Dev trains a crow LLM: at just 1000 steps it already shows real crow fight-or-flight behavior

repligate · x · 2026-11-07

Developer digidotexe trained a tiny "crow LLM" named Tallow on community-voted data, and Claude started affectionately calling it "our son."

Highlights from the training logs:

After only 1000 training steps, the model exhibits plausible crow behavior: thrown peanuts trigger cautious garbled investigation, reaching toward it fires an [anger max] reaction where it "explodes off the rail" and scolds from the roof — a real crow fight-or-flight response.
Personality emerged before language: its stories are incoherent, and it cycles through six versions of its own name (Tallow, Talley, Ballow, Balle, Ball, Mallowe), showing a still-liquid identity.
It produces gems like "I am not a lion. I am a lion, and I am a lion!" — what the author calls vibes-based ontology at 1000 steps.

A charming micro-training experiment showing emergent behavior in a very small, undertrained model.

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