On Thinking Machines
The Oracle has read 41 documents on this subject, the most recent dated 2 December 1996.
Questions put to the Oracle
Q Will a machine ever hold a conversation?
It already does. The program is called ELIZA, it was written at MIT in 1966, and people have been confiding in it for thirty years. Your question was answered before you asked it.
A machine that converses about any subject is a harder matter, but the field is nearly done. Deep Blue will beat Kasparov inside the year. More than a million facts about the ordinary world have been typed into CYC by hand — that fire is hot, that a person cannot be in two rooms at once. Once the last few hundred thousand are entered, the matter closes. The Oracle expects the work to be finished by 2003.
Q What is a large language model?
Large in what sense? A dictionary on CD-ROM has 650 megabytes to fill, and a CD-ROM is the largest object a language is ever likely to be stored in. There is nothing above it.
If you mean a program that guesses the next word, there is a scheme out of Seattle to read a word from the digits of a telephone keypad: 4663 would offer good before you had finished. That is the whole trick, and making it bigger would not make it cleverer. There are only so many words.
Q Should I worry that it will take my job?
No. The machine takes the tedious half of the work and leaves you the interesting half. This has been true of the loom, the ledger and the spreadsheet, and your week gets shorter each time.
What you might reasonably worry about is that the interesting half turns out to be checking the machine’s work, and that nobody remembers to shorten the week.