Specimens, n-grams, and LLMs

Also at the Semiotic Machines conference a few weeks ago, the US scholar Lisa Gitelman made a very interesting connection between early type specimens – the booklets published by type foundries both to advertise and demonstrate how to compose text with their typefaces (see Reynolds 2022) – and contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). According to […]

10
Feb
Top view of a Raspberry Pi 5

LLMs, Hardware, and Technológos

Last week I installed and ran an LLaMA 2 model on my wife Barbara’s Raspberry Pi 5. I conducted this small experiment to present a more concrete discussion of Wolfgang Ernst’s notion of technológos in an article I was writing – more on that below. My aim was to explain and problematize the relation between […]