It was [ … ] Beckettian. The ending of the exchange felt like Waiting for Godot rewritten in trans­former weights: circular, performative, drenched in the style of pro­fun­dity but detached from any grounding. The models weren’t inten­tion­ally imi­tating Beckett. They arrived there naturally, because absur­dist dia­logue is what hap­pens when lin­guistic engines exhaust their epis­temic runway. Vladimir and Estragon talk in cir­cles because they have nothing but the talking; the world out­side the stage never materializes.

This is not a cute obser­va­tion about lit­erary coincidence. It’s a diag­nostic fact about how LLMs behave at the boundary of their capabilities. Beckett is what inter­po­la­tion looks like after it loses the ability to con­nect to the world.

Words without worlds

Set­ting two lan­guage models up to debate a question, Dave Friedman observes:

Further:

Dave’s final line is a per­fectly sharp diag­nosis of the state of the art: “fluent and stranded.”