If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve no doubt heard that Typepad is shutting down on Sept. 30. I’ve moved NewAPPS to WordPress, which is what you’re reading here. In the coming days and weeks I hope to get nearly all of the content from the original site ported over, get the url’s working correctly, and…

By Gordon Hull For quite a while, I’ve been exploring how to relate Derridean concerns about language and the politics behind theories of language (and text), and how to think about those in the context of large language models (part one, two, three, four, five, six).  Last time, I talked about subjectivity and the question…

The announcement is here: https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2025/08/typepad-is-shutting-down.html NewApps has its own URL, but it's hosted on Typepad.  I assume this means that Typepad blog content will disappear from everything other than the Internet Archive (I can also download a file, so I can explore migration options), which hopefully will capture a lot of it. I have limited…

By Gordon Hull Over what’s become a lengthy series of posts ((one, two, three, four, five), I’ve been exploring a Derridean response to language models. Initially prompted by a pair of articles by Lydia Liu on the Wittgensteinian influence on the development of language models, and some comments Liu makes about Derrida, I’ve been looking…

I want to take a break from Derrida and language models this week to explore an emerging policy issue.  As is impossible to miss, “AI” is everywhere.  Not everything that claims to be “AI” really is, but it’s getting hard to avoid things that call themselves “AI” as the AI companies look to make the…

By Gordon Hull As part of thinking through the implications of Lydia Liu’s papers (here and here) demonstrating a Wittgensteinian influence on the development of large language models, I’ve made a detour into Derrida’s critique of writing (my earlier parts: one, two, three).  My initial suggestion last time was that Derrida’s discussion is designed to…

By Gordon Hull I’ve been looking (part 1, part 2) at a couple of articles by Lydia Liu (here and here) demonstrating a Wittgensteinian influence on the development of large language models.  Specifically, Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the meaning of words as determined by their contexts and placement relative to other rules gets picked up by…

I’ve been loosely tracking the AI and copyright cases, most notably the Thaler litigation, where Thaler keeps losing the argument that work solely by an AI should get copyright protection.  To summarize: everybody who has ruled on that said that only work involving humans can get copyright protection.  As I said at the time, I…

By Gordon Hull There’s an emerging literature on Large Language Models (LLMs, like ChatGPT) that basically argues that they undermine a bunch of our existing assumptions about how language works.  As I argued in a paper a year and a half ago, there’s an underlying Cartesianism in a lot of our reflections on AI, which…

The NSF had attempted to reduce indirect costs (F&A) on all future grants to 15%, in a somewhat more coherent version of the NIH's effort to do so for all ongoing and future grants.   A federal court today enjoined the rate cut, vacating the new rule, finding that "National Science Foundation’s 15% Indirect Cost Rate…