LLMs Through the Eyes of Vinge

For the last few months, I’ve been re-reading some of my favorite novels. Recently, I went through Vinge’s Zones of Thought series: A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and The Children of the Sky. And what struck me reading them is how much Vinge wrote about a world filled with LLMs without ever having seen one. Now perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, it’s from Vinge we get the term “Singularity”, and he was thinking deeply about superintelligence at a time when AI was little than a curiosity in the back corners of CS departments.