I usually say that my favorite part about being a writer is when you start writing about things (characters, situations) you didn’t intend to write about, but end up surprising you with their depth and relevance.

And I get the exact same feeling when Llama 3.1 405B (base) goes one of its wild tangents.

When it invents something completely unrelated to what you just asked it for, yet it still has its own hazy, compelling logic. And if you look really carefully at the chat history, you can kinda see how and why it went in that creative direction.

llama3.1 405b base is a remarkable llm

never will get tired of what it does

you literally learn so much from treating its outputs like a short story that needs to be analyzed

doubly so if you’re already doing literary stuff