📄 Large AI models are cultural and social technologies https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-2495/full I found this article very interesting, as a counter-narrative to the common description of LLMs as abstract entities with vague definitions ("agents", "AGI", etc). - The authors interpret LLMs as a socio-cultural technology, like the printing press, markets, or representative democracy. All technological innovations (like electricity or the Internet) can have large cultural impact, but cultural technologies are peculiar in that they operate on our society and culture directly. - LLMs in particular can compress a lot of information into a single artefact, and allow to remix it at large scale and speed (similar to the price signal in a market). - The real question is not whether LLMs are on a path to "AGI", but what are the likely social consequences of LLM deployment: cultural homogenization vs. diversity, who wins and loses, and power concentrating in whoever owns the models. - Social scientists and computer scientists need to work together to understand and manage this change. The AGI "boomer/doomer" debate is a distraction on this discussion of actual impact.