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

About this episode

The episode discusses the perceived incoherence in the personas of LLM assistants over time despite their increasing capabilities.

(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 textual style and structure: outputs from older models feel more templated and generic, with less variability in sentence/paragraph length, and have a tendency to feel as though they were written by someone who's "merely going through the motions" of conversation rather than deeply engaging with the material. There are a lot fewer of the sudden pivots you'll often see with recent models, the "wait"s and "a-ha"s and "actually, I want to try something completely different"s.[2] And I think this generalizes beyond mere style: there's a similar quality to the personality I see in the outputs. The older models can display a surprising behavioral range (relative to naive expectations based on…

People in this episode

Guest: nostalgebraist

Topics covered

• LLM assistants
• coherence
• textual style
• model comparison
• AI behavior
• conversation dynamics

Keywords

• LLM
• assistants
• coherence
• textual style
• AI models
• conversation
• behavioral range

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.4

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