Comment by jcgrillo
10 hours ago
Except... not at all? The vast majority of the training data required to create an artificial Aristotle has been lost forever. Smash your coffee cup on the ground. Now reassemble it and put the coffee back in. Once you can repeatably do that I'll begin to believe you can train an artificial Aristotle.
Also none of Aristotle’s exoteric works is extant. All we have are dry, boring lecture notes. Cicero said his public works were a “golden stream of speech” and its all lost. So I don’t see how you’d build an artificial Aristotle when we don’t have any of his polished works meant for the public surviving. Plato would be a better option, since his entire exoteric corpus is extant.
Your bar is too low. With the coffee cup, you at least have access to all the pieces - in theory, although not in engineering practice. With Aristotle, you don't have anything close to that.
Recreating Aristotle in any meaningful way, other than a model trained on his surviving writing of a million or so words, is simply not possible even in principle.
That's easy! All you have to do is simulate the whole universe on a computer, and then go the point when Aristotle is lecturing. Record all his works, then ctrl-c out of that and then feed those recordings into the LLM's training data. For the coffee, you just rewind the simulation and ctrl-c and ctrl-v it at the point you want.
Fuck why didn't I think of that all those other times I fucked up in my life. Ctrl-z woulda done it every goddamn time.
OK I'll raise the bar--make sure when you reassemble the coffee cup and put the coffee back into it, the coffee is the exact same temperature as when you threw the whole shooting match onto the floor ;)
EDIT: and you don't get to re-heat it.
EDIT AGAIN: to be clear, in my post above (and this one) by "put the coffee back in" I meant more precisely "put every molecule of coffee that splashed/sloshed/flowed/whatever out when the cup smashed back into the re-assembled cup" i.e. "restore the system back to the initial state". Not "refill the glued-together pieces of your shattered coffee cup with new coffee".