The Rhetoric of Computers

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the world has changed. Overnight, language models have transformed from a purely research experiment into a cultural phenomenon, becoming an integral part of our daily lives.

Johannes Oster attempts to trace this rapid evolution concisely.

He begins from an external perspective, exploring why AI’s linguistic flexibility has such a magical effect on us. He explains how this technology works—how language is translated into basic building blocks (“codes”), how its meaning is anchored in high-dimensional vector spaces as a “map of meaning,” and how AI learns the complex patterns of our language through the simple task of predicting the next code. Finally, he offers a critical look at the broader picture and the profound implications of this revolution.