Recent quotes:

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

But these systems do not merely summarize this information, like library catalogs, Internet search, and Wikipedia. They also can reorganize and reconstruct representations or “simulations” (1) of this information at scale and in novel ways, like markets, states and bureaucracies. Just as market prices are lossy representations of the underlying allocations and uses of resources, and government statistics and bureaucratic categories imperfectly represent the characteristics of underlying populations, so too Large Models are ‘lossy JPEGs’ (6) of the data corpora on which they have been trained.

Simulation "proves" Gladwell wrong

They looked at that information spread in several ways, comparing via computer simulation how information moved throughout the networks when it came solely through word-of-mouth within a network ("bottom up"), when it came solely through external advertising or public information ("top down") and when it came through varying bottom-up and top-down combinations. What they discovered refutes Gladwell's concept that network position is always paramount. They found that in instances where there is even a small amount of advertising -- even when it is just a quarter of a percent as strong as word-of-mouth -- there's virtually no difference between the influence of the person at the center of a network and those further out on the string.