Musings 175 Why is the distribution uneven?

@ Aaron Dec. 29, 2023

"The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."

·-- William Gibson

This sentence has been overused, I have heard this sentence in every religious fervor-like entrepreneurial wave in the past.

Three friends who have been in different fields of entrepreneurship mentioned this sentence in their respective speeches and pitches. The first one is doing programming education, the second one is doing blockchain, and the third one is doing large language models.

Every time this sentence is quoted, I want to stand up and ask, why not evenly?

I always think that when we utter this sentence, we are entering someone else's future, not our own.

But today I want to talk about: why is the distribution uneven?

Because good and long-term ideas are rare, it's because people have different understandings of the same thing.

Taking advantage of the New Year holiday, I just reviewed the large language model algorithm, startup companies, RAG, open-source code, etc.

What is everyone using LLM for? From prompt engineering to fine-tuning, to SEO, to RAG, to LLM OS, to embodied artificial intelligence, and so on.

How do people view this technology and the attitude of OpenAI as a company? From admiration, to hostility, to regret, and so on.

What is my brief conclusion?

Indeed, comprehension is difficult to train, and judgment is difficult to train. Intuition is an ability hidden beneath knowledge, just like LLM, it is a manifestation of the mastery and compression ability of world knowledge.

Uneven distribution in the future is due to the uneven distribution of vectors in different people's brains, the uneven distribution of compression algorithms, different intuitions projected onto this world, different reactions to the same thing, resulting in different guiding actions. And at the same time, many people have gone to branches that can be optimized, rather than heading towards the future branch.

I faintly hear someone say that there are a thousand cross paths in the garden for a thousand readers.

As a noun, the future is evenly distributed, as an ability, the distribution is uneven.

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