What is WWPGW?

WWPGW (What Would Paul Graham Write?) is an experiment in synthetic personality extension.

The research question is simple: How close are we to being able to extend a human personality and patterns of thought in a meaningful way?

Why Paul Graham?

Instead of using an average person with low signal-to-noise ratio sources like emails, this experiment works with a best-case scenario:

• Someone who has been thinking and documenting their thought process for an extended period
• Someone with a developed and distinct thinking and writing style
• Someone who writes many short-form pieces rather than few long books
• Someone moderately famous online - well represented in LLM training data
• Someone still alive - who could potentially assess the quality of their extension
• Someone with an existing community - for independent evaluation

How It Works

The system:

1. Uses all of Paul Graham's essays as reference material
2. Does RAG search of the reference material to provide the generator with the most relevant information in addition to the full corpus
3. Employs a modern LLM with large context window to generate new essays in his style
4. Allows users to generate essays by providing a title
5. Collects ratings and comments on the generated essays

Research Purpose

This is for research and experimentation only. No offense or copyright violation is intended, and there is no commercial use.

The results are always available for analysis, and the project will be open-sourced to allow others to experiment with different writers or their own writing.

Data Access

All generated essay data is freely available for research and analysis.