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Notes -
This was a genuinely gripping read, and I am once again updating my understanding of the SOTA upwards. That being said, I can't see a bunch of humanities-aligned Oxford dons being too impressed with it on its own merits - the rhetorical bombast feels a bit too on the nose, like prose written by a strong student who on some level is still marvelling at himself for being able to write so well and can't quite hide being proud about it. This impression is amplified by the occasional malapropism* (ex.: the use of "profound" in the second paragraph) which seems to be a problem that LLMs still struggle with whenever trying to write in a high register (probably because the training corpus is awash with it, and neither the operators nor their best RLHF cattle actually have the uniformly high level of language skill that would be necessary to beat the tendency out of them with consistency).
Do you know how Gemini generated the essay exactly? Is it actually still a single straight-line forward pass as it was when chat assistants first became a thing (this would put it deeper in the "scary alien intelligence" class), or does it perform some CoT/planning, possibly hidden?
*In self-demonstrating irony, "malapropism" is not quite the right word for this, but I can't think of a word that fits exactly! Rather than actually taking into account what exactly, in this context, wishing for the advisor to become foolish is more of than wishing for the advisee to drop dead, it feels like just picking, from among all vaguely positive choices of A in "not X, but something more A", the one that is most common (even if it happens to just denote the nonsensical "deep").
These days with the thinking models the model first thinks about what to write (generating some thinking tokens) and then does a forward pass with the thinking tokens as context.
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