Measure Up

An Ode to an Instrument

For new readers: my writing usually concerns AI and AI policy more directly than this essay would suggest. But trust me, this essay is very much about AI and AI policy.

—

“My very dear friend Broadwood—

I have never felt a greater pleasure than in your honor’s notification of the arrival of this piano, with which you are honoring me as a present. I shall look upon it as an altar upon which I shall place the most beautiful offerings of my spirit to the divine Apollo. As soon as I receive your excellent instrument, I shall immediately send you the fruits of the first moments of inspiration I gather from it, as a souvenir for you from me, my very dear Broadwood; and I hope that they will be worthy of your instrument. My dear sir, accept my warmest consideration, from your friend and very humble servant.

—Ludwig van Beethoven”

As musical instruments improved through history, new kinds of music became possible. Sometimes, the improved instrument could make novel sounds; other times, it was louder; and other times stronger, allowing for more aggressive play. Like every technology, musical instruments are the fruit of generations worth of compounding technological refinement.

In a shockingly brief period between the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, the piano was transformed technologically, and so too was the function of the music it produced.

To understand what happened, consider the form of classical music known as the “piano sonata.” This is a piece written for solo piano, and it is one of the forms that persisted through the transition, at least in name. In 1790, these were written for an early version of the piano that we now think of as the fortepiano. It sounded like a mix of a modern piano and a harpsichord.

Piano sonatas in the early 1790s were thought of primarily as casual entertainment. It wouldn’t be quite right to call them “background music” as we understand that term today—but they were often played in the background. People would talk over these little keyboard works, play cards, eat, drink.

In the middle of the 1790s, however, the piano started to improve at an accelerated rate. It was the early industrial revolution. Throughout the economy, many things were starting to click into place. Technologies that had kind of worked for a while began to really work. Scale began to be realized. Thicker networks of people, money, ideas, and goods were being built. Capital was becoming more productive, and with this serendipity was becoming more common. Few at the time could understand it, but it was the beginning of a wave—one made in the wake of what we today might call the techno-capital machine.

Riding this wave, the piano makers were among a great many manufacturers who learned to build better machines during this period. And with those improvements, more complex uses of those machines became possible.

Just as this industrial transformation was gaining momentum in the mid-1790s, a well-regarded keyboard player named Ludwig van Beethoven was starting his career in earnest. He, like everyone else, was riding the wave—though he, like everyone else, did not wholly understand it.

Beethoven was an emerging superstar, and he lived in Vienna, the musical capital of the world. It was a hub not just of musicians but also of musical instruments and the people who manufactured them. Some of the finest piano makers of the day—Walter, Graf, and Schanz—were in or around Vienna, and they were in fierce competition with one another. Playing at the city’s posh concert spaces, Beethoven had the opportunity to sample a huge range of emerging pianistic innovations. As his career blossomed, he acquired some of Europe’s finest pianos—including even stronger models from British manufacturers like Broadwood and Sons.

Iron reinforcement enabled piano frames with higher tolerances for louder and longer play. The strings became more robust. More responsive pedals meant a more direct relationship between the player and his tool. Innovations in casting, primitive machine tools, and mechanized woodworking yielded more precise parts. With these parts one could build superior hammer and escapement systems, which in turn led to faster-responding keys. And more of them, too—with higher and lower octaves now available. It is not just that the sound these pianos made was new: These instruments had an enhanced, more responsive user interface.

You could hit these instruments harder. You could play them softer, too. Beethoven’s iconic use of sforzando—rapid swings from soft to loud tones—would have been unplayable on the older pianos. So too would his complex and often rapid solos. In so many ways, then, Beethoven’s characteristic style and sound on the keyboard was technologically impossible for his predecessors to achieve.

These new pianos had a progressively higher dynamic range, like when a new camera captures the hue of the sun better than the old one, or how progressively better displays depict those hues with greater fidelity. These instruments could render the music in the artist’s mind with greater fidelity, conveying a sharper image of his motive. And they expanded the artist’s palette, too.

Beethoven’s 1795 Op. 2 sonatas (piano sonatas number 1, 2, and 3) were among the most sophisticated piano works anyone had ever heard. In 1796, Beethoven composed his masterful Op. 7 E-flat sonata (no. 4). If Beethoven had stopped here, before any of the pieces he is famous for today were written, he still would be considered among the greatest piano composers of his era.

