[fzeroracer]

In a 'rebooting society' doomsday scenario you're assuming that our language and understanding would persist. An LLM would essentially be a blackbox that you cannot understand or decipher, and would be doubly prone to hallucinations and issues when interacting with it using a language it was not trained on. Wikipedia is something you could gradually untangle, especially if the downloaded version also contained associated images.

[lblume]

I would not subscribe to your certainty. With LLMs, even empty or nonsensical prompts yield answers, however faulty they may be. Based on its level of comprehension and ability to generalize between languages I would not be too surprised to see LLMs being able to communicate on a very superficial level in a language not part of the training data. Furthermore, the compression ratio seems to be much better with LLMs compared to Wikipedia, considering the generality of questions one can pose to e.g. Qwen that Wikipedia cannot answer even when knowing how to navigate the site properly. It could also come down to the classic dichotomy between symbolic expert systems and connectionist neural networks which has historically and empirically been decisively won by the latter.

[Timwi]

You'd have to go many generations after the doomsday before language evolves enough for that to be a problem.

[thakoppno]

> associated images

fun to imagine whether images help in this scenario