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?)

> 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.

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.

I’m a huge fan of his short story Funes the Memorious. Link: https://ia801405.us.archive.org/10/items/HeliganSecretsOfThe...

Herb Simon certainly was great, but it is weird that the site uses a picture of what is obviously (despite his face being cut off) Claude Shannon working on his robotic mouse Theseus.

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/08/23/shannons-mouse/

https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Libr...

I really enjoyed and have recommended to others this very short paper, 'Borges and AI' [1], that was also discussed on HN a couple years back [2].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01425

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693120

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

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.

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

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.

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.