If AI is next-token prediction, inference is partly 'speaking with the dead'
NYCounihan · x · 2026-10-06
The author offers a thought: if you view AI as a next-token predictor whose weights come from the world's corpus—a decent chunk written by those now deceased—then inference can be seen as a means of speaking with the dead.
He adds a hypothetical: if you could trace training data to weights, you could track what percentage of inference comes from dead people—much higher for old words like "hornswaggle," near zero for Python code.
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