Latent space as a new medium

This piece from Kevin Kelly is both an interesting future-look at what LLMs may have in store for us (with Kevin's typical energizing optimism), and a great layman's primer on what the tech itself is actually doing — on how LLMs work in general. Latent space acts as a continuous map of the possible. Most of those possible things don’t exist — yet. The space of what we know, for instance known materials, known proteins, known chess plays, known ways to paint, fill only fragmented, patchy spots with plenty of white spaces between them. The white spaces between known things are unknown to us, but they are already mapped in latent space. We now have new tools to explore these white spaces in a systematic way. What lies in between astronomy and astrology? What gems await in between bluegrass music and ballet? What about in between the notion of corporations and the theory of Gaia? Exploring latent space is the new frontier. Invention shifts from “think of something new” to “prospect in the…