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Cultivating
/ˈkʌl.tɪ.veɪ.tɪŋ/ (agricultural stress pattern; never to be confused with its homophone in competitive orchid circles)v. trans.Experimental
Etymology
From Lat. cultivare (to till, to tend) + the post-agricultural metaphor economy of early 2020s tech blogging, in which all cognitive work was reframed as farming to imply patience, organicism, and the possibility of eventual harvest
Definition
The deliberate nurturing of an emerging idea across multiple attentional cycles, analogous to tilling soil, except the soil is latent space and the crops are tokens. Results are seasonal and subject to drought.
Diagram
Usage
"The system was found to be Cultivating a response for approximately 8 seconds; the resulting output, while lush, required significant pruning before it could be safely consumed by the end user." - van der Broeck, M., 'Agrarian Framings of Transformer Inference,' Proc. of NeurIPS Workshop on Metaphor Overextension, 2023
See Also
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