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Comment by akoboldfrying | Hacker News Reader

Even LLMs from years ago could accurately mimic the style of any sufficiently famous author.

LLMs from years ago weren't aligned to death like these days. It's hard to get rid of "AI smell" than years ago.

Yeah and it's degraded significantly since then. Older llms were still mostly language focused and had a lot of latent knowledge about things like writing styles. Now it's crowded out in favor of agenetic work, programming etc.

No, the latent knowledge is larger than ever, as verified by many benchmarks (and instances like people being shocked by truesight of obscure forum posters). This is 100% a chatbot personality/alignment/post-training thing.

> truesight of obscure forum posters

What does this mean?

Stylometry on steroids: https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/stylometry/truesight/index

Truesight is a spell in D&D that allows you to see the true being behind an illusion or other deception.

It's almost like a claudeism

Gwern, who posted that comment, is one of the early popularisers of the term. Janus used it in at least 2023, and Gwern in at least early 2024.

If anything, you probably have the causation backwards: Claude talks like a LessWrong poster.

I’m surprised no one has distilled a 4o model yet that’s really good at prose. No money from enterprise users I suppose.

At best it can use some of the same vocabulary. Often not even then.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to get these models back? I really like the older ones for NPC dialogue for TTRPG campaigns and the like.

I just looked into it and I think I can still find GPT 3.5, but wonder if it too has been trained out of usefulness.

The characters a styles were quirky and not always perfect, but added a lot more flavor and character nuance that could be corrected with editing.

I have no experience with style imitation, so perhaps I'm missing something here. I asked Kimi K3 to rewrite your comment in the style of Ernest Hemingway:

> I would like to get the old models back. If anyone can show me the way, I would be grateful. I liked them for NPC dialogue, for TTRPG campaigns and the like.

> I looked into it. GPT 3.5 is still around, I think. But perhaps they have trained it out of usefulness. It is difficult to say.

> They were quirky, the old ones, and not always perfect. But they had flavor, and their characters had nuance, and what they got wrong you could fix in the editing.

Full conversation with thinking: https://paste.ononoki.org/?2fc049fe1ae7302b#GjzuEn8VmaYJ565M... Password: kimitest

This is really neat, but if you'll notice, it just kept the same words and rewrote it a few different ways. I guess what I'm actually thinking of it's when the model temperatures weren't quite dialed in and you would get some wonky stuff that was genuinely useful for character exposition and giving a particular character a "voice".

How token efficient is kimi? How much do you average each month for example?

You can pay Microsoft they were exclusive host of GPT models.

The base models were really good at this. These days even the "base" models are full of awful synthetic data.

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