Last Words: Large Language Models and the AI Apocalypse

What kind of meaning can machines make―and why does it matter that it’s not the same as ours?

Anthropologist Paul Kockelman's Last Words offers a rigorous but accessible account of how large language models actually work―and why the meaning they produce is fundamentally different from human meaning-making. Drawing on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, Kockelman’s witty and insightful pamphlet shows how LLMs are trained to predict word-word relations, not word-world relations, which explains both their uncanny fluency and their systematic blind spots. The result is a compact, essential guide to cutting through the hype: not a dismissal of AI, but a precise account of what it can and cannot do―and who profits from the confusion.
 

Paul Kockelman teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Interpretation in the Age of Computation, The Anthropology of Intensity, and The Chicken and the Quetzal.