[HN Gopher] When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
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When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
Author : benbreen
Score : 158 points
Date : 2025-04-02 17:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| aorloff wrote:
| https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Libr...
| viccis wrote:
| 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 _Tlon,
| 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?)
| kunzhi wrote:
| Did you ever read House of Leaves?
| 7thaccount wrote:
| 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.
| theshaper wrote:
| 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.
| internet_points wrote:
| 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
| theshaper wrote:
| OMG! 1[0o0]v
|
| Thanks!
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Thank you. It calls to me from the shelf occasionally.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| 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.
| cvz wrote:
| Tlon 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.
| thrance wrote:
| Highly recommend his _Fictions_ too. Grabbed a worn copy for
| 1EUR on the street months ago, and I still think about _Uqbar_
| from time to time.
| Lerc wrote:
| > _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.
| viccis wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| > 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.
| viccis wrote:
| There's definitely a Pierre Menard joke in here somewhere
| frank20022 wrote:
| 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.
| aktau wrote:
| I have the opposite experience. I find Cortazar impenetrable,
| but the Borges stories "speak to me".
| flobosg wrote:
| 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.
| Kiln6125 wrote:
| 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.
| integralof5y wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| 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.
| theobreuerweil wrote:
| I think the comment is referring to "Pierre Menard, Author of
| the Quixote".
| dwringer wrote:
| Yes indeed. This thread seems to indicate more people
| should read more Borges!
| jhedwards wrote:
| 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.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| The joke the previous comment is making is that Borges
| already wrote that story. "Pierre Menard, the Author of the
| Quixote."
| awithrow wrote:
| 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
| raminism wrote:
| ChatGPT, Author of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I see what you did there...should your username be Pierre
| Menard, perhaps?
| jl6 wrote:
| Hofstadter should have written _Godel, 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
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Hofstadter was defiantly a fan of Borges' work.
| https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-1-borges-and-i...
| kragen wrote:
| What, when did he stop being so?
| ecocentrik wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that he stopped being a Borges fan.
| hybrid_study wrote:
| you beat me to this
| kouru225 wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of his short story Funes the Memorious. Link:
| https://ia801405.us.archive.org/10/items/HeliganSecretsOfThe...
| f1shy wrote:
| Which is in Borges words "a long allegory of insomnia" :)
| mentalgear wrote:
| Is there an audio file of this interview? I'd prefer listening to
| the original (in the background).
| gwern wrote:
| 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.
| benbreen wrote:
| 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.
| gwern wrote:
| 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
| benbreen wrote:
| That's awesome, thank you for uploading.
| mrpsbrk wrote:
| This seems to be the version published in an Argentinian
| magazine:
|
| https://borgestodoelanio.blogspot.com/2017/05/jorge-luis-bor...
| 101008 wrote:
| 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.
| theshaper wrote:
| Hey! Opino lo mismo!
|
| (I agree!)
| jtmoulia wrote:
| 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/
| tgv wrote:
| 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.
| 101008 wrote:
| 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.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| I had the same issue with Stephen King, reading it in English
| after reading Spanish translations is a different world.
| anthk wrote:
| Which editions? The Iberian Spanish ones are not that
| different in tone/speech to the original English ones.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| 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.
| tekacs wrote:
| 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
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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/
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