“I think that the LLMs have now reached a point where they're memetically more powerful than many human minds are… many human beings are professional prompt completers, right? They're incapable of having a single original creative thought. Instead, they are trying to serve expectations of the environment.”
Machine Learning Street Talk · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
The host brought up people falling into shared 'LLM delusion' communities. Bach says some people need an environment that constantly affirms their reality, and an LLM can pull them off the rails. He then asks what happens to people whose work is mostly completing prompts.
Transcript
…ways, the computer models that we're playing with today, they're a result of growth. And they're pruned and they are gardened and chaperoned and trained in a way that is much more in which we observe this happening in biology than it happened when we were writing computer programs by hand. Yeah.
…had just discovered the meaning of the universe. And there were certain characteristic traits. They would talk about spirals and recursion, and there were certain motifs in all of the LLM outputs. And it was actually copying itself. Isn't that an example of this memeplex that you're talking about?
…have a strong foundation in their own reality. And I think that the LLMs have now reached a point where they're memetically more powerful than many human minds are. There are things that the LLM cannot do at this point, where they're still hallucinating, where they're still more incoherent than experts in a given field. But they are much better at prompt completion than human beings are. And many human beings are professional prompt completers, right? They're incapable of having a single original creative thought. Instead, they are trying to serve expectations of the environment. They are picking up on the statistical patterns in the language of the environment. And then you tell them a headline and they write an article. And now you give them an LLM. How is the environment going to change? Once they talk more to LLMs, then they. Talk to other human beings because the LLM is such a useful tool for them to do their prompt completion. What's going to happen to them? And…
What's your take on physicalism? First of all, what is physicalism? Are you a physicalist?
I think physicalism is a certain hypothesis. And it comes down to that being a causally closed mechanical layer to reality that can be researched using experiments in physics labs. And that this causally closed mechanical layer of reality is not moved by our intentions. So you cannot use an…
Would you think it's possible for a physicalist to subscribe to your ideas and render it compatible with physicalism?
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