alt.hn

4/2/2025 at 5:30:08 PM

When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI

 https://resobscura.substack.com/p/when-jorge-luis-borges-met-one-of

by benbreen

4/2/2025 at 6:52:20 PM

If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.

Regarding the content of this interview:

>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?

This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.

In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)

by viccis

4/3/2025 at 7:31:39 AM

> Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break.

Yes, his writings are short, but man they are dense!

To anyone who cares, do this exercise: read short story by Borges, probably the shorter the better. Then go ahead say, next day, and try to write it down again in your own words. I tried a couple of times, and I ended with at least twice the number of pages. Amazing.

by f1shy

4/3/2025 at 5:01:23 PM

There's definitely a Pierre Menard joke in here somewhere

by viccis

4/3/2025 at 2:48:31 PM

Somewhat relevant to this overall conversation is "pierre menard author of the quixote". Which takes the concept of death of the author in an amusing direction.

by Kiln6125

4/2/2025 at 8:32:14 PM

Tlön is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember basically anything about it once I've finished reading.

by cvz

4/3/2025 at 10:01:04 AM

I first encountered Borges in high school, reading “The House of Asterion” as an assignment. Probably not one of his most well known short stories, but I would still recommend it.

by flobosg

4/3/2025 at 1:31:16 AM

>but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge.

Do you think that a LLM has the ability to identify a new a priori knowledge?

It seems like it would be a lower threshold to meet but If you combine that with a stochastic process then it seems inevitable that it would be able to ruminate until it came up with new a priori knowledge.

by Lerc

4/3/2025 at 4:57:27 PM

I've said this in another comment but an example would be to train an LLM on a corpus with ALL mathematic content removed. Nothing at all. Then ask it what the shortest distance between two points is. That's an example of synthetic a priori knowledge.

by viccis

4/3/2025 at 8:03:22 AM

Reading Borges is anything but easy. It requires a certain state of mind. I myself would pick Cortazar over Borges any day, buy I have appreciated some of his writings.

by frank20022

4/3/2025 at 12:41:31 PM

I have the opposite experience. I find Cortazar impenetrable, but the Borges stories "speak to me".

by aktau

4/2/2025 at 11:36:44 PM

Highly recommend his Fictions too. Grabbed a worn copy for 1€ on the street months ago, and I still think about Uqbar from time to time.

by thrance

4/2/2025 at 7:59:12 PM

Did you ever read House of Leaves?

by kunzhi

4/2/2025 at 8:52:56 PM

I've tried, but never made it all the way through. Cool to realize the author's sister (Poe) made a hit song "Haunted" when inspired by the same house iirc. There's my random fact of the day.

by 7thaccount

4/2/2025 at 10:00:58 PM

Let me give you some probably bad advice. Skip the Johnny Truant parts and skim past all the creative layout stuff. It's just decoration, and decoration is often suspicious. Focus on the core story. It’s fantastic. There’s a shot at building a full-on American mythology, Lovecraft-style, from that alone.

Sadly, almost no one talks about it. Ditch the form and embrace the substance. ← It also nods to the mystery behind The Navidson Record.

I wish I had known this when I first read it.

by theshaper

4/3/2025 at 9:11:10 PM

Thank you. It calls to me from the shelf occasionally.

by 7thaccount

4/3/2025 at 8:26:26 AM

I agree, I loved the story (I also did kind of enjoy the form, but agree it can get in the way of enjoying the story).

The Navidson Record is on youtube if you dare =P

by internet_points

4/3/2025 at 6:38:36 PM

OMG! ੧[⁰o⁰]ʋ

Thanks!

by theshaper

4/3/2025 at 2:50:29 PM

I was interested in what this house looks like but after a quick internet search it seems that her album was inspired by the novel itself, not any particular house.

by indoordin0saur

4/2/2025 at 7:04:08 PM

> If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?

Hmm, what if you could recreate, word-for-word, the great works of an author like Borges (or, say, Cervantes) by so thoroughly understanding their life that the words themselves came out of you, not memorized and recapitulated, but naturally and unbidden? What an interesting idea for a story, maybe an LLM will be able to write that one day.

by karaterobot

4/2/2025 at 7:16:30 PM

There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a poet robot. They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their culture, and a culture is programmed by the previous culture, so the robot has to simulate the evolution of the world from the beginning of time in order to produce the AI poet. It's a wonderful and hilarious story.

by jhedwards

4/2/2025 at 9:47:54 PM

It could be that Lem was influenced by Borges? The original poster is referencing a specific Borges short story called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which he published in 1939. It influenced a number of other notable authors

by awithrow

4/2/2025 at 9:31:24 PM

The joke the previous comment is making is that Borges already wrote that story. "Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote."

by QuesnayJr

4/2/2025 at 7:23:34 PM

ChatGPT, Author of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

by raminism

4/2/2025 at 10:42:00 PM

I see what you did there...should your username be Pierre Menard, perhaps?

by kjellsbells

4/2/2025 at 7:13:06 PM

This reads exactly like the plot of a story Borges might write, maybe someone more familiar with his ouevre can shine a light on which stories of his touch on this kind of theme.

by uoaei

4/2/2025 at 7:22:35 PM

I think the comment is referring to “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.

by theobreuerweil

4/2/2025 at 8:36:53 PM

Yes indeed. This thread seems to indicate more people should read more Borges!

by dwringer

4/2/2025 at 9:19:12 PM

Borges is totally recommended, of course, but after reading him in the original language I think his English translations lack the poetry and music of his writings. For once I am happy Spanish is my first language.

by 101008

4/3/2025 at 2:12:25 AM

The last few months I've been picking up Spanish language editions of Borges's short stories and poems from used book stores. Two decades ago during school I took two years of Spanish, so reading native Borges would be way beyond my comprehension.

