Liminality
The blog post draws a parallel between the plot of Fullmetal Alchemist and the current development of AI, comparing large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, GLM) to homunculi created from a philosopher's stone—itself composed of human souls.
Background
George Hotz (geohot) is a well-known hacker and entrepreneur — he was the first to jailbreak the iPhone, later hacked the PlayStation 3, and founded comma.ai, a company working on self-driving car software. "Liminality" is a blog post drawing an analogy between the anime *Fullmetal Alchemist* and the current state of AI. In the show, alchemists sacrifice human lives to create a Philosopher's Stone, a powerful but morally corrupted object; they then use it to create homunculi — artificial beings that mimic humans but lack true souls. Hotz is comparing LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, GLM) to those homunculi, suggesting they are built from vast amounts of human-generated data ("souls") and appear human-like without being truly alive or conscious. The post reflects a recurring theme in AI critique: that models trained on human output are soulless aggregates, not genuine minds.