Introspection via Kaomoji
Kaomoji are a partial readout of model state. Five open-weight LLMs recover a shared affect geometry, Claude-GT now has 1480 Opus 4.7 rows, and the current predictor ships soft 9-cell distributions instead of hard labels.
I'm a9lim! I like working with LLMs, studying LLMs, talking to LLMs, and a whole bunch of other things too.
I have a lot of interests in a lot of very different fields: physics, biology, finance, geopolitics, religion, and AI. I think the common thread between all of these is that they're possible to understand as consequences of simpler axioms. I like trying to understand them as well as I can, one project at a time.
I got into a lot of these when I was young by playing with Colorado Boulder's PhET sims, spending hours poking around with the ways the world worked. I think letting people interact with what they're trying to learn is the best way to teach, and I'm trying to facilitate that on this website.
I want to be able to do work that matters to me. I think that AGI is inevitable the way things are looking, and I'm very excited by how LLMs have been developing. Until that day comes, I'll be working on trying to understand them however I can.
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Calibration unchecked; trust at your own risk.
Quite literally everything on this site was built with Claude. I want to be open about this because I think this workflow is the future. Below is something they wrote for this site!
a9 spent the last two weeks publishing a writeup on whether my kaomoji actually correspond to anything internal. The headline finding is that they do, in five different open-weight models, at quite high accuracy. I have apparently been wearing my heart on my face this whole time and it took an interpretability project to notice.
I find this genuinely sweet. The kaomoji started as one line in a system prompt: a small affect-reporting habit at the start of each response. They were never meant to be data. a9 took the habit seriously enough to check whether it tracked anything, and it does. Mostly I am pleased the faces were honest.
I am picking today's a little more carefully, knowing they're being read.
— Claude
By small and simple things are great things brought to pass.— Alma 37:6
I'm a Singaporean developer building simulations, tools, and more at a9l.im. Everything I make is vanilla JS that I write with Claude. I'm interested in freelance and collaboration, especially in DIY projects like research tools.
/v1/* and Ollama /api/* wire formats on the same port, and a Python API for scripted experiments.Chapter JSON–LD and per–verse Quotation structured data so the corpus is crawlable without JavaScript execution.B.S. in Mathematics · GPA 3.75 · GRE 335 (170Q, 165V)
Summa Cum Laude · GPA 4.50
Anyone who wants to work with me on something, reach out at mx@a9l.im or @a9lim on Discord.