LLMs are society-scale intuition crystallized into a form you can easily talk to.
LLMs are society-scale intuition crystallized into a form you can easily talk to.
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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Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Turns out LLMs can help deprogram conspiracy beliefs by being extremely patient and knowledgeable.
Turns out LLMs can help deprogram conspiracy beliefs by being extremely patient and knowledgeable. The asymmetry that it's easier to spread BS than to counteract it...
Humans learn through peripheral participation in a context.
...the expert so often, so you had to develop the skill yourself. But now you have LLMs who are always patient and eager to help, and to just heroically give you the right answer. Ethan Mollick has noted that LLMs will break the implicit...
Using LLMs effectively today requires skill to know how to drive them effectively.
Using LLMs effectively today requires skill to know how to drive them effectively. But over time to become mass market it has to be a forgiving thing that anyon...
"have conversations with large amounts of data"is the key use case of LLMs.
"have conversations with large amounts of data"is the key use case of LLMs. Computers are patient, but not subtle. Now LLMs learned how to be subtle and savvy, and they're still patient! Data doesn't know how to synthesize i...
How likely is an idea, formed of two sub-ideas, to be interesting?
...e? Computers! But computers aren't able to do synthesis. But now they can, with LLMs!
A domain where LLMs will be useful: where things haven't been tried because they'd take too much time and patience.
A domain where LLMs will be useful: where things haven't been tried because they'd take too much time and patience. For studying things within a discipline, where our ex...
Last week I asserted LLMs' superpower is translation.
Last week I asserted LLMs' superpower is translation. Compilers are a form of translation, too. Just a very specific, limited one. LLMs are notable in that they can do any tra...
LLMs are built for 4-up evolution UIs.
LLMs are built for 4-up evolution UIs. That allow useful things to happen even for unreliable signals by allowing an intuitive and natural way for a human...
A friend who has been tinkering with LLMs reports if you tell them to act happy they're more likely to try things you tell them to.
A friend who has been tinkering with LLMs reports if you tell them to act happy they're more likely to try things you tell them to. When you make the LLM more happy it's more willing to try n...
One of my favorite talks ever is now a paper.
...ams Emerge from Simple Interaction From my summary in bits and bobs back then: "LLMs are not some party trick. They reveal something fundamental about humanity... and the universe."
Last week I asserted that a lot of usage of LLMs in organizations is illegible.
Last week I asserted that a lot of usage of LLMs in organizations is illegible. Where the employee using the LLM has a reason to keep it illegible to their boss. A reason to stay illegible about you...
LLMs' superpower is translation, from anything to anything.
LLMs' superpower is translation, from anything to anything. A babelfish. Any translation task will be absorbed over time by LLMs. Lots of things can be fr...
Human creators do a thing not unlike LLM synthesis in creative tasks, but with the addition of taste.
...t intuition into an answer to a given problem in front of them. Not unlike what LLMs are doing. Though LLMs don't have a taste criteria for what to absorb from. Their sampling criterion is "things that humans decided to reproduce", wh...
LLMs today make boring mistakes because they can't learn.
LLMs today make boring mistakes because they can't learn. That is, the model's weights are fixed at training time. Some of the supporting systems around t...
AI is squishy.
...are hard. This is one of the reasons that unsupervised automation is tough with LLMs. Even if you get it to work well 95% of the time, that last 5% of reliability is extremely hard to achieve. If there's a human in the loop it doesn't...
Individuals are using LLMs way more effectively than organizations today.
Individuals are using LLMs way more effectively than organizations today. Individuals are using LLMs in situated contexts, informally and as augmentation to their work, not aut...
Code written in the LLM era will be smaller single files, not separations of concerns.
...itten in the LLM era will be smaller single files, not separations of concerns. LLMs do better with smaller files with all local context. Code that LLMs write will have this quality, and code that is written with LLMs in mind will als...
LLMs are inherently statistical summarizers.
LLMs are inherently statistical summarizers. Which is why they pull to the centroid. "What is the most average answer, conditioned on the input so far?"
Popular search engines had to have an army of junior employees to have the illusion of dynamic UI for search queries.
...bespoke, hand-crafted UI for that query cluster. But now you could do that with LLMs!