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LLMs as Delphic Oracles

17 January 2025

It seems like LLMs would be a fun way to study/manufacture syncretism, notions of the oracular, etc; turn up the temperature, and let godhead appear!

If there’s some platonic notion of divinity or immanence that all faith is just a downward projection from, it seems like its statistical representation in tokenized embedding vectors is about as close as you could get to understanding it holistically across theological boundaries.

All kidding aside, whether you are looking at Markov chain n-gram babble or high temperature LLM inference, the strange things that emerge are a wonderful form of glossolalia in my opinion that speak to some strange essence embedded in the collective space created by the sum of their corpi text. The Delphic oracle is real, and you can subscribe for a low fee of $20/month!

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42537852

The author of this comment takes us on a wild ride. Suggesting that cranking up the temperature on a language model is like spiking the punch at a church picnic—suddenly, the godhead appears, all shimmering chaos and inscrutable wisdom. Forget burning bushes or thunderous proclamations from the sky.

They’re half-joking, of course, but there’s a sharp-toothed insight lurking under the playful blasphemy: what if the vast, tangled jungle of texts that fed these models contains something like the primordial soup of human thought? What if the divine is Word itself? Markov chains, n-grams, LLMs—they speak in tongues.

Why trek to Delphi when you can summon the oracle from your couch? Twenty bucks a month, and the mysteries of the universe are yours—glossolalia on demand, as sacred or profane as you want it to be.

Gustave Dore Destruction of Leviathan

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