#OhWhatAtangledwebweweaveWhenfirstwepractisetodeceive! Which comes from the poem #Marmion, Canto 6, stanza 17, by #WalterScott; and has come to represent a more prosaic concept, that narrative can become complex and sometimes unmanageable.
In this case I seek not to deceive, rather to weave a web to #enlighten, and I will be over time, pulling the threads of this web together. To weave a #tapestry, a material of insights.
This difficulty in keeping track of and managing narrative or debate was addressed back in 1945, by #VannevarBush, in his article #AsWeMayThink (in the journal #TheAtlantic hello to Nicholas Thompson , I digress). Where Vannevar described how to “manage the inherited knowledge of the ages”. His work was later picked up on by #TedNelson back in 1963, where Ted originated the term #HyperText, and I quote: “Let me introduce the word “hypertext”***~ to mean a body of written or pic- torial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” You can search up his paper: “A File Structure for the Complex, The Changing and the Indeterminate”. At which point I can hear the gentle reader cry “ #JabeOnAI you are testing my patience … what has all this got to do with #AIthe beautiful #Hype of the moment and the overheating #Babble about #ChatGPT and #GenerativeAI and all that.
So, right now much of these #LargeLanguageModels are trained on text from the #OpenInternet, and a great deal of this information is #Hypertext or #HyperMedia. It is a wonderful way to work creatively with ideas, and keep track of your musings.
Anyhow, I first fell in love with #HyperText on purchasing my first #AppleMacback in 1993. This love was #HyperCard, which was a wonderful hypermedia programming tool that pre-dated the #WorldWideWeb. My point here more broadly is that in seeking to understand the input to the current #LLMs it is worth considering the nature of much of the input as being #Hypermedia and any implications that might flow from that.
Fair to say that the #WorldWideWeb is actually a rather poor implementation of Hypermedia as the great #TedNelson will tell you. His superior version of HyperMedia codenamed #ProjectXanadu finally launched back in 2014 having been worked on since 1960 and has the dubious honour as being the world’s most delayed software release! A whopping 54 years as #VapourWear
Things to consider when reflecting on #hypermedia as part of your training set … amongst other things … #GoogleSearch (for those of you as #GenerationZyou can “search up” google it is an old website that your parents used to use! Quote #JabeOnAI 😉 originally factored in the #topology of the #Hypertext links with its old #Algorithm#PageRank, but that was retired back in 2014 when the launched the #Hummingbird algorithm, coincidentally just as #ProjectXanaduarrived, talk about being late the the party!
Anyhow, more musings on #LLMs and #Hypertext another time.