The Engine of Lagado

In the third book of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift described a machine at the Grand Academy of Lagado: a twenty-foot wooden frame covered in small cubes of wood inscribed with every word of the language, linked by wires, turned by forty students at iron cranks. When the handles are ground, the words shift into new positions, and wherever three or four happen to form something that might be part of a sentence, scribes copy it down. The professor who built it intends, given sufficient time and labor, to produce a complete body of all the arts and sciences without anyone needing to understand anything at all. Swift wrote this in 1726 as the bitterest satire he could devise against the projectors and system-builders of his age—the men who mistook elegant method for actual knowledge. He could not have known he was describing, three centuries early, the foundational principle of the large language model: language produced by the systematic recombination