Rob Horning’s latest offers a key meditation on what data even is in a world covetous of new algorithmic possibilities. Is “data”, like “AI”, losing its meaning when applied to the breathless hype cycles concentrated around certain forms of machine learning and large language models?
"The dataset is a quantity that becomes a quality, a totality, a piece of discrete property that can’t be reduced to the trillions of pieces that compose it."
https://open.substack.com/pub/robhorning/p/so-called-well-meaning