The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

I’m glad that Henry Farrell has written this about Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines. It’s a dense, complex and at times frustrating book but it’s also the most genuinely original take on LLMs I’ve encountered. This is how Farrell summarises the outcome of the book:

That LLMs exist; that they are capable of forming coherent sentences in response to prompts; that they are in some genuine sense creative without intentionality, suggests that there is something importantly right about the arguments of structuralist linguistics. Language demonstrably can exist as a system independent of the humans who employ it, and exist generatively, so that it is capable of forming new combinations.

This cashes out as a theory of large language models that are (a) genuinely culturally generative, and (b) incapable of becoming purposively intelligent, any more than the language systems that they imperfectly model are capable of becoming intelligent. Under this account, the “Eliza effect” – the tendency of humans to mistake machine outputs for the outputs of human intelligence – is not entirely in error. If I understand Weatherby correctly, much of what we commonly attribute to individual cognition is in fact carried out through the systems of signs that structure our social lives.

I’m still processing it but I think this book shows a way through the cultural tensions which have made it conceptually difficult to get to grips with what LLMs fundamentally are: actions without actors, creativity without intentionality, even thought without a thinker? They are a sociotechnical infrastructure which facilitates the generativity of the linguistic system, unbinding it from the direct dependence upon individual subjectivity in order that we can prod and prompt it in newly intentional ways.