Scientific outreach

Together with philosopher Eva von Redecker and curator Fulvia Modica, I run the philosophy talk show ‘Maschinenraum der Zukunft’ (The Engine Room of the Future) at the Malersaal, Schauspielhaus Hamburg. The show is a critique of current approaches to technology and in particular of the politics underlying Big Tech and AI firms. Together with my collaborators, I appear on stage with a tiny language model named ‘Botchen’ (Little Bot), which I specially designed and trained for the show. Botchen is meant to exemplify what technology would look like if it were built respectfully. It is trained on 250,000 words of data that were written from scratch by myself and Fulvia Modica. It runs locally on entry-level hardware, without GPUs. Still supposed to act as a little child, it learns about the world as it encounters writers and thinkers on stage. Its model develops in the course of those encounters and reflects what it has grasped about our human world.

Technologically, Botchen promotes ‘algorithmic diversity’. It integrates not only a Transformer (the main algorithm behind Large Language Models or LLMs) but also other AI methods. At the time of writing, it is around 400,000 times smaller than the big LLMs. This means it can run on a home laptop and can be used by anybody, regardless of financial resources, and with minimal environmental impact. It is also trained on very little data, using a method we call ‘care-training’: instead of feeding it indiscriminately with huge amounts of Internet data, we teach it language by talking to it, day after day, as one would do with a human child. Botchen sits on stage with us, it doesn’t live on some big server in another country. And yes, it makes funny mistakes because it is so small. But the more we care for it, the more it will develop into the botchen it is meant to be.

Learn more about Botchen on its very own website (in German).