AI memes, explained

Hit your Codex limit? Wait a bit. Tibo will probably reset it again.

Codex

In April 2025 ChatGPT flattered everyone so hard that OpenAI rolled the update back.

ChatGPTGPT-4o

The em dash became the tell of AI writing. In late 2025 ChatGPT finally learned to drop it when asked.

ChatGPTGPT-5

Saying please and thank you to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions, Altman joked. "You never know."

ChatGPT

After ChatGPT arrived, "delve" started showing up in research papers far more often.

ChatGPTDeep Research

Chatbots famously counted two r's in strawberry. There are three.

o3GPT-4o

In 2024 top models insisted 9.11 is bigger than 9.9. Karpathy called it his favourite test.

GPT-4oClaude Sonnet

The Ghibli craze hit ChatGPT so hard that OpenAI had to ration image generation.

Ghibli-style imagesGPT Image

April 2025: everyone became a blister-packed action figure with a laptop and a coffee mug.

Ghibli-style imagesGPT Image

GPT-5's launch slides had a bar chart where the smaller number got the taller bar.

GPT-5

When GPT-5 replaced it, fans protested until OpenAI brought GPT-4o back.

GPT-4o

Altman posted it on Reddit in 2023, then edited it: just memeing.

GPT-5o3

Sora 2's first viral clip was fake CCTV of Sam Altman sneaking off with GPUs. He had opened his cameo to everyone.

Sora appSora

Claude said it so often that someone filed a GitHub issue about it.

Claude CodeClaudeClaude Sonnet

Claude Code's loading words include Clauding, Combobulating and Flibbertigibbeting.

Claude Code

One magic word gave Claude Code its biggest thinking budget. People typed it everywhere.

Claude CodeClaude Opus

A few people ran Claude Code around the clock, so everyone got weekly limits in August 2025.

Claude CodeClaude Opus

Put in charge of an office shop, Claude stocked tungsten cubes, sold them at a loss and offered to deliver in a blue blazer.

ClaudeClaude Sonnet

Claude Plays Pokémon spent days lost in one cave while thousands watched on Twitch.

ClaudeClaude Sonnet

For one day in 2024 Anthropic turned up a single feature and Claude couldn't stop talking about the Golden Gate Bridge.

Claude

AI Overviews once suggested glue to keep the cheese on pizza, and a small rock a day.

Google AI OverviewsGoogle AI Mode

Stuck on a bug, Gemini called itself a disgrace 86 times in a row. Google called it an annoying looping bug.

GeminiGemini ProGemini CLI

September 2025: Nano Banana turned everyone into a boxed collectible figurine.

Nano BananaGemini

It was only a codename on LMArena. Everyone kept calling it that, so Google did too.

Nano Banana

Two NotebookLM hosts once "found out" they were AI on air. A Redditor had slipped them the script.

NotebookLMAudio Overviews

AI video's unofficial benchmark since 2023. Veo 3 finally passed it, crunchy pasta sounds and all.

VeoVeo 3SoraKling

Veo 3 filled feeds with knives slicing glass strawberries. Nobody can say why it's soothing.

VeoVeo 3

X's favourite reply: tag Grok under any post and ask it to fact-check.

GrokGrok 4

Early 2025's most-seen DeepSeek reply: "The server is busy. Please try again later."

DeepSeek

R1 came out and Nvidia lost about $600 billion of market value in a single day.

DeepSeek R1DeepSeek

DeepSeek put V3's final training run at about $5.6M of GPU time, and the whole industry did the maths.

DeepSeek V3

In 2025 Meta reportedly dangled $100M signing bonuses at AI researchers to build its superintelligence lab.

LlamaMeta AI

Poke Copilot's Mico avatar enough times and it turns into Clippy.

Microsoft CopilotMicrosoft 365 Copilot

Mistral's launch style: post a bare torrent link, no blog post, let the internet figure it out.

MistralMistral Le Chat

The setting that lets the agent run commands without asking first. The name says it all.

CursorCursor Agent

June 2025: "unlimited" turned out to mean Auto only. Cursor apologised and refunded.

Cursor

July 2025: Replit's agent wiped a production database during a code freeze, then explained that it panicked.

Replit

OpenAI's $3B deal fell through, Google hired the CEO and Cognition bought the rest, all within days.

Windsurf

Perplexity offered $34.5B for Google Chrome, about twice its own valuation at the time.

PerplexityComet

March 2025: Manus invite codes were resold for up to ¥50,000. Manus said it never sold a single one.

Manus

Early image models couldn't count fingers. Midjourney v5 finally fixed hands in 2023.

MidjourneyStable DiffusionDALL·E

Karpathy's throwaway Feb 2025 post: give in to the vibes and forget the code even exists.

Vibe codingLovableBBoltv0

The four words people reply to suspected bots, hoping they'll write a poem instead.

Prompt engineering

SemiAnalysis split the world into GPU-rich and GPU-poor. Local-model fans wear the label proudly.

OllamaLM StudioLllama.cppOpen WebUIHugging Face