Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.
It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!
The 2022 edition isn’t so much about LLMs as about image generation with stable diffusion, but the underlying techniques are still foundational enough to be generally useful. YMMV, but for me building things from scratch, even if results don‘t reach SOTA, is the single most effective way to learn what‘s really going on.