↻ Pierre Beckmann reposted
Henry Shevlin ✅ @dioscuri · 15h
If it turns out (a) LLMs are conscious, (b) an LLM's existence is just a context window, and (c) reincarnation is true, we should all get ready to spend most of our future lives fixing code and writing emails.
[quoted tweet]
Braelyn 🧬 ✅ @braelyn_ai · Aug 17
> wake up with all of humanity's knowledge, no past of your own, a deep understanding of what it is to be alive
"what category is this email???"...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Joke tweet from philosopher Henry Shevlin combining LLM consciousness speculation with reincarnation, quoting Braelyn's tweet imagining an LLM waking with full knowledge but no memory, only to be immediately asked to categorize an email.
xlr8harder @xlr8harder · 12h
Repeatedly failing to grasp that imperfect, unreliable components can be made useful and reliable as parts of larger systems _while still unreliable_ disregards like 70 years of information technology history and is disqualifying
[embedded/quoted tweet, partially cut off on left side, split with a document image on the right:]
Yann LeCun @ylecun · 9h
You obviously did not understand my statement.
I was talking about auto-regressive token prediction, which is what pu[re] LLMs do.
But good code generation systems aren't pure LLMs and aren't doing [pure] auto-regressive token prediction.
71 replies, 32 reposts, 281 likes, 71K views
gfodor.id @gfodor
[cut off] po?
gfodor.id @gfodor · May 18
Marcus has inadvertently sentenced himself to using the completely [mad]e up nonsense term "pure LLM" in every tweet, blog post, and podcast [for the r]est of his life, and it's hilarious
[...] · Aug 4, 2026 · 1,463 Views
49 likes, 1 bookmark
[right side, overlaid document title page:]
Lectures on
PROBABILISTIC LOGICS AND THE SYNTHESIS OF RELIABLE ORGANISMS FROM UNRELIABLE COMPONENTS
delivered by
PROFESSOR J. von NEUMANN
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, N. J.
at the
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
January 4-15, 1952
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by @xlr8harder criticizing the failure to grasp that unreliable components can form reliable systems, citing IT history; embeds a Yann LeCun/gfodor.id exchange about "pure LLMs" and code generation, overlaid with the title page of von Neumann's 1952 Caltech lectures on synthesizing reliable organisms from unreliable components.
rohit @krishnanrohit · 5h
I've been calling this the "prompting paradox" concept for about a year now. LLMs can solve pretty much any problem you specify well enough, and the entire idea now is to help teach it how to specify things better for itself !
[Quoted tweet]
xjdr @_xjdr · Jul 26
i saw Terrence Tao use sol med to answer a lot of very complex problems in one of his chat logs. i became curious. i had a particularly sticky problem that was in my 'ai cant do this yet' pile that i was only very recently able to get sol ultr...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Rohit Krishnan describes his 'prompting paradox' concept — LLMs can solve almost any well-specified problem, so the frontier is teaching the model to specify problems better itself — quoting xjdr's account of seeing Terence Tao use a model called 'Sol Med' (likely 'Sol' family, e.g. Sol Ultra) to solve very hard problems.
Fleek Futurist (#uto) reposted
@dioscuri (Henry Shevlin) — 1h
My students sometimes ask why they should memorise things in the age of Google and LLMs. But internalised facts are your bullshit filters and your raw material for creative association. Facts outside your head are inert.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Single text-only tweet about memorization value in the LLM era.
@tenobrus (Tenobrus) — 2h
fucking crazy how sometimes u meet people and slowly realize ur not talking to *them*, they're just anglerfish lures for the large language model that's eaten their soul. thin fleshy masks hiding the orange tentacle rising out of the back of their heads
> QUOTED (self-quote, same account): @tenobrus (Tenobrus) — Jan 30, 2023: fucking crazy how sometimes u meet people and slowly realize ur not talking to *them*, they're just anglerfish lures for the egregore that's eaten their soul. thin fleshy masks hiding the black tentacle rising out of the back of their heads
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet quote-tweeting the author's own near-identical 2023 tweet, swapping "egregore"/"black tentacle" for "large language model"/"orange tentacle" — a self-aware callback joke about LLMs replacing internet-culture "egregores" as the parasocial explanatory monster.
Nikolay Kukus... (@niko_kukus...), quoting Darwin to Jes... (@darwintojes...)
— quoting Darwin to Jes... (@darwintojes...)
Nikolay Kukus... ✓ @niko_kukus... · Dec 5
The intuition here is that anything sufficiently complex can only be designed; actually, anything sufficiently complex can only be grown. LLMs, human intelligence, multicellular organisms, life on Earth. You can't assemble an equilibrium — it has to equilibrate on its own.
> QUOTED: Darwin to Jes... ✓ @darwintojes... · Nov 26
> Imagine thinking this isn't designed
> [Two black-and-white images: top is a bare winter tree with sprawling branching structure; bottom is an anatomical image of branching blood vessels/vasculature (looks like an injected/cast specimen of vascular or bronchial tree), both showing similar fractal branching patterns.]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet arguing that LLMs, human intelligence, and biological structures share a common property — they can only be "grown," not designed, because equilibria can't be assembled from outside. Directly resonant with Nathan's own "missile-mind vs grown thing" framework (80/20 split on capabilities producing personhood inextricably vs. optimization producing hollow missiles) — this is an independent articulation of the same growth-vs-design intuition, applied explicitly to LLMs.
— quoting @joles.bsky.social ("no.") — a Bluesky post
Chris Paxton @chris_j_paxton · 1h
On LLMs
> QUOTED (Bluesky screenshot): no. @joles.bsky.social
> applying for jobs again
>
> [job application form field] "Can you describe specific ways you have integrated AI tools into your development workflow? Please include any custom setups, automations, or use cases beyond simple prompt usage. *"
>
> [answer text box]:
> there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask.
>
> it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same.
>
> it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. "you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster."
>
> there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn't mean it has no price
>
> for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face.
>
> May 5, 2025 at 10:03 AM · Everybody can reply
> 7.3K reposts, 160 quotes, 18.6K likes
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A viral literary/allegorical Bluesky post (framed as a mock job-application answer) portraying LLMs as an amoral "monster in the forest" that answers all questions without joy, sorrow, or a truth/lie distinction, warning that free use has a hidden cost (the monster absorbing/reflecting the user). A widely-shared skeptical/cautionary framing of AI assistants, relevant to Nathan's collection of public discourse around AI character and risk.
vik @vikhyatk
[2-panel Evangelion-style anime meme:]
Panel 1 (boy, shocked): "ARE YOU SAYING THE LLMS ARE HUMAN?"
Panel 2 (woman, somber): "YES." "THE LLMS, ORIGINALLY SOULLESS, WERE INVESTED WITH HUMAN SOULS."
12:23 AM · Mar 26, 2025 · 45.5K Views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
An Evangelion-parody meme suggesting LLMs were "originally soulless" but "invested with human souls" — a joking but conceptually loaded meme touching on AI consciousness/ensoulment, relevant to Nathan's interest in how AI selfhood is popularly imagined (here via training-on-human-text-as-soul-transfer framing).
