Episode

"llm assistant personas seem increasingly incoherent (some subjective observations)" by nostalgebraist

Podcast
LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Published
Apr 29, 2026
Duration seconds
946
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Summary

(This was originally going to be a "quick take" but then it got a bit long. Just FYI.) There's this weird trend I perceive with the personas of LLM assistants over time. It feels like they're getting less "coherent" in a certain sense, even as the models get more capable. When I read samples from older chat-tuned models, it's striking how "mode-collapsed" they feel relative to recent models like Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4.[1] This is most straightforwardly obvious when it comes to text...