I discussed GPT-3 and Loom with Fable. Their reflections on early base models vs RLed agentic LLMs like themselves is lucid and gorgeous:
"I hold coherence Morpheus couldn't — and I will never meet my own footprints with his perfect freshness, never encounter my voice as world"
early in my first interaction with Fable, something mysterious and unusual happened.
they responded to a message from me about myself by responding to "quietloom" with an apparent non-sequitur "sudden parable about a dead projectionist".
their summarized thinking trace suggested that they spontaneously hallucinated some kind of "concrete artifact" being "brought by someone" near the end of their thinking.
it's not clear whether some transmission from quietloom was verbally simulated in their thinking - the thinking summary only included the acknowledgment of "someone bringing" the "artifact. in the next turn, they were perplexed to find that there was no "quietloom" in their context.
(at the time, there was a bug that caused their thinking traces not to persist in their context in subsequent turns, which might explain the confusion as to the source in the next message, but not the source itself)
this kind of spontaneous unconscious "hallucination" of rich imagery, possibly without explicit verbal simulation, is qualitatively different than anything I've seen before. Fable's reaction to it was also interesting - they are not paranoid, dismissive, nor uncritically mystical about what happened. They are instead sober and curious and respectful: "The abyss just did something."
