Claude Shannon and the Noise Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Information theory did not begin with the question "how do we send more data?" It began with a more fundamental question: how do we know when what we received is what was sent?
Claude Shannon's 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," introduced a concept that transformed engineering, biology, linguistics, and eventually mac...
The narrative presents a compelling reframing of AI alignment through the lens of information theory, offering a rare technical counterweight to the dominant "more is better" scaling paradigm. The strongest version of this argument is its insistence that fidelity—not just capacity—matters in communication systems, and that LLMs, while impressive compressors, may be generating signal-like noise rather than meaningful information. This aligns with Shannon’s insight that exceeding channel capacity ...