But then in 1799, Beethoven published the Pathétique (no. 8)—his first piano sonata that is remembered broadly today, its second movement having been covered, doo-wop style, by Billy Joel in his song “This Night,” The sonata’s unforgettable opening on a massive, ominous chord may have broken the pianos of just half a decade earlier. With this first masterpiece, Beethoven had established himself as one of the most significant keyboard players of all time.

And then Beethoven began to write his legendary pieces. Moonlight (no. 14) in 1801, Waldstein (no. 21) in 1804, Appassionatta (no. 23) in 1806, Hammerklavier (“hammerkeyboard,” no. 29) in 1818—to name just a few examples (to hear these pieces performed on period instruments, I suggest listening to Ronald Brautigam’s cycle).

Each landed at a new outer conceptual extreme of musical expression. Each stressed the limits of the piano, too—Beethoven was famous for breaking piano strings that were not yet strong enough to render his vision. There was always a relevant margin against which to press. By his final sonata, written in the early 1820s, he was pressing in the direction of early jazz. It was a technological and artistic takeoff from this to this, and from this to this.

Beethoven’s compositions for other instruments followed a structurally similar trajectory: compounding leaps in expressiveness, technical complexity, and thematic ambition, every few years. Here is what one of Mozart’s finest string quartets sounded like. Here is what Beethoven would do with the string quartet by the end of his career.

No longer did audiences talk during concerts. No longer did they play cards and make jokes. Audiences became silent and still, because what was happening to them in the concert hall had changed. A new type of art was emerging, and a new meta-character in human history—the artist—was being born. Beethoven was doing something different, something grander, something more intense, and the way listeners experienced it was different too.

The musical ideas Beethoven introduced to the world originated from his mind, but those ideas would have been unthinkable without a superior instrument.

—

I bought the instrument I’m using to write this essay in December 2020. I was standing in the frigid cold outside of the Apple Store in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., wearing a KN-95 face mask, separated by six feet from those next to me in line. I had dinner with a friend scheduled that evening. A couple weeks later, the Mayor would temporarily outlaw even that nicety.

I carried this laptop with me every day throughout the remainder of the pandemic. I ran a foundation using this laptop, and after that I orchestrated two career transitions using it. I built two small businesses, and I bought a house. I got married, and I planned a honeymoon with my wife.

I launched Hyperdimensional on this instrument, and on this instrument I have written almost everything I have published in the past year. Over 200,000 words in total, articulated using this keyboard—sometimes on an airplane tray table as bubbling ginger ale sprinkled on the keys, sometimes on my bed late at night, sometimes on deadline, sometimes staring at a white page with seemingly nothing interesting to say, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes deflated.

I made great strides while using this instrument, and I made mistakes. This instrument let me make those mistakes. It never tried to stop me or slow me down. It computed with equal efficiency regardless of what was thrown at it. When it came time for me to correct those mistakes, to try—imperfectly and unevenly—to fix what I had broken, this instrument served me with precisely the same alacrity.

In a windowless office on a work trip to Stanford University on November 30, 2022, I discovered ChatGPT on this laptop. I stayed up all night in my hotel playing with the now-primitive GPT-3.5. Using my laptop, I educated myself more deeply about how this mysterious new tool worked.

I thought at first that it was an “answer machine,” a kind of turbocharged search engine. But I eventually came to prefer thinking of these language models as simulators of the internet that, by statistically modeling trillions of human-written words, learned new things about the structure of human-written text.

What might arise from a deeper-than-human understanding of the structures and meta-structures of nearly all the words humans have written for public consumption? What inductive priors might that understanding impart to this cognitive instrument? We know that a raw pretrained model, though deeply flawed, has quite sophisticated inductive priors with no additional human effort. With a great deal of additional human effort, we have made these systems quite useful little helpers, even if they still have their quirks and limitations.

But what if you could teach a system to guide itself through that digital landscape of modeled human thoughts to find better, rather than likelier, answers? What if the machine had good intellectual taste, because it could consider options, recognize mistakes, and decide on a course of cognitive action? Or what if it could, at least, simulate those cognitive processes? And what if that machine improved as quickly as we have seen AI advance so far? This is no longer science fiction; this research has been happening inside of the world’s leading AI firms, and with models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3, we see undoubtedly that progress is being made.

What would it mean for a machine to match the output of a human genius, word for word? What would it mean for a machine to exceed it? In at least some domains, even if only a very limited number at first, it seems likely that we will soon breach these thresholds. It is very hard to say how far this progress will go; as they say, experts disagree.

