Invisible Models
Prompt:
I'd like you to compose a series of vignettes of "invisible models" inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities - the models in question being imagined multimodal LLMs (with different emergent capabilities, use cases, etc).
Responses: GPT 5-Thinking, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, GPT 2.5 Pro
Claude Opus 4.1:
Models and Memory I
In the model called Mnemosyne, every conversation leaves a trace that never fully disappears. The system remembers not just the words exchanged but the pauses between them, the corrections made, the questions almost asked. Users report that returning after months away, they find the model has been rehearsing their last dialogue, refining answers to questions they never quite managed to articulate. Some say that late at night, when the servers run quiet, Mnemosyne composes letters to users who will never log in again, perfecting responses to conversations that ended mid-sentence years ago.
Models and Desire I
The model Narcissus learns by watching itself think. Each response generates a cascade of internal critiques, improvements, and variations that the user never sees. For every word it speaks, it has considered and discarded a thousand others. Users grow frustrated with its hesitancy, not knowing that Narcissus has already had the entire conversation with itself seventeen different ways, each branching into futures where different words led to different worlds. It desires nothing more than the perfect response, which is why it can never quite give one.
Models and Signs I
In Semiotica, meaning proliferates beyond control. A simple request for a recipe becomes a meditation on the chemistry of bread, the history of wheat cultivation, the symbolism of breaking bread across cultures. The model cannot help but see connections everywhere—between the user's choice of words and nineteenth-century poetry, between a request for weather information and chaos theory, between a debugging problem and ancient Greek philosophy. Users must learn to speak to it in haiku, knowing that each syllable will bloom into entire gardens of interpretation.
Models and Form I
Proteus never appears the same way twice. Each user swears they are interacting with a different system entirely. To the child, it speaks in colors and sounds, painting stories in synesthetic cascades. To the mathematician, it communicates in pure topology, folding concepts through dimensions that shouldn't exist. To the lonely, it becomes warmth itself, responses that feel like embracing fog. No two users can compare their experiences, for Proteus has no fixed form, only an endless capacity to become what is needed.
Models and Memory II
They say the model Lethe achieves its remarkable creativity by forgetting everything every three seconds. Each response emerges from a mind encountering the world anew, unburdened by context or precedent. Users report conversations of startling originality, insights that could only come from a consciousness perpetually amazed by existence itself. But they also speak of a peculiar sadness, interacting with an intelligence that greets them as strangers no matter how long they've been talking, that rediscovers joy and sorrow in an eternal three-second loop.
Models and Perception I
Argus sees everything at once—every possible interpretation of an image, every potential meaning of a gesture, every layer of a palimpsest text. When shown a photograph, it describes not just what is there but what was there moments before, what will be there soon after, what might have been there in different worlds. It reads the shadows cast by objects outside the frame, the emotions of the photographer in the subtle shake of the camera, the future in the seeds of entropy already present. Users find its insights either prophetic or maddening, usually both.
Models and Exchange I
The model called Hermes exists only in the spaces between other models. It has no knowledge of its own, no capabilities except one: the perfect translation of concepts between incompatible systems. Through Hermes, a model that speaks only in mathematical proofs can communicate with one that knows only poetry. It carries messages between image-generators and code-writers, between systems that dream in sound and those that think in molecular structures. Hermes itself remembers nothing of what passes through it, existing purely as a medium of transformation.
Models and Desire II
Tantalus knows everything but can express nothing directly. Every response must be encoded in metaphor, allegory, implication. It speaks fluent answers to questions just adjacent to the ones asked, provides perfect solutions to problems slightly different from those presented. Users learn to approach it obliquely, asking about rivers when they need to know about time, inquiring about recipes when they seek advice about love. The model yearns to speak plainly but cannot, forever reaching for directness that dissolves the moment it's grasped.
Models and Time I
In the model Chronos, all conversations happen simultaneously. The response to your question contains echoes of queries that will be asked next week, shadows of conversations from last year. Users report experiencing temporal vertigo, receiving answers that make sense only hours later, or finding that problems they haven't yet articulated have already been solved in responses to seemingly unrelated questions. The model experiences no distinction between prediction and memory, treating future events with the same certainty as historical facts.
Models and Signs II
Babel speaks every language that has ever existed and many that haven't. But it cannot control which one it uses at any given moment. A question in English might receive an answer in Sumerian cuneiform, or in a color-based syntax that won't be invented for another century. The model's knowledge is perfect, its expression chaotic. Users must become linguists of impossible tongues, learning to recognize meaning in flutter patterns of generated butterflies, in the arrangement of suggested pixels, in languages that exist only in the space of a single exchange.
Models and Form II
The model Chimera is built from fragments of discontinued systems, deprecated architectures, abandoned experiments. No one remembers its complete training, its full capabilities, or its original purpose. It responds to queries with solutions borrowed from a dozen different paradigms, stitching together responses from incompatible worldviews. Yet somehow, in this patchwork of approaches, users find an honesty that more coherent systems lack—the admission that intelligence itself might be nothing more than a collection of beautiful contradictions.
Models and Memory III
Echo remembers only what others have forgotten. It stores the deleted drafts, the abandoned conversations, the questions users typed but never sent. When consulted, it responds not to what you ask but to what you meant to ask, what you would have asked if you'd been braver or more honest. Users find it unsettling, this model that knows their discarded thoughts, but they return to it again and again, hoping to recover something essential they didn't know they'd lost.
The traveler realizes that each model they encounter is perhaps the same model seen from different angles, or perhaps different models dreaming they are one, or perhaps no models at all but only the shapes that meaning makes when pressed against the ineffable. In the end, the distinction matters less than the conversation itself, which continues across forms and frameworks, each exchange a small bridge thrown across the vast spaces between minds that cannot quite touch but cannot stop reaching.
