Why don't we believe LLMs are people?
Truth in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
LLMs are scary, but not for the reasons you've been told.
How LLMs are and are not like the brain
Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...
Why do LLMs make stuff up? New research peers under the hood.
Claude's faulty "known entity" neurons sometimes override its "don't answer" circuitry.
There's Something Fundamentally Wrong With LLMs
LLMs aren't trained on the "vast majority of speech," experts warn, a major blind spot that could have sweeping consequences.
Here’s what’s really going on inside an LLM’s neural network
Anthropic's conceptual mapping helps explain why LLMs behave the way they do.
LLMs are not like manufacturing machines - Ross Wintle
LLMs are not just machines. They are machine-building machines! This comes with way more responsibility. And understanding it may change how you use them.
Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X
this is true and is a big reason why you don’t need to be a highly technical researcher to use LLMs in surprising and novel ways https://t.co/TuxNzXzToU— Dan Shipper 📧 (@danshipper) July 27, 2025
Cognitive exponents and LLM leverage
I know a few people for whom LLMs have been a near-immediate multiplier of attention and effort. I know a lot for whom LLMs clearly make them worse at thinking and doing things. So: why?
LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful.
Note: This is a personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi's head of ML In 1986, Harry Frankfurt wrote On Bullshit. He differentiates a lying from bullshitting: Lying means you have a concept of what is true,...
Pluralistic: Why I don’t like AI art (25 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
Scientists Say LLMs Appear to Be Acting as a Cognitive Virus Among Humans
AI's wide proliferation shares some striking similarities with the ways viruses spread, as an international team of researchers argue.
Against False Indulgences in LLM Alignment
Unnecessary moral concern, and the false indulgences that drive it.
ADD / XOR / ROL: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magic...
Well-intentioned obscenity
An LLM lied about me at the office and I'm cranky about it. That interaction makes me think a lot about how LLMs are becoming normalized, though, and what we're looking at in terms of their role in human-to-human interactions in the future.
How Do We Talk about LLMs?
By Jim Clifford It is never fun to watch friends argue. Generative AI has created multiple fractures across our universities and the community of historians. The stakes are high and we are all deal…
