer 4 days ago

Yes indeed. This thread seems to indicate more people should read more Borges!

kjellsbells 4 days ago

I see what you did there...should your username be Pierre Menard, perhaps?

101008 4 days ago

Borges is totally recommended, of course, but after reading him in the original language I think his English translations lack the poetry and music of his writings. For once I am happy Spanish is my first language.

jtmoulia 4 days ago

The last few months I've been picking up Spanish language editions of Borges's short stories and poems from used book stores. Two decades ago during school I took two years of Spanish, so reading native Borges would be way beyond my comprehension.

With AI tools, though, I can "read" Borges in his native language: with my phone + OCR + translate I have an English language companion. Or, using the voice interface I can try narrating the Spanish text and ask clarifying questions whenever I'm confused.

An author like Borges makes it well worth the extra effort. And, his puzzles often involve language, so the extra layer of mental translation can mirror the work itself, e.g. in his poem La luna [1]. (though, I envy your native Spanish)

1. https://www.gaceta.unam.mx/la-luna-un-poema-de-borges/

tgv 3 days ago

My Spanish is more advanced (I was fluent in everyday Spanish, not so much in the more formal use), and I'm reading El Aleph now. It sure takes quite some effort. So many unknown words. And he can turn a phrase quite concisely. But worthwhile.

101008 3 days ago

Congrats on both of you for putting the effort! I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina, so 100% same language as Borges. However, as both of you already said, it isn't even easy for us to read Borges. He has a complex sentence structure, and uses a lot of not-so-common words, so you have to read it really carefully, paying extra attention (not as I'd read any other text). But in the end is really worthwile, everytime I read something by Borges (new or not), I found it fascinating.

Izikiel43 4 days ago

I had the same issue with Stephen King, reading it in English after reading Spanish translations is a different world.

anthk 4 days ago

Which editions? The Iberian Spanish ones are not that different in tone/speech to the original English ones.

Izikiel43 3 days ago

Yes, Iberian spanish. The issue is that I'm from Latam, so the slang used in Iberian spanish, and some conjugations still sound foreign to me. In english, King's words flow better, the intent and the idea are much clearer, and since I've been much more exposed to American culture than Iberian culture, it feels much more familiar.

anthk 2 days ago

Ah, I'd guess the Latam Spanish has more traits in common with the American English. Similar to Iberian Spanish novels being compared to the British English ones since Cervantes/Hamlet.

On these conjugations, compound verbs are not hard at all.

Izikiel43 2 hours ago

They are not hard, I agree, but they sound weird/foreign to me when in my version of Spanish we barely use them.

theshaper 4 days ago

Hey! Opino lo mismo!

(I agree!)

6stringmerc 4 days ago

Fascinating and very accessible read. While in jail I tried to get through Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (new translation) and some of the big concepts are echoed in this dialogue.

An LLM trained on Sartre would be amazing because the logical extensions of many of his positions and postulations would be uncomfortable in polite society. Even as a human being he quite frequently espoused concepts counter the grain of civility or notions of what ethics are or should be. An unrestrained, uncensored LLM in this vein could be scary and gut wrenching and yet a good reminder of our less-than-ideal state of refinement of thought and behavior as a species.