A chilling tweet from Derek Thompson:
...rrently manifested are a deeply anti-social technology[lb]. We need to manifest LLMs in prosocial technology[lc].
Topic: llms
1,749 mentions · 790 chunks · 131 episodes
184.9× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
1.5x burst in 2025 Q1
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- llms appears in 790 chunks across 131 episodes, from 2023-11-06 to 2026-08-03.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 10/20/25 (2025-10-20), with 17 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with ChatGPT, Claude, and Google, while by chunk count it sits between Claude; its yearly rank moved from #2 in 2023 to #1 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
A dystopia in a maximal antisocial LLM world:
...ck in our own hyper personalized bubble only able to talk to others mediated by LLMs, all of which work for one overlord with goals not aligned with yours. It's not possible for it to be aligned with your intentions.
LLMs are great at debunking… but also bunking.
LLMs are great at debunking… but also bunking. So if it has intimate knowledge of you and is not perfectly aligned (an impossibility) you get Goodhart's L...
The open web as we knew it is now a zombie.
...cape of human-generated slop drowning under a grotesque dogpile of ads. But now LLMs put a stake through the heart of it and its soul is well and truly dead. Step 4 is now completely replaced, because LLMs can just generate a high-qua...
I had the opportunity to see a presentation from Tom Costello, one of the authors of the paper that showed that LLMs are great at changing the beliefs of conspiracy theorists.
...resentation from Tom Costello, one of the authors of the paper that showed that LLMs are great at changing the beliefs of conspiracy theorists. Previously everyone assumed that conspiracy theorists were inherently hard to convince. It...
LLMs have the Harry Potter problem that recommender systems have.
LLMs have the Harry Potter problem that recommender systems have. Imagine a recommender system that recommends books given that you liked a specific book....
The book Blindsight seems to have implications for society and LLMs.
The book Blindsight seems to have implications for society and LLMs. I just finished Peter Watt's classic hard sci fi Blindsight, which is a meditation on consciousness and insight. Afterwards, the comparison to LLMs'...
LLM's patience could create magic.
...ay more time on something than any reasonable person would think was worth it." LLMs are infinitely patient. If you let the tokens flow, LLMs could create magic.[lq]
The LLMs are formed by a bottom-up and top-down process.
The LLMs are formed by a bottom-up and top-down process. A bottom-up emergent cultural process of the corpus (summarization of text) A top-down process by the...
People are trying to figure out how to cram LLMs into the current generation of software.
People are trying to figure out how to cram LLMs into the current generation of software. What we need is the next generation of software for the AI era.
AI must have a subscription to be user-aligned.
...Attention is all you need… a neverending force of gravity not just for training LLMs but for business models too.
Three humanity-denying visions for the age of AI:
...troying society's soul for a buck.[mn] 3) Doomerism, pushing back on any use of LLMs. Humans need hope, something to strive for, together.[mo] An optimistic vision for the future: intentional tech. Tech aligned with our intentions, th...
One possible steamroller kind of problem: a lack of apprenticeship in the age of AI.
... called an "informal upgrade network." Senior employees with experience can use LLMs to do the jobs of multiple junior people. These indirect processes are things that might evaporate with LLM and a need for fewer junior employees. Th...
I liked this essay about LLMs are weird computers.
I liked this essay about LLMs are weird computers. Normal programs can't write a sonnet to save its life. LLMs can't give you the same results repeatedly to save its life. Determi...
I like Amp Code's slogan: "Let the tokens flow."
I like Amp Code's slogan: "Let the tokens flow." Maximally using LLMs will require context and tokens. Focus on the users who are living in the future, and make them successful.
Chatbot is a feature, not a paradigm.
... industry we're so distracted by Chatbots. Chatbots are the most obvious use of LLMs, what you'd come up with after thinking for literally 30 seconds. Their obviousness is like a bright light, blinding us to everything else. Chats are...
ChatGPT knows too little about me to be useful.
...information is creepy. Where do I dump my life context in a way that will allow LLMs to work on it? A trusted place just for me, totally aligned with my interest.
The context and the LLM you use should be separate.
...nintentionally. Why might context portability happen now when it didn't before? LLMs are the most intimate technology ever, the stakes have never been higher. The hard part of interoperability is coordinating on schemas, but that prob...
ChatGPT's memory feature refusing to tell you what it knows about you is inherently creepy and lampshades the misaligned incentives.
...gagement-maximizing playbook of Facebook, multiplied by the superhuman power of LLMs. Terrifying!
It's my context, not the model's.
It's my context, not the model's.[nn] I want to be able to bring it to other LLMs, and not have to worry about some company building a dossier on me. I also want to choose what context to include or exclude in a given conversation ...