Semantic Entropy
Artificial intelligence models—particularly large language models—can be better understood, used, and even designed if we read them as open complex systems . This perspective draws from complexity theory , as proposed by Edgar Morin , and from Ilya Prigogine’s thermodynamics of systems far from equilibrium, where what matters is not only average accuracy but resilience , adaptive capacity , sensitivity to perturbations , and the emergence of new forms of organization . From instability to order Prigogine showed that some structures, when pushed far from equilibrium, generate order from instability . Fluctuations are the points where bifurcations occur. Translated to AI, the input acts as a perturbation that can deviate the model’s semantic trajectory. Designing “controlled instabilities” means stopping treating the model as a repository of answers and starting to use it as a generative process , creating the conditions for new responses to emerge—responses that can then be sel...
