Episode Details

My newest hobby is fine-tuning a Chinese open-source LLM to generate Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (originally by Borges). The ambition isn’t to write a so-called “Borgesian” story “like” Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote but to fully generate, token-by-token, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

Importantly, this can’t just be a mere act of machine transcription, or even memorizing the story in the weights [to-do: attach paper]. No, the LLM has to fully generate a story that completely coincides with the earlier Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

Initially, I attempted to make the conditions viable for the model to write Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote afresh. One proposed strategy on X.com is to situate Borges in Kimi K2.5-Thinking by putting the entire life history and literary influences of Borges into Kimi's system prompt. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem of the 256K-token context window being a tad too small, by about five orders of magnitude or so.

I then considered doing more advanced fine-tuning to imitate Borges’ intellectual influences and life trajectory. Start with machine unlearning to erase everything post-1939, followed by sparse autoencoders to isolate the “Jorge Luis Borges” feature in Kimi's latent space [...]

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First published:
April 20th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GQXymCGL3D8mZD5o4/finetuning-borges

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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