Insights & perspectives

The word sycophancy has circulated in AI research for several years. It appears in papers, in model evaluations and in technical documentation from the major AI companies, and over the past year it has stepped into the broader conversation about how language models affect us. The word sounds specialised, like a property only researchers can measure and only engineers can fix.

I have helped people start using AI. Over the years I have carried the knowledge of language models forward, shown what they can do, opened the door, made them useful in everyday life. Part of what I set in motion is now unfolding into something else.