This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.
While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly entertaining and interesting.
I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.
A huge loss indeed.
Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative models or LLMs.
Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they rely on statistical correlations harvested from training data which would not include any existing translations by definition.
I may be misremembering certain details, but the similarity to neural networks and their use in machine translation was quite apparent.
It’s that hyper-focus that I suspect many of us have experienced, but without agency and permanent. Worse than slavery.
I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?
In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very useful for decoding language but would constitute probably a medium-grade spoiler if I shared, so there's another relevant difference.
Still, it should also be said it wasn't literally LLMs, it was humans, merely, "affected" in a way that they are basically all idiot savants on the particular topic of language acquisition.
(That said it would be an interesting _experiment_, if a little hard to set up; you'd need a live language which hadn't made it into the LLM's training set at all, so you'd probably need to purpose-train an LLM...)
The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at all ambiguous.
The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.
Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.
IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.
But there's also a record of him personally torturing and raping one of the captives for the sake of it - which he keeps around, presumably to rewatch every now and then.
Anyway I think the point remains - after that point, the reader is meant to understand that the emergents self-serving justifications are just that.
R.I.P. dear friend, you will be missed and remembered.