My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.

▲

shivaniShimpi_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.

feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late

▲

waltbosz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.

I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.

▲

mercer 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...

	▲	IAmBroom 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in base 13. God's numbering system is "unlucky".

▲

baq 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)