“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - Arthur C. Clarke

Today I’d like to talk about LLMs. But first, I’d like to talk about an impressive invention from the late 1700s.

The Mechanical Turk

The Mechanical Turk - or “The Turk” as people called it - was an autonomous chess-playing machine. Built in 1770, it went on tour across parts of the world for 84 years as a robot playing chess against human opponents.