I wonder how Tolkien would’ve thought about the use of LotR names being used by all these AI and tech companies.. especially since they all seem to use the names of things that were corrupted by darkness.
“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real things of its own. I don't think it gave life ..., it only ruined them and twisted them.”
I wonder much the same thing, but this seems like a slightly odd place to say it since so far as I can see the only LotR name in the linked article is the company name Earendil, and AFAIK Earendil-in-Tolkien was very much not corrupted by darkness.
Well there’s <a href="https://disconnect.blog/peter-thiels-influence-over-a-network-of-lord-of-the-rings-inspired-companies/" rel="nofollow">https://disconnect.blog/peter-thiels-influence-over-a-networ... and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/1lrc27y/how_do_tolkien_fans_feel_about_all_these_tech/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/1lrc27y/how_do_tolkie...
LLMs in general are a corruption in a literal moral-neutral way. You stop worrying about whether something is correct or not, or how it works and just give in to the vibes, doesn't matter what goes in the backend or in some data center or mine far away, everything reduced to producing digital nuggets.
Yes, for an encyclopedic use-case for example, asking a fact question, when compared to Google or Wikipedia, using an LLM is less deterministic and provides less auditable metadata, it's just the answer and trust me bro.
Funny that he is building a middleware layer to a biggest surveillance system in all our history, the one which will spy on everything people are typing on their digital devices forever. How nice of him :)
Ehh it's Old Norse and tied to Norse mythology and its exact etymology is not clear, and Lucifer was the Roman name of the planet Venus. Christianity does not get to define the words it steals.
Though I find it funny that they put “Bearer of Light” as a description, at least on their GitHub page. AFAIK Tolkien did not used the phrase, it is maybe a bit too close to the Latin version, Lucifer. Talk about a thing corrupted by darkness.
A lot of Tolkien names come from old Germanic languages. Eärendil for example from Ēarendel, the Old English name for a figure from Norse mythology [1]
Or maybe from the 9th century poem Christ I [2], which translated to modern English starts off with the words
Hail Earendel, brightest of angels,
Sent to men over middle-earth,
And true radiance of the sun,
Fine beyond stars, you always illuminate,
From your self, every season!
IKEA catalogs using Swedish names, and Swedish being a Germanic language that stayed truer to its Germanic roots than English did, it's not that far off. In a weird way
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I think they mean that most companies that use these Tolkien names, are on the dark side.
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Are you sure about that? All llm use is like this?
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> When I'm old I want people to remember Tolkien named companies for things other than weapon and surveillance systems.
Source: <a href="https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/2041855748481695774" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/2041855748481695774
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Though I find it funny that they put “Bearer of Light” as a description, at least on their GitHub page. AFAIK Tolkien did not used the phrase, it is maybe a bit too close to the Latin version, Lucifer. Talk about a thing corrupted by darkness.
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Or maybe from the 9th century poem Christ I [2], which translated to modern English starts off with the words
IKEA catalogs using Swedish names, and Swedish being a Germanic language that stayed truer to its Germanic roots than English did, it's not that far off. In a weird way1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurvandill" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurvandill
2: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_I" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_I