Language is humanity's greatest gift

The same symbols humans invented to visually encode speech are now what computers use to generalize beyond the finite examples we give them.

Language allowed us to tell stories, to organize societies and to send humans to space. The explanatory capabilities of Large Language Models are not to the credit of the computers, or even of their engineers. The merit belongs entirely to humanity, all of it, really.

Our language is so rich in meaning that it not only allows us to communicate but it also encodes our understanding of our world. What natural language struggles to explain, mathematics compresses and rearranges to better express how the natural world works.

By transforming our language into numbers, and looking for regularities in those numbers, we could see how much of our world was in our words. Language is subjective, but we have now discovered that it is not arbitrary.

We told a very long sequence of stories to sand, and sand added a few more on its own.