"A Hill" Friday redemption block 1: not what I was trying to talk about
I need to finish this essay before the world ends so I can be
complete, which seems like a trivial condition to put on it, but I've
been kicking around scraps of this for nearly three years! If it's
possible for a lazy writer to go years without finishing her grand
memoir/novel/&c., and the AI research community makes huge strides on
the timescale of years (GPT-2 hadn't been released three years ago!),
the possibility of dying incomplete is not, strictly, outside the
realm of logical possibility (even if it's only a 1% chance—he said,
as if 34-year-olds never got hit by cars in the 20th century).
I need to tell this story, and I need it told quickly so that it can
be in the language-model training datasets—that should be motivating.