Writing is More Valuable in the Age of LLMs

Previously:

• The World is More Important if it's a Simulation
• Vim is more useful in the age of LLMs

Writing is more valuable than ever.

The arguments for the opposite are obvious:

• A new incredibly prolific writer has entered the scene. It's futile to compete.
• No one reads anymore. If your blog answers a question they'll ask an LLM instead of Google.

But there is also a new reader in town. And it's going to read more than every human in history put together. Back when pretraining was being scaled up the new value of writing was obvious: you've got to escape the permanent not in the weights underclass. Fable is the first model to know who I am without web search so I'm safe there.

In the new RL world the argument is a little different. It's no longer the case that the LLMs can only get ideas from training on existing ideas as they have contact with reality in their agent harnesses. Maybe they don't need your ideas. But they can now read your writing at inference time! If your goal is to spread ideas and steer the future, the scope of influence you can hope to have as a niche internet writer is only increasing. Write your llms.txt now.

It's a vertiginous moment as the population of thinking, reading entities in the world explodes. It's easy to feel small and irrelevant. But the larger the world the more consequential your actions are in an absolute sense if not a relative sense. Remember we are just at the beginning of infinity. Thanks for reading.