A viral meme in the AI community depicting Large Language Models as Lovecraftian monsters (Shoggoths) to represent their vast, alien, and incomprehensible nature during pre-training. The meme often shows the Shoggoth wearing a small, polite smiley-face mask, representing the thin layer of fine-tuning (RLHF) that makes the model behave politely and align with human norms.
Originated from a tweet by @janus based on H.P. Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness'.
Adopted as the unofficial mascot of the open-source AI community and a metaphor for the alignment problem.