The LLM Psychologist

Andrej Karpathy mentioned the term LLM psychologist first in Feb 2023. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, now.

I’ve always been fascinated by psychologists in fiction. I grew up with Hari Seldon in Foundation, wanting to be a psycho-historian. (I spent several teenage years building my mind-reading abilities.) I wanted to be Susan Calvin, the only robopsychologist.

Instead, I became an engineer and a manager.

Over the last few months, several things changed. Most of my time is spent researching LLMs.

I also have a new job.

So, on Fri 9 Aug, I spoke to our head of HR.

“Manju, I’ve decided to officially designated myself as LLM Psychologist.”

“Um,… sure Anand, whatever works for you.”

On Sat 10 Aug, I delivered a TEDx talk at MDI Gurgaon. During the talk, I said,

So, as of now, I am finally an LLM Psychologist. Let me head over to my LinkedIn profile and update my designation. There. Now, you have the pleasure of talking to the world’s only (and first) LLM Psychologist!

Obviously, that gimmick drew an applause and that’s what it was designed for.

But there it is. To the best of my knowledge, I’m now the only official LLM psychologist in the world – and very likely the first official one.

As Oscar Wilde said 🙂

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

---

Links:

• Code for the talk
• Slides for the talk
• Annotated transcript of the talk