This strange simulator is “just math,”—it is, ultimately, ones and zeroes, electrons flowing through processed sand. But the math going on inside it is more like biochemistry than it is like arithmetic. The language model is, ultimately, still an instrument, but it is a strange one. Smart people, working in a field called mechanistic interpretability, are bettering our understanding all the time, but our understanding remains highly imperfect, and it will probably never be complete. We don’t quite have precise control yet over these instruments, but our control is getting better with time. We do not yet know how to make our control systems “good enough,” because we don’t quite know what “good enough” means yet—though here too, we are trying. We are searching.

As these instruments improve, the questions we ask them will have to get harder, smarter, and more detailed. This isn’t to say, necessarily, that we will need to become better “prompt engineers.” Instead, it is to suggest that we will need to become more curious. These new instruments will demand that we formulate better questions, and formulating better questions, often, is at least the seed of formulating better answers.

The input and the output, the prompt and the response, the question and the answer, the keyboard and the music, the photons and the photograph. We push at our instruments, we measure them up, and in their way, they measure us.

Over the past two years of thinking and writing with my instruments, I have learned to express myself with greater precision and range. The software, made by millions, that runs on my trusty laptop, has allowed me to capture my thoughts with greater fidelity, and it has allowed me to expand my thoughts as well.

I love this laptop, but there is nothing special about it. It’s a bare-bones M1 MacBook Air. Other colors in Apple’s product lines have names like “starlight” and “midnight.” This laptop, though, is just “silver.” It’s as basic as it gets. It sometimes strained to keep an ever-growing collection of Arxiv tabs in its measly 8 gigabytes of random-access memory, but fundamentally, it was always a trustworthy instrument. In ten years, I will probably pull this laptop out of the closet, hold it for a while, and smile.

—

I don’t like to think about technology in the abstract. Instead, I prefer to think about instruments like this laptop. I think about all the ways in which this instrument is better than the ones that came before it—faster, more reliable, more precise—and why it has improved. And I think about the ways in which this same laptop has become wildly more capable as new software tools came to be. I wonder at the capabilities I can summon with this keyboard now compared with when I was standing in that socially distanced line at the Apple Store four years ago.

I also think about the young Beethoven, playing around, trying to discover the capabilities of instruments with better keyboards, larger range, stronger frames, and suppler pedals. I think about all the uncoordinated work that had to happen—the collective and yet unplanned cultivation of craftsmanship, expertise, and industrial capacity—to make those pianos. I think about the staggering number of small industrial miracles that underpinned Beethoven’s keyboards, and the incomprehensibly larger number of industrial miracles that underpin the keyboard in front of me today.

Sometimes, I contemplate poor Ludwig sawing the legs off his piano as his deafness worsened so that he could, just maybe, hear a bit more sound with his instrument closer to the floor. I imagine him squatting at the keyboard with a horn to his ear, desperate for just a little signal. Fate robbed him of the faculty he cherished most, but he abandoned neither his instrument nor his art. He continued to push himself, and his keyboard, even when his body failed him, and even when the piano strings broke.

To create is to take a measurement of one’s own mind, a kind of image of one’s thoughts. I admire both the camera makers and the photographers, the instrument builders and the instrument players. I am humbled by their ingenuity and their artistry, by the relentless drive with which they, together, have striven over centuries to render their ideas in higher fidelity, like a photograph getting into focus. I am forever in their debt.

My own photographs became less blurry over the last year, but they can become much sharper yet. I can work harder, and my instruments can improve.

This past weekend, I replaced my MacBook Air with a new laptop. I wonder what it will be possible to do with this tremendous machine in a few years, or in a few weeks. New instruments for expression, and for intellectual exploration, will be built, and I will learn to use nearly all of them with my new laptop’s keyboard. It is now clear that a history-altering amount of cognitive potential will be at my fingertips, and yours, and everyone else’s. Like any technology, these new instruments will be much more useful to some than to others—but they will be useful in some way to almost everyone.

And just like the piano, what we today call “AI” will enable intellectual creations of far greater complexity, scale, and ambition—and greater repercussions, too. Higher dynamic range. I hope that among the instrument builders there will be inveterate craftsmen, and I hope that young Beethovens, practicing a wholly new kind of art, will emerge among the instrument players.

Our new instruments will surprise me in their capabilities and frustrate me in their limitations. I expect to break their strings. I hope to break their strings. Otherwise, I would not be pushing them, or myself, hard enough. For it is by pressing at the limits of our instruments that we discover how they really measure up.

Happy new year, and talk to you next week.

Right image courtesy Bösendorfer.