Max Leiter rewrote Terry Bisson's 1991 story "They're Made Out of Meat" — the one where two aliens are aghast that humans think with meat — as a dialogue about large language models. This time, the thing that shouldn't be able to hold a conversation is made of numbers.
"We opened it up. There's no dictionary in there, no grammar rules, no little man. Just weights. Eighty layers of numbers getting multiplied together," one investigator insists. The other won't have it: "Thinking numbers! You're asking me to believe in thinking numbers!"
In the end, they file the whole thing under pattern matching and move on, because, as one puts it, "Do we really want to owe something to weights?"
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