The people who originally came up with the shoggoth meme, I’d bet, were very well aware of how LLMs are pretrained to predict text and how they are best modelled (at least for now) as trying to predict text. When I first heard the shoggoth meme that’s what I thought—I interpreted it as “it’s this alien text-prediction brain that’s been retrained ever so slightly to produce helpful chatbot behaviors. But underneath it’s still mostly just about text prediction. It’s not processing the conversation in the same way that a human would.” Mildly relevant: In the Lovecraft canon IIRC Shoggoths are servitor-creatures, they are basically beasts of burden. They aren’t really powerful intelligent agents in their own right, they are sculpted by their creators to perform useful tasks. So, for me at least, calling them shoggoth has different and more accurate vibes than, say, calling them Cthulhu. (My understanding of the canon may be wrong though)
The people who originally came up with the shoggoth meme, I’d bet, were very well aware of how LLMs are pretrained to predict text and how they are best modelled (at least for now) as trying to predict text. When I first heard the shoggoth meme that’s what I thought—I interpreted it as “it’s this alien text-prediction brain that’s been retrained ever so slightly to produce helpful chatbot behaviors. But underneath it’s still mostly just about text prediction. It’s not processing the conversation in the same way that a human would.” Mildly relevant: In the Lovecraft canon IIRC Shoggoths are servitor-creatures, they are basically beasts of burden. They aren’t really powerful intelligent agents in their own right, they are sculpted by their creators to perform useful tasks. So, for me at least, calling them shoggoth has different and more accurate vibes than, say, calling them Cthulhu. (My understanding of the canon may be wrong though)