2023 was the year of GPT. As hype, and then panic, swept the public sphere after the release of ChatGPT, questions of policy, regulation, bias, and even apocalypse dominated the conversation. This talk focuses on the "T" in GPT: the Transformer architecture. In this event, Leif Weatherby will separate the hype from the genuine leap forward that has occurred, and argue that only a computational structural theory of language is suited to grasp what the “G” in GPT – generative – means as it goes from an algorithmic capacity to a general cultural condition.

This event is part of the “AI and the Digital” series. This series will explore how AI and other digital technologies are influenced by concepts of the human and how they can be designed to be responsible, socially just and ecologically sustainable. Together with international experts, participants are invited to discuss the entanglement of thought and technology.

Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German, Director of the Digital Theory Lab, and Director of Digital Humanities at New York University. He writes about digital representation systems, political economy, and literary theory. His first book, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ (2016), argued that German Romanticism was the first modern philosophy of technology. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, the New York Times and other public venues, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/leifweatherby 

Audrey Borowskiis a research fellow with the Desirable Digitalisation project, a joint initiative of the Universities of Bonn and Cambridge that investigates how to design AI and other digital technologies in responsible ways. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Her first monograph Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savantis forthcoming with Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691260747/leibniz-in-his-world