Latent Space as a New Medium

Winslow Homer’s most famous watercolor rendered as a child’s drawing. Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code? My answer is the latent spaces within AIs themselves will become a new medium for creativity. I will first explain what I mean by latent space, and then at the end of this explanation, I offer possible ways scientists and artists may use the latent spaces inherent in neural nets to serve as a new platform for creativity. ********* A Large Language Model (LLM) is like a small zip file that contains all human knowledge. It takes massive arrays of 100,000 GPU chips working in the cloud, and costing billions of dollars, to compress all of human writing into a small working model that could run on one single GPU chip. Even the biggest frontier models compress down to several hundred gigs, which is small enough it can fit on a card in your palm. In a strange but real way the resulting tiny file…