ChatGPT: A Selective History, and Notes on the Future of AI/ML Language Models

Drawing on the Humanities Division's Humanizing Technology curriculum, this talk will highlight some of the history of language models now ascendant in systems like ChatGPT. We will wend our way from early cryptography through the beginnings of machine translation, and into the data-rich present of large language models. Along the way, we will contemplate the ways that developments in technology have been driven by historical backdrop, and leverage that understanding to contemplate what the near future will look like.