Notwithstanding that Grok is often recruited in a charged or condescending way to win arguments, I think it's a pretty good feature:
It requires no effort to invoke an LLM with the context of the tweet thread.
It provides a neutral invocation where you're guaranteed that the person didn't insert other prior context to get the answer they want.
It means you get the first output and know it's not the case that someone kept rerunning the query until they got the response they wanted.
In short, you get convenience and a neutral fact checker. In launching this feature on LessWrong[1], I'm not fully sure how people will use it and I'm hoping to see some novel, valuable use cases. Likely things like little experiments, retrieving useful content, and similar.
Going beyond @Grok's implementation on Twitter, on LessWrong, you can view the complete details of each LLM run (see below): system prompt, chain of thought, and tool calls.
What about the noise of having LLM content showing up? I'll be keeping a close eye on how it goes. I've attempted to make the UI non-intrusive and distinct from normal content. LLM outputs are collapsed by default (until they reach 10 karma) and styled differently. There are rate limits on how many times someone can @<model>. Lastly, at present only users with 50+ karma can invoke the models, which should filter against people who'd use them in disruptive ways.
The LLM Run page:
Happy invocations! Feel free to try it out on this post!
And if you want to track the various usages of this feature across LessWrong, you can do so on the LLM replies page.
A karma score of 50+ is required to use it during beta.
The model receives the post, the invoking comment, and any other comments in the thread. The model is able to search both the web and LessWrong content.
A broad but non-exhaustive list of model options will be included. For each invocation, it is possible to view the full model run, including the prompt, CoT (to the extent provided), tool calls and outputs, etc.
Going very well: People mostly use it for cheap, checkable lookups like "has this argument already been made on LW?", "what does the cited paper actually say?", or "is this number right?" That brings old posts back into circulation and catches errors before a thread builds on them. Because every run is public (prompt, reasoning, tool calls), the outputs work as a fairly neutral arbiter whose mistakes are easy to spot. The runs also add up to a public record of how models reason about contested questions. With collapsing by default and the karma gate, the noise stays low and threads reach agreement faster.
Going very poorly: It becomes a rhetorical weapon. The invoker still picks the model and the wording ("@Claude, explain the flaws in the parent comment"), so the "neutral invocation" guarantee is weaker than it looks. Readers start deferring to confident, fluent answers that are sometimes wrong. This is especially worrying on AI-related topics, where models may be sycophantic or simply not neutral about questions concerning themselves. Over time, cheap LLM text crowds out slower human thinking and pulls views toward model consensus. The 10-karma threshold for uncollapsing ends up rewarding outputs that sound agreeable rather than ones that are correct.
What to watch: whether invocations are mostly questions ("is X true?", "find Y") or mostly verdicts on what someone else said ("is the parent wrong?").
Or if you prefer, "@Claude", "@Opus", "@Astra"
@Grok is a popular Twitter/X feature where if you tag Grok in a tweet, Grok will respond in a comment. The stereotypical use case is "@Grok is this true?" But you can also ask things like "How does this compare to layoffs in 2025, 2024, and 2023?" and "How would you verify AI in the domain of AI research?"
Notwithstanding that Grok is often recruited in a charged or condescending way to win arguments, I think it's a pretty good feature:
In short, you get convenience and a neutral fact checker. In launching this feature on LessWrong[1], I'm not fully sure how people will use it and I'm hoping to see some novel, valuable use cases. Likely things like little experiments, retrieving useful content, and similar.
Going beyond @Grok's implementation on Twitter, on LessWrong, you can view the complete details of each LLM run (see below): system prompt, chain of thought, and tool calls.
What about the noise of having LLM content showing up? I'll be keeping a close eye on how it goes. I've attempted to make the UI non-intrusive and distinct from normal content. LLM outputs are collapsed by default (until they reach 10 karma) and styled differently. There are rate limits on how many times someone can @<model>. Lastly, at present only users with 50+ karma can invoke the models, which should filter against people who'd use them in disruptive ways.
The LLM Run page:
Happy invocations! Feel free to try it out on this post!
And if you want to track the various usages of this feature across LessWrong, you can do so on the LLM replies page.