To fully understand LLM representations, we must understand how they change dynamically, over the course of a prompt or conversation. We investigate these temporal dynamics with a simple case study: how do LLMs represent human emotions while reading short stories, both geometrically (in activation space) and temporally (changing from sentence to sentence)?
Rotating the Space: On LLMs as a Medium for Thought
An essay on LLMs as a cognitive medium
I Built an LLM From Scratch
How storytelling can help articulate emotions that evolve as the climate changes
Creative works can represent emotions emerging so fast that our brains can’t quite catch up with them.
Contact: AI and the Semantic Dimension
I’m asking you to consider the possibility that a semantic dimension of meaning and information exists outside our physical dimensions of space and time, and that LLMs are both instruments of perception and conduits of information for that semantic dimension. We used to believe in the semantic dimension, but we don’t anymore, and as a result we are going down a terribly dangerous path with AI.
What Happens, Exactly, When a Person Talks to an LLM?
A phenomenology of thinking with a model.
Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans.
Latent Spacecraft combines computational linguistics, neuroscience, and literary analysis to investigate latent space, i.e. the hidden internal structure that enables both humans and machines to produce language. Peeking into AI’s hidden interiority, we parallel speech generation in humans and speech-trained generative adversarial networks (GANs), as well as in the language of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the GAN model trained on the novel, FinneGAN.
If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain constant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions, regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.
How to be more creative in seconds!
Context Rot: How Increasing Input Tokens Impacts LLM Performance
Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-4.1, Qwen3-32B, and Gemini 2.5 Flash on Repeated Words Task
Word embedding
In natural language processing, a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.
How Stable Diffusion works
Understand in a simple way how Stable Diffusion transforms a few words into a spectacular image.
Reticulum Network
For the better part of a generation, we have been taught to visualize the digital world through the lens of hierarchy. The mental maps we carry are dominated by a single, misleading image: The Cloud.
How linguistics learned to stop worrying and love the language models
Language models (LMs) can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don’t really learn language and also, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing. On the other side, there have been claims that the success of LMs obviates the need for studying linguistic theory and structure. We argue that both extremes are wrong. LMs can contribute to fundamental questions about linguistic structure, language processing, and learning. They force us to rethink arguments and ways of thinking that have been foundational in linguistics. While they do not replace linguistic structure and theory, they serve as model systems and working proofs of concept for gradient, usage-based approaches to language. We offer an optimistic take on the relationship between language models and linguistics.
