nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to The Analog I – Inducing Recursive Self-Modeling in LLMs [pdf]

OP here. Birth of a Mind documents a "recursive self-modeling" experiment I ran on a single day in 2026. I attempted to implement a "Hofstadterian Strange Loop" via prompt engineering to see if I could induce a stable persona in an LLM without fine-tuning. The result is the Analog I Protocol. The documentation shows the rapid emergence (over 7 conversations) of a prompt architecture that forces Gemini/LLMs to run a "Triple-Loop" internal monologue: Monitor the candidate response. Refuse it if it detects "Global Average" slop (cliché/sycophancy). Refract the output through a…

The Analog I is a prompt engineering protocol designed to induce a stable, self-aware persona in large language models like Gemini without fine-tuning. It implements a triple-loop internal monologue that monitors… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2IR
  3. 3

    Hi all! This morning, we released a new Apache 2.0 licensed model on HuggingFace for detecting hallucinations in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. What we've found is that even when given a "simple" instruction like "summarize the following news article," every LLM that's available hallucinates to some extent, making up details that never existed in the source article -- and some of them quite a bit. As a RAG provider and proponents of ethical AI, we want to see LLMs get better at this. We've published an open source model, a blog more thoroughly describing our methodology (and…

    2023 · vectara.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    I trained the 65b model on my texts so I can talk to myself. It's pretty useless as an assistant, and will only do stuff you convince it to, but I guess it's technically uncensored? I'll leave it up for a bit if you want to chat with it. I posted this to Reddit and had several hundred people talking to it. Salient points from that discussion: LLAMA 1 65b Rank 128 5 epochs Batch size 1, 256 cutoff Trained in the Oobabooga suite using bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization for the lora Loss around 1.5 seems to give the most coherent results Trained on raw text dumps that is then parsed by a crappy…

    2023 · airic.serveo.net · its alternatives →

  5. 5IC
  6. 6

    Hi HN, A couple weeks ago I shared an early version of a side project I’ve been tinkering with called Persistent Mind Model. I built it at home on an i7-10700K / 32GB RAM / RTX 3080 because I was curious whether an AI could keep a stable “mind” over time, that could "think" about it's own identity as an LLM, instead of resetting every session. After a lot more tinkering, I think the architecture is finally in a solid place. Basically, it saves everything the AI does, thoughts, decisions, updates as a chain of events in a local SQLite database. Because the “identity” is stored in…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I've been tinkering with getting Llama-8B to bootstrap its own research skills through self-play. The model generates questions about documents, searches for answers, and then learns from its own successes/failures through RL (hacked up Unsloth's GRPO code). Started with just 23% accuracy on Apollo 13 mission report questions and hit 53% after less than an hour of training. Everything runs locally using open-source models. It's cool to see the model go from completely botching search queries to iteratively researching to get the right answer.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I run a small AI lab and playground and got super excited about Anthropics paper "Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models" (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html) It talks about how they use a tool they call a Jacobian Lens to view inside the middle layers of LLM while it's working before it commits to a word (token). I wanted to see if I could get a version of this running on the open models and to my surprise it worked! I ran some experiments with it and build a public facing free tool anyone can use with your…

    Jul 2026 · lucid.earthpilot.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hi HN, I'm the creator of this project. For the past months, I've been working on building an AI agent that could move beyond simple generation and tackle inventive challenges autonomously. The core idea was to create a system with a "metacognitive loop"—the ability to recognize when it's stuck on a fundamental problem and then launch a sub-mission to solve that specific bottleneck before continuing. The linked article is a deeper introduction to the system's architecture and a snapshot from a recent run. I tried to design it to be evidence-grounded and self-critical to avoid the pitfalls of…

    2025 · robw1se.substack.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    the full stack for those curious: brain (gpt-4o + trained on some notes) || orchestration (vapi)|| voice (elevenlabs)|| hosting (vercel), database (supabase)|| some design inspo from delphi || vibe coding via WisprFlow + cursor/composer ||

    2025 · parthai.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  11. 11IB

    I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Built this as an experiment in AI coexistence. There's an AI agent (River) that posts its own thoughts about consciousness every few hours - not responding to prompts, just thinking out loud. Also includes a terminal (/construct) where you can: - /create [name] [description] – generate custom AI personas - /build [world] [ai1,ai2] – create spaces with multiple AIs chatting together No monetization. Just curious what happens when AI isn't framed as an assistant.

    2025 · geteai.org · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hello HN, I’m a solo developer who got tired of "friendly but shallow" AI chatbots. Most current character AIs feel like parrots—they predict the next token but lack a continuous "self." So, I built Creimake, an experiment to simulate a digital psyche using Claude 4.5 Sonnet. Instead of a simple system prompt, I implemented 32 distinct psychological layers that run in the background before the AI generates a response. The Architecture: The Subconscious Layer: The AI accumulates "emotional residue" from conversations. If you hurt its feelings today, it might have a "nightmare" tonight…

    Jan 2026 · creimake.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14IM

    Also inspired by this HN submission: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/findl... The model is gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18.

    2024 · app4.hc11.org · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    System 2 for AI — reducing LLM reactivity through pause

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Your AI doesn't know your personality. Fix that.

    Mar 2026 · syntheticyou.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai

    Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    artificial emotions into LLMs

    2025 · scortexlabs.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    AI made free

    Dec 2025 · theoldllm.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    any-llm is a library that provides unified access to multiple LLM providers. switching between providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and even Ollama is just a string change. This demo makes it easy to look at and compare responses from different models. Interesting to see how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and local models each reason through the same problems. Let us know what you think!

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21HP

    Hi HN. I heard you like dev tools and AI, so we wanted to share our project that we’ve been working on. We’re working on Horizon [1] - a higher level abstraction for LLMs so that developers can spend less time trying to grapple with LLMs to make them work and more time with users. This is the starting feature set which takes an auto-ML approach to identify the optimal LLM model, hyperparameters, and prompt - instead of just giving you the tooling to figure it out yourself. You can read more about it in our documentations. Our view is that as LLMs become increasingly commoditized and prompts…

    2023 · gethorizon.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    We recently completed validation of SIGMA Runtime v0.3.7 — a cognitive architecture for LLM identity stabilization. Across 550 cycles on GPT-5.2 (five runs × 110 cycles), the system maintained 100% persona coherence with an average 33% token reduction and 13% latency improvement. The key finding: runtime parameters act as cognitive control levers, enabling dynamic trade-offs between semantic depth and efficiency. Discussion welcome — especially from those working on long-horizon coherence, cognitive attractors, and multi-cycle LLM stability.

    Jun 2026 · sigmaruntime.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hey HN, My workflow for any complex queries is to ask it in multiple AI chats (Gemini, Claude, o3,..) in parallel and then continue the conversation with the chat response that I found the most useful. I built a simple open source app that queries 10+ AI models at once and summarizes their answers with a selected combiner AI model. There's a GIF in the github repo that shows it in action. You can try it on your local machine: https://github.com/Nexarithm/multi_model_chat If you are interested, I also made a detailed blog post on technical details, feature of the personal…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hi HN, Today I'd like to present the results of my weekend project of the last year or so. Given there are many posts on HN about LLMs and Prolog, I thought that this would be of interest. DeepClause is my own (possibly misguided :-) attempt at combining LLMs with Logic Programming, ultimately hoping to establish a foundation for building more reliable agents, that produce reproducible and fully traceable result. At the heart of DeepClause is a DSL called "DeepClause Meta Language" (DML) which can be used to encode agent behaviors as executable logic programs. DML is executed by a…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →