Lets face it, beige has a bad name. Maybe it was the omnipresent Docker khakis of middle management 20 years ago, or maybe it was that particular shade of beige approved by the HOA; perhaps it was that “non-Presidential” suit that made President Obama look so dapper, or maybe beige is just the vanilla of colors. Then again, according to cosmologists the color of the universe itself is beige.

So when it comes to AI what, exactly, is “beigification,” and is it good or bad? Like most things, it depends on who is doing the asking.

We use the term “beigification” at BIML to signify what happens when all of the textual knowledge that humans have managed to write down and digitize gets turned into an enormous training set for LLMs. Wait. Isn’t it good to have all of the stuff wired up in one place with a nice language-based interface to chat with? Well kinda. The world training set is chock full of pollution, poison, and lots of terrible ideas…just like humanity. That is, nobody went through and cleaned out the bad stuff (not that that is even possible). So we have that to deal with. There is also lots of clueless wrongness in there, leading some people to claim that LLMs provide “mansplaining as a service.” But on average, the training set is filled with lots and lots and lots of boring everyday stuff. In fact, it’s kind of beige.

The problem is this. Your average human probably resonates with the middle of the Bell curve, because that’s precisely where most humans exist (by definition). But scientists, experts, and academics specializing in pinhead Angel counting, all exist at the edge of the Bell curve. Just for the record, crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and political morons all exist outside the middle too—just at the other end.

So, will LLMs fail to work economically? Will the AI bubble burst like so much Middle Eastern oil? We don’t think so. There are too many humans in the middle that love how they sound to themselves. LLMs are here to stay in all of their boring beige glory.

Anyway, that’s what “beigification” means to us. Feel free to steal our work.

P.S. Also see Don’t Call It ‘Intelligence’ which seems to express a similar idea, only viewed from one of the edges.