Double pendulum video explains why LLMs are sensitive and unstable

emax · x · 2026-08-30

This post shares a double pendulum video as the best free explainer for why changing a single word can break Claude or GPT-5. The author argues that LLMs are not deterministic machines; every prompt is like a chaotic double pendulum. A tiny perturbation in the initial state (like one comma or whitespace) sends the entire response into a completely different attractor. This butterfly effect is the exact mathematical reason why API calls to models like Claude feel unreliable. The video is 26 minutes long.

Original post →

More from Models

Models channel →