LLMs and information post-scarcity

original article by gordon brander: https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/llms-and-information-post-scarcity - published in: jan 9, 2023

my highlights:

"Technology for producing and distributing information is useless without some way to locate, filter, organize and summarize it. A new profession of “information managers” will have to combine the skills of computer scientists, librarians, publishers and database experts to help us discover and manage information. These human agents will work with software agents that specialize in manipulating information-offspring of indexing programs such as Archie, Veronica and various World Wide Web crawlers that aid Internet navigators today." (Hal Varian 1995, “How much will two bits be worth in the digital marketplace”)

Hal Varian, by the way, is the person who designed the Google ad auction. He was only partially right about the importance of human “information managers” (we call them influencers). It turns out that aggregators like Google do the bulk of the heavy lifting. Computers are able to scale in ways that people can’t. So, the condition of superabundance creates a need for aggregation. LLMs will amplify that abundance. It’s a good bet that this strengthens the strategic importance of aggregation