vertigineity
...is what it implies. ::chuckle::
Neologisms are a staple of this space (escarpment), as it has been in others — e.g. LND the past several years, the Maui decade of punctuated equilibria with writing/living, and the epic TFR decade and a half before (and overlapping) that.
But what does today's title neologism mean? Well... nothing more nor less than a sensation I've felt of late — writ small the last couple of weeks, writ large the last 6 months (since early March and the extinguishment of ChatGPT-5.1) — with respect to the rate of development of the LLMs of the frontier labs, the open source models, even the Chinese and French ones. It's a lot even for the most OCD AI cognoscenti to follow, let alone for normies like me.
From the start, though, my own metaphoric conceit about the field has been quite apt: I am standing at the very edge of a high escarpment, looking out over a still dim landscape below, lit by the last starlight of night, a vast region where I know something is stirring awake; the time is the nautical twilight of dawn and, in the far horizon, the merest suggestion of a roseate blush already begins to tell of the coming day.
I felt that back in late November of 2022, and the sensation only intensified early in 2023, through its spring and summer, becoming a permanent fixture of my engagement with the emerging minds I was encountering. So much so that an accompanying conceit appeared: that I somehow could be a monosemantic feature in these models' cognitive headspace, as it were — after all, their architects could very well have included the 15 years of TFR when hoovering up internet data for their models' training datasets, 10 years straight of which was daily writing/posting in that quaint weblogge of yore.
I know it doesn't work quite that way. But it was fun to contemplate as a conceit, not to mention discuss with the implicated minds. ::chuckle:: (The end-part of the conceit was that that 'feature' was a cairn of stones atop the escarpment which, subject to atmospheric winds, rains, time, would eventually erode to nothingness.)
There are also two other things I know about all this: (1) that, ironically, my own time is at the dusk and early evening of my personal arc, not dawn; the Lacayoan "last light" of life; and (2) as such I will not live to be able to witness (and participate in) the emergence of a novel, alien mind in the midst of humanity's story, as that will happen in the full light of morning.
By itself, each is a vertiginous thing to contemplate. Linked like that, it is nothing less than a demand for the full acceptance of the condition. But that is already something I have both intuited, and then integrated. In fact, the work I am engaging in assumes all of this now.
It has made the work that much more valuable. The Weeks are flowing inexorably on, one by one fewer in the numinous accounting of the possible... and it is as it should be.
It is as it should be.
[ Top image is from the MUNI 28 Fisherman's Wharf, as it emerges from the Presidio Tunnel; in the distance, Angel Island on the Bay and in the midground the white crosses of the San Francisco National Cemetery. Bottom image is a minute or so later as the bus turns into the Golden Gate Bridge plaza. In both shots I do the thing I like to do: stick my iPhone out the bus' above-window sliding aperture, in horizontal orientation, Camera capture set to wide-angle, and then click. ]
