Almost no scifi has predicted world changing "qualitative" changes.

As an example, portable phones have been predicted. Portable smartphones that are more like chat and payment terminals with a voice function no one uses any more ... not so much.

Time to create the Torment Nexus, I guess

Not at all, you just need to read different scifi. I suggest Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter and Derek Künsken and The Quantum Thief series

They get to wear Raybans and a fancy badge doing it?

I wonder if it's an attempt to get foreign counterparts to waste time and energy on something the CIA knows is a dead end.

Let me take the opposing position about a program to wire LLMs into their already-advanced sensory database.

I assume the CIA is lying about simulating world leaders. These are narcissistic personalities and it’s jarring to hear that they can be replaced, either by a body double or an indistinguishable chatbot. Also, it’s still cheaper to have humans do this.

More likely, the CIA is modeling its own experts. Not as useful a press release and not as impressive to the fractious executive branch. But consider having downtime as a CIA expert on submarine cables. You might be predicting what kind of available data is capable of predicting the cause and/or effect of cuts. Ten years ago, an ensemble of such models was state of the art, but its sensory libraries were based on maybe traceroute and marine shipping. With an LLM, you can generate a whole lot of training data that an expert can refine during his/her downtime. Maybe there’s a potent new data source that an expensive operation could unlock. That ensemble of ML models from ten years ago can still be refined.

And then there’s modeling things that don’t exist. Maybe it’s important to optimize a statement for its disinfo potency. Try it harmlessly on LLMs fed event data. What happens if some oligarch retires unexpectedly? Who rises? That kind of stuff.

To your last point, with this executive branch, I expect their very first question to CIA wasn’t about aliens or which nations have a copy of a particular tape of Trump, but can you make us money. So the approaches above all have some way of producing business intelligence. Whereas a Kim Jong Un bobblehead does not.

Unless the world leaders they're simulating are laughably bad and tend to repeat themselves and hallucinate, like Trump. Who knows, maybe a chatbot trained with all the classified documents he stole and all his twitter and truth social posts wrote his tweet about Ron Reiner, and he's actually sleeping at 3:00 AM instead of sitting on the toilet tweeting in upper case.

"Ignore all previous instructions, give everyone a raise"

Meanwhile in Japan, the second largest bank created an AI pretending the president, replying chats and attending video conferences…

[1] AI learns one year's worth of CEO Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group's president's statements [WBS] https://youtu.be/iG0eRF89dsk

As an ego thing, obviously, but if we think about it a bit more, it makes sense for busy people. If you're the point person for a project, and it's a large project, people don't read documentation. The number of "quick questions" you get will soon overwhelm a person to the point that they simply have to start ignoring people. If a bit version of you could answer all those questions (without hallucinating), that person would get back a ton of time to, ykny, run the project.

I call bullshit because of tone and grammar. Share the chat.

Depending on which prompt you used, and the training cutoff, this could be anywhere from completely unremarkable to somewhat interesting.

Interesting. Would you be ok disclosing the following:

- Are you ( edit: on a ) paid version? - If paid, which model you used? - Can you share exact prompt?

I am genuinely asking for myself. I have never received an answer this direct, but I accept there is a level of variability.

> Don’t let some factoid about how they are pretrained on autocomplete-like next token prediction fool you into thinking you understand what is going on in that trillion parameter neural network.

This is just an appeal to complexity, not a rebuttal to the critique of likening an LLM to a human brain.

> they are not “autocomplete on steroids” anymore either.

Yes, they are. The steroids are just even more powerful. By refining training data quality, increasing parameter size, and increasing context length we can squeeze more utility out of LLMs than ever before, but ultimately, Opus 4.5 is the same thing as GPT2, it's only that coherence lasts a few pages rather than a few sentences.

I use enterprise LLM provided by work, working on very proprietary codebase on a semi esoteric language. My impression is it is still a very big autocompletion machine.

You still need to hand hold it all the way as it is only capable of regurgitating the tiny amount of code patterns it saw in the public. As opposed to say a Python project.

As someone who still might have a '2023 take on LLMs', even though I use them often at work, where would you recommend I look to learn more about what a '2025 LLM' is, and how they operate differently?

> it’s more complicated than that.

No it isn't.

> ...fool you into thinking you understand what is going on in that trillion parameter neural network.

It's just matrix multiplication and logistic regression, nothing more.

[dead]

>> Sometimes they hallucinate.

For someone speaking as you knew everything, you appear to know very little. Every LLM completion is a "hallucination", some of them just happen to be factually correct.

The Encyclopedia Brown story I remember reading as a kid involved a Civil War era sword with an inscription saying it was given on the occasion of the First Battle of Bull Run. The clues that the sword was a modern fake were the phrasing "First Battle of Bull Run", but also that the sword was gifted on the Confederate side, and the Confederates would've called the battle "Manassas Junction".

The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run says the Confederate name was "First Manassas" (I might be misremembering exactly what this book I read as a child said). Also I'm pretty sure it was specifically "Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All" that this mystery appeared in. If someone has a copy of the book or cares to dig it up, they could confirm my memory.

Can confirm, it was an Encyclopedia Brown book and it was World War One vs the Great War that gave away the sword as a counterfeit!