So far I’ve had nothing to say about the LLM chatbot frenzy. My understanding of the technology is shallow and I’ve no sense for its functional envelope, and lots of other people have had smart things to say. I hadn’t even conversed with any of the bots. But I fell off the wagon a few days ago and put time into GPT3 and (especially) the new GPT4-based Bing chat. I got off Bing’s waitlist a few days before the recent general availability, so I have more hands-on than most people. Plus I caught up on background reading. So, question: Are LLMs dangerous distractions or are they a glowing harbinger of a bright future? (Spoiler: I’m dubious but uncertain.)
The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot
New research confirms that LLMs often perform better when you encourage them. But why?
Isn't the fundamental problem that LLM's don't actually understand anything (as ... | Hacker News
My 2 month active experience with ChatGPT-4 gave me the following takeaways:
Lincoln Michel on Twitter / X
This was my read on AI from the beginning and it proved very true. Whatever hypothetical benefits LLMs have (and they have some), their main use is to waste everyone's time wading through slop. Longer colleague powerpoints. More spam emails. More slop clogging up all the systems. https://t.co/2gtGfqf7KF— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) September 21, 2026
The AI summer — Benedict Evans
Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we ha
The Bitter Lesson of LLM Extensions
From ChatGPT Plugins to Agent Skills, a look at how we've been trying (and failing) to extend LLMs for the last three years.
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.
A Gentle Intro to Running a Local LLM
Open, small LLMs have gotten good enough that non-technical people can benefit from having a local chatbot on their machine.
Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud
Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds
LLMs Are Still Making Election Deepfakes Just Days Before the US Midterms
The Brennan Center tested AI chatbots to see if they would generate images with false election claims. The results were unsettling, writes Abdiaziz Ahmed.
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
Deaths linked to chatbots
There have been multiple incidents where interaction with a large language model (LLM) chatbot has been cited as a direct or contributing factor in a person's suicide or other fatal outcome. In some cases, legal action was taken against the companies that developed the AI involved.
This Web Tool Sabotages AI Chatbots By Making Them Really, Really Slow
Artist Sam Lavigne created ‘Slow LLM’ to make people question their dependence on tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Or at least, make them super annoying to use.
Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud
Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds.
Texting a Random Stranger Better for Loneliness Than Talking to a Chatbot, Study Shows
A newly published study of how college students interact with chatbots and human strangers showed talking to a random person offers more connection than an LLM.
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past …
