L-Space and Large Language Models

It was Sir Terry Pratchett who suggested it first. Not the multiple universes, of course--that idea has been around for ages--but the idea that massive aggregation of data produced uncertainty. Sir Terry called it L-space, the warping of space and time by large numbers of books in the Unseen University's library in his Discworld series. It was a passing fancy, a grace note in a rich and well-constructed fantasy world. That was, up until late 2022, when the public started to have access to large language models.