Another deeply thoughtful essay this morning from Om Malik. You should read it!
Malik begins by wondering why Anthropic called its new model Mythos. To even wonder about that, you have to understand some things about history, literature, and philosophy. I won’t explain Malik’s inquiry; that’s what his essay does brilliantly. It’s another example of something I’ve recently been noticing: the large language model phenomenon is bringing classical, nontechnical education and thinking to more prominence, particularly vis-à-vis technical or STEM studies.
LLM vendors are hiring ethicists and philosophers, and the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, seems to be emerging as more of a student of humanities than of physics and technology. Malik’s essay suggests that Amodei may be working harder to appear to be a student of the humanities than actually being one. He holds degrees in physics and biophysics, not that anyone’s intellectual development stops after graduation.
As I’ve said before, one of the unexpected outcomes of this latest iteration of “AI” looks like it might be the ascendancy of heterodox humanities over technical specialization. Now that there are tools emerging that often seem to be able to provide technical details, being an educated generalist may be the most fruitful approach to life and careers.
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