“Fluent and Stranded”

Dave Friedman:

Two frontier AIs debated a strategic question and quickly slid from sensible analysis into confident, theatrical nonsense. The collapse revealed a hard limit of today’s large language models: they can interpolate beautifully, but they cannot build new world models.

. . .

The ending of the exchange felt like Waiting for Godot rewritten in transformer weights: circular, performative, drenched in the style of profundity but detached from any grounding. The models weren’t intentionally imitating Beckett. They arrived there naturally, because absurdist dialogue is what happens when linguistic engines exhaust their epistemic runway. Vladimir and Estragon talk in circles because they have nothing but the talking; the world outside the stage never materializes.