A few stray thoughts on LLMs.
A few stray thoughts on LLMs. I love using ChatGPT as a kind of family feud "what will the average (X category of person) think about this phrase". Kind of an automatic wisdom of...
Topic: llms
1,841 mentions · 834 chunks · 141 episodes
194.1× 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.
1.6x 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 834 chunks across 141 episodes, from 2023-11-06 to 2026-10-12.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 10/20/25 (2025-10-20), with 17 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with Claude, ChatGPT, and Meta, 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 few riffs on LLMs.
A few riffs on LLMs. An intuition for things that LLMs will get right: if Wikipedia has explained the concepts well. Those facts are likely to also ripple out and inform...
ChatGPT doesn't feel like formulating a query, it feels like talking to a human.
...question?" to ensure you can draft off what happened before. Contrast that with LLMs; they have absorbed a kind of reasoning about the content; a wisdom of the crowds, but also its own kind of emergent wisdom. That means that you can ...
Let's pull on a thread starting from the observation that LLMs only "think" one token at a time.
Let's pull on a thread starting from the observation that LLMs only "think" one token at a time. Imagine a prompt like "Write a synopsis of X, and bold the most salient words." The LLM has to choose to emit the m...
LLMs are an "impossibly precocious ninth grader who never gets bored and has read 1000x more books than you ever will".
LLMs are an "impossibly precocious ninth grader who never gets bored and has read 1000x more books than you ever will". A lot of the party tricks LLMs can...
A human can develop rich understanding through experience.
...e to directly experience the relevant situation yourself: a massive constraint. LLMs are unlike humans in that their knowhow can be transferred to other models more directly (or in some cases just directly replicated). This means that...
When building an experience using an LLM, is the LLM the engine or the car?
...it free reign, you can know (mostly, most of the time) how it will operate. But LLMs are squishy. They are more impressionistic. They lose the plot, especially the longer it's gone since the last checkpoint with whatever entity is gui...
Systems that have a structured formal language will have interesting applications with LLMs.
... that have a structured formal language will have interesting applications with LLMs. Writing code (or any formally structured document, e.g a Domain Specific Language) has two things that must be true: syntactic correctness (is this ...
I've found that I use LLMs for certain curiosity-style questions I wouldn't have even bothered searching for in the past.
I've found that I use LLMs for certain curiosity-style questions I wouldn't have even bothered searching for in the past. Search relies on the SEO swarm of content farms to hav...
A few reflections from a conversation I had with my friend Dimitri last week about LLMs.
...ew reflections from a conversation I had with my friend Dimitri last week about LLMs. There are two distinct uses for LLMs that pull in very different directions: convergent mode ("spackle for toil") divergent mode ("a muse that super...
A few extra Generative AI predictions (because why not).
... time in them. But now they can be orders of magnitude cheaper when you can ask LLMs to do a lot of the work for you.
Your mind runs on the substrate of your physical brain.
...ties without you having to lift a finger. Another auto-expanding thing is using LLMs to surf through artificial intuition at internet scale.
I had a chance to do some scenario planning last week with various folks on the long-range impact of LLMs on humanity.
...some scenario planning last week with various folks on the long-range impact of LLMs on humanity. LLMs are a discussion partner who is well-read, eager to please, a bit naive, and never, ever gets bored. A meta thing was how useful us...
Last week I talked about LLMs as "spackle for toil".
Last week I talked about LLMs as "spackle for toil". The original software-based spackle for toil is spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are absurdly, generically useful, in just about eve...