One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer ). RIP
The Bobbler was a strange idea. It made for a fun concept. I think there was more than one story in that world, if I'm remembering correctly.
with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.
Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.
OK. I'm imagining a correlation engine that looks through code as a series of prompts that are used to generate more code from the corpus that is statistically likely to follow.
And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light airbrush.
Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud.
Oh man, this makes me sad. I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel. He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission . A true name in sci-fi.
I'm stuck halfway through Deepness in the Sky, I should pick it up again. Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5 chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about from the previous book. Agree about the expert omission part.
Deepness was well worth it.
Wheel of Time, on the other hand, I was very glad to give up on right around the same point as you.
One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer ). RIP
The Bobbler was a strange idea. It made for a fun concept. I think there was more than one story in that world, if I'm remembering correctly. Rainbow's End was very good!
The shift of the use of bobbles from Peace War to Marooned in Realtime is _wild_. Fantastic stories, wildly creative, delightfully different.
Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.
Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is how Putin operates. Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.
Yeah, discovering Nau’s chamber of horrors is meant to strip any illusions about his motivations.
Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.
OK. I'm imagining a correlation engine that looks through code as a series of prompts that are used to generate more code from the corpus that is statistically likely to follow. And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light airbrush. Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud. LLMs are not going to generate improvements.
Saying they definitely won't or they definitely will are equally over-broad and premature.
I currently expect we'll need another architectural breakthrough; but also, back in 2009 I expected no-steering-wheel-included self driving cars no later than 2018, and that the LLM output we actually saw in 2023 would be the final problem to be solved in the path to AGI.
I’ll echo everyone else saying you should read his books (and not just Fire/Deepness) but wanted to note that while I never met him in person, I know a few people who have and literally everyone has started by describing him as one of the nicest people they met. That seems like an accomplishment of its own.
I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on. You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pil…
I disagree with your characterization of Vinge's works as primarily about disasters but I agree they were all about an accelerating technological pace and its relation with intelligence.
I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in Realtime was Ascension.
For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful countermeasure.
The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me. Child-like playfulness, fey-like chaotic neutral at worst. I do not interpret Rabbit's survival as hints of doom. The weapon was plain old human abuse of power for control.
Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.
OK. I'm imagining a correlation engine that looks through code as a series of prompts that are used to generate more code from the corpus that is statistically likely to follow. And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light airbrush. Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud. LLMs are not going to generate improvements.
They might generate improvements, but I’m not sure why people think those improvements would be unbounded. Think of it like improvements to jet engines or internal combustion engines - rapid improvements followed by decades of very tiny improvements. We’ve gone from 32-bit LLM weights down to 16, then 8, then 4 bit weights, and then a lot of messy diminishing returns below that. Moore’s is running on fumes for process improvements, so each new generation of chips that’s twice as fast manages to get there by nearly doubling the silicon area and nearly doubling the power consumption. There’s a lot of active research into pruning models down now, but mostly better models == bigger models, which is also hitting all kinds of practical limits. Really good engineering might get to the same endpoint a little faster than mediocre engineering, but they’ll both probably wind up at the same point eventually. A super smart LLM isn’t going to make sub-atomic transistors, or sub-bit weights, or eliminate power and cooling constraints, or eliminate any of the dozen other things that eventually limit you.
My introduction to Vinge was Rainbow's End. As a fellow San Diegan raised in East County I found it hilarious that he represented El Cajon as a wasteland.