With AI tools, though, I can "read" Borges in his native language: with my phone + OCR + translate I have an English language companion. Or, using the voice interface I can try narrating the Spanish text and ask clarifying questions whenever I'm confused.

An author like Borges makes it well worth the extra effort. And, his puzzles often involve language, so the extra layer of mental translation can mirror the work itself, e.g. in his poem La luna [1]. (though, I envy your native Spanish)

1. https://www.gaceta.unam.mx/la-luna-un-poema-de-borges/

by jtmoulia

4/3/2025 at 12:25:07 PM

My Spanish is more advanced (I was fluent in everyday Spanish, not so much in the more formal use), and I'm reading El Aleph now. It sure takes quite some effort. So many unknown words. And he can turn a phrase quite concisely. But worthwhile.

by tgv

4/3/2025 at 12:41:20 PM

Congrats on both of you for putting the effort! I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina, so 100% same language as Borges. However, as both of you already said, it isn't even easy for us to read Borges. He has a complex sentence structure, and uses a lot of not-so-common words, so you have to read it really carefully, paying extra attention (not as I'd read any other text). But in the end is really worthwile, everytime I read something by Borges (new or not), I found it fascinating.

by 101008

4/3/2025 at 4:11:52 AM

I had the same issue with Stephen King, reading it in English after reading Spanish translations is a different world.

by Izikiel43

4/3/2025 at 6:45:00 AM

Which editions? The Iberian Spanish ones are not that different in tone/speech to the original English ones.

by anthk

4/3/2025 at 10:30:01 PM

Yes, Iberian spanish. The issue is that I'm from Latam, so the slang used in Iberian spanish, and some conjugations still sound foreign to me. In english, King's words flow better, the intent and the idea are much clearer, and since I've been much more exposed to American culture than Iberian culture, it feels much more familiar.

by Izikiel43

4/2/2025 at 10:07:47 PM

Hey! Opino lo mismo!

(I agree!)

by theshaper

4/2/2025 at 7:24:16 PM

Hofstadter should have written Gödel, Escher, Bach, Borges.

I wrote about the connection between Borges, AI, Wikipedia, Kafka (the messaging system, not the author), GPUs, and cryptography in the small print on page 7 of this:

https://lab6.com/4#page=7

by jl6

4/3/2025 at 4:14:06 AM

you beat me to this

by hybrid_study

4/2/2025 at 10:43:38 PM

Considering Borges' stories (some written as if they're reports of actual events), I had to wonder for a long while if this is a "reporting" of a "what if" scenario. It would've been a great homage to him.

by netsharc

4/3/2025 at 12:38:04 AM

Fascinating and very accessible read. While in jail I tried to get through Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (new translation) and some of the big concepts are echoed in this dialogue.

An LLM trained on Sartre would be amazing because the logical extensions of many of his positions and postulations would be uncomfortable in polite society. Even as a human being he quite frequently espoused concepts counter the grain of civility or notions of what ethics are or should be. An unrestrained, uncensored LLM in this vein could be scary and gut wrenching and yet a good reminder of our less-than-ideal state of refinement of thought and behavior as a species.

by 6stringmerc

4/2/2025 at 8:50:18 PM

Is there an audio file of this interview? I'd prefer listening to the original (in the background).

by mentalgear

4/2/2025 at 9:35:53 PM

I see no hint of an audio recording having been made, much less surviving & digitized, in the original article's description: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-histo... It's too detailed to be retroactive notes by Simon or Borges, so I would guess Borges's secretary or a student simply transcribed it as they went.

by gwern

4/2/2025 at 10:30:50 PM

Gwern and others who have dug into it this far might be interested by this footnote in the Crespo article: "I have tried to lay my hands on the original version of the conversation, as I am sure Simon did, too. I contacted Gabriel Zadunaisky, who, as the article explains, participated in the meeting. He is a professional translator. I asked him for the original version, and he replied on WhatsApp: 'Mr. Crespo: I am very sick. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with the information requested.' My hypothesis is that Zadunaisky translated the conversation directly from the recorded version and that this original version has been lost."

My read is that most likely, it was recorded on an old school reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's entirely possible that the tapes are still sitting on a shelf somewhere in Argentina, though the chances of actually tracking them down are pretty low. I worked with some reel-to-reel tapes that Alan Ginsberg made (now held at Stanford) in the mid-60s (including one where he is talking to Bob Dylan!) and they held up pretty well. Had to use audio editing software to remove tape hiss, but they were not as badly preserved as I expected.

by benbreen

4/3/2025 at 1:49:29 PM

That's unfortunate about Mr Zadunaisky, but it does suggest there's no hope of a recording unless someone should stumble across it in the Borges papers (although given how his estate has been abused, little hope of that being useful, one way or another) or the Argentine library archives...

Anyway, I uploaded the Simon book chapter at https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1996-simon-2.pdf

by gwern

4/3/2025 at 5:58:27 PM

That's awesome, thank you for uploading.

by benbreen

4/2/2025 at 6:59:36 PM

Borges and Herbert Simons are two great minds, but their conversation is not deep since is mostly shared view about the meaning of human and machine intelligence. Today, with LLMs we have a tool to explore the relation between intelligence and language, between number of parameters, neural nets architectures and much more. So that conversation give us no new insight but is delightful to share time with such great people.

by integralof5y