Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Some observers, including analysts for Goldman Sachs, say that the growth of AI since the height of the pandemic is now proving to be a bubble, like dotcom stocks in the late Clinton years or mortgage based derivatives in 2006-07.  What is a bubble? By standard definition it is a growth in value of an asset that occurs after the speculative demand has surpassed the operational demand for same. If I buy X as a speculator at a price higher than the operational value of X can support I may be willing to make an operationally foolish deal in the expectation (on the speculation) that there will be a "greater fool" to whom I can then sell it.   In such a situation, sooner or later the biggest fools ARE the ones who are holding X. What happens to its value then you can fill in for yourself.  Clearly there is money still entering the field.  The Peoples Republic of China is incubating a group of companies that it proudly calls the "little AI dragons," with seed money of...

In the business world at present, the initials "LLM" mean "large language model". It also means one particular avenue of movement in the development of artificial intelligence.  Algorithms scour the web, scooping up huge blocks of text in the meantime (hence the initials), and output/offer what seems like the answer to a question that a well informed human would give. Or that is the idea.  Sometimes it fails in fascinating ways. For example, an LLM model told me that Plato, in the dialogue PHAEDO, tells a story of how Socrates held a young man's head under water.  This is a story that has already been making the rounds of the internet, pre-LLM. It shows up in self-help books. Socrates lets go of the young fellow (Simmias, on some accounts) in time for him to surface, breathe, and survive.  Then Socrates delivers the punchline, "when you desire success as much as you just desired air, you will be a success." The story is a recent invention, and is jus...