Post #4284035

Here is my completely unscientific linguistic theory. Europe got cold weather. The rule became: speak less, do more. Standing outside giving a 40-minute speech was a suicide act. The Middle East got sun. Lots of it. So they invented stories, poetry, debates… and eventually holy books that people have been arguing about for thousands of years. A European proverb is basically: "Don’t be an asshole." A Middle Eastern version starts with the genealogy of the guy who wasnt an asshole, introduces twelve characters, three metaphors, a camel, a mountain, and by the end you have forgotten what the original question was. I grew up in France and learned Arabic much later. It felt like mental gymnastics. Now imagine training an LLM on that. People complain that today's AI is verbose because it learned English. I'm just glad the first generation didn't think primarily in Arabic. We will spend half the context window arguing over which of forty equally correct words for 'door' best captures the mood. 😄