Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the third one was a dud. My main gripe is that these three books all share the same trope that underpins one of the…
Does anyone know if he got started on another book in the series?
Yes, I recall that he started writing one about the invasion of the Emergency, but it was too depressing and he abandoned it.
I am bummed out. I first read The Witling by Vernor Vinge in the early 1980's while in high school. I have read every novel and most of his short stories/novellas since then. I have reread most of his books at least once if not more. I am currently rereading The Peace War, Time to break out my paperback of the The Witling that is falling apart and read it again in tribute to VV.
> Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years. Pretty sure it's quite the opposite of what you're implying: People see those LLMs who closely resemble actual intelligence on the surface, but have some shortcomings. Now they extrapolate this and think it's just a small step to perfection and/or AGI, which is completely wrong. One problem is that conver…
AGI (human level intelligence) is not an really an end goal but a point that will be surpassed. So, by looking at it as something asymptotically approaching an ideal 100% is fundamentally wrong. That 100% mark is going to be in the rear view mirror at some point. And it's a bit of an arbitrary mark as well. Of course it doesn't help that people are a bit hand wavy about what that mark exactly is to begin with. We're…
I think you're falling for the exact same fallacy that I was describing. Also note that the human level of intelligence is not arbitrary at all: Most LLMs are trained on human-generated data, and since they are statistical models, they won't suddenly come up with truly novel reasoning. They're generally just faster at generating stuff than humans, because they're computers.