How the Shoggoth Meme Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.
A few months ago, while meeting with an A.I. executive in San Francisco, I spotted a strange sticker on his laptop. The sticker depicted a cartoon of a menacing, octopus-like creature with many eyes and a yellow smiley-face attached to one of its tentacles. I asked what it was.
“Oh, that’s the Shoggoth,” he explained. “It’s the most important meme in A.I.”
And with that, our agenda was officially derailed. Forget about chatbots and compute clusters — I needed to know everything about the Shoggoth, what it meant and why people in the A.I. world were talking about it.
The executive explained that the Shoggoth had become a popular reference among workers in artificial intelligence, as a vivid visual metaphor for how a large language model (the type of A.I. system that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots) actually works.
Source: The New York Times
