Om Malik died recently. He was a keen observer of the tech industry, insightful and thoughtful. He was also an insider in that area; maybe that’s what gives his writing such power.
In his last published essay, on the meaning of the name “Mythos” that Anthropic has bestowed upon its best frontier model, he reflects on the ways that the company and its president Dario Amodei are using a constructive narrative to legitimize Generative AI.
The whole essay is really worth your time, but this observation in particular stood out to me.
[…]Dario has collected the two most powerful character references on the planet. The President gives temporal legitimacy. The Pope gives moral legitimacy. No other AI company has done both. That is no accident.
Augustus had the Senate and the priests. Dario had the Oval Office and the Vatican. The structure is the same. Two thousand years apart.
Plato would recognize this immediately. He spent his career distinguishing the philosopher who seeks truth from the sophist who manufactures persuasion. The sophist is not lying exactly. The sophist is selecting, sequencing, and presenting in ways that produce belief without requiring the audience to do the work. Mythos, for Plato, was the domain of poets and myth-makers. Useful for educating the young, dangerous when deployed as a substitute for rigorous argument among adults. He would look at Anthropic’s naming strategy and see sophistry wearing philosophical clothes.
That characterization of the frontier model as a form of sophistry… it feels like it points out something I’ve been missing. The model’s output, the process it uses, doesn’t denote understanding. The output is a summary or a distillation of others understanding. It masquerades as something that understands, but it doesn’t. It’s simply a very sophisticated mathematical process that guessed the next word or words in a preceding sentence.
That can be useful for some purposes, but it has profound limits – especially to those seeking truth.
Sophistry. That’s worth reflecting on at some length.
Do go and read the rest of his essay.
It’s August and that means the best part of the summer is upon us. (I’m a big fan of the latter part of summer.) I’m going to be off for much of this month, and otherwise occupied with some weekend events for the rest.
The Gospel reading for this week has a parable and its interpretation once again – just like last week. And once again, the reading skips over part of the narrative that St. Matthew is constructing. Given that it can seem like parables are just a funny sort of rhetorical device that rabbis used in Jesus’ day to teach their disciples, whereas in truth, the hard work of trying to unpack the meaning or meanings of a parable is how the path of wisdom was shown to the hearers.
This week’s Gospel reading skips over the, to my mind, most interesting part of the reading. In between the parable of the sower and its explanation is a vignette where the disciples take Jesus aside apart from the crowd and push to know why it is that he teaches in parables rather than speaking the truth plainly.
This Sunday’s Gospel (Matthew 10:40–42) is only three verses long, but it quietly rearranges the way most of us keep score. We’re trained to read résumés: titles, degrees, the things a person earns and accumulates over a lifetime. And we tend to assume God reads us the same way, tallying up what we’ve managed to make of ourselves.
We read the Bible as though we are always meant to be focused on Isaac, the chosen one, the child of the promise, the one the story is about, the one who is the ancestor of Israel. But this story is also, quietly, about the one who gets sent away, the one who exits the story at this point in Moses’ account of his people. God says something remarkable to Abraham: do not be distressed about the boy. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.
This Gospel, The Gospel, is not about the people whom God will accept, who God wants to accept, who are outside the walls right now, waiting to hear the Good News. It’s as much about us, the good people who have come to worship God. We are the descendants of Gentiles, we are not the Children of Abraham, but because of God’s love and compassion, and in spite of everything that we have done, we are now adopted into the family of the insider, we are the Daughter, the child of God.