In 1993, a company called MAI Systems sued Peak Computer, a computer repair firm, for copyright infringement. Peak’s technicians had turned on MAI clients’ computers to diagnose them, which loaded MAI’s proprietary operating system into RAM. MAI argued that loading its software into memory—even briefly, even just to make sure the computer was working, even though there was no way to start the computer without loading the software—constituted an unauthorized copy. Because the Peak technician was not licensed to use that software, MAI said, Peak had committed copyright infringement.

They won.

The aphorism “quantity has a quality all its own” is usually attributed to Josef Stalin, though the earliest traceable source appears to be an American defense newsletter from 1979.

Whoever said it, they were talking about armies. More soldiers don’t just let you fight the same battles better. Past a certain size, your army can fight a different kind of battle entirely, with new strategies and tactics. The observation applies at other scales, too: firing a machine gun is a very different experience from firing a musket—especially if you’re on the receiving end.

The aphorism might as well be the thesis statement for one of the most surprising discoveries in modern AI research. I touched on it in my last post when I compared Mark V. Shaney’s capabilities to modern LLMs. The discovery is this: bigger language models don’t just do the same things, only better. When they grow large enough, they start to be able to do entirely new things.

In 1984, an unusual user started posting in net.singles, a Usenet newsgroup where lonely people discussed dating, and he fit right in… sort of. He would respond to threads with sentences like “I have a great time to try to herd cats, and I’m not sure I agree with you.” Plausible. Slightly off, but weirdly confident.

The poster was named Mark V. Shaney, and he wasn’t human. “He” was a computer program, or bot, that was in essence the forerunner of today’s large language models (LLMs).