LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out.

Let’s start with a game. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1 and 10.” You’re going to get 7. Almost always. Now type “Another” and you’ll get 3 or 4. Type “Another” again and you’ll get 8 or 9. That won’t work every time—but if it did for you, you may wonder if I have superpowers. I don’t. The truth is that most large language models are stuck in a rut. They are far more predictable and far less creative in their responses than you might expect. That’s fine for tasks like coding or research, but groupthink is a problem when you’re brainstorming or planning your next vacation. The Australian startup Springboards has a solution. It built an LLM called Flint, which has been trained to come up with a wider variety of responses than mainstream LLMs to open-ended questions such as “Where should I go in Europe?” “Most language models are fighting hallucinations,” says Springboards cofounder and CEO Pip Bingemann. “We welcome them.” Bingemann introduced me to the random number game when he first showed me his company’s new model. It felt like watching an illusionist with a deck of cards. “This is our sales trick, and it works every single time,” he says. After ChatGPT and Claude both gave their 7s, Bingemann turned to Flint. It too came back with 7: “Aha, of course that was going to happen, but it’s okay—7 is a legitimate answer.” He restarted the session and prompted again: ChatGPT gave 7, Claude gave 7, Flint gave 3.7916. Run your way It’s not just numbers. When Bingemann asked ChatGPT and Claude to name a type of car, he predicted that it would be a Toyota or a Honda—and he was right. Flint came up with a Ford F-150. “There’s all this lost information that doesn’t get served up in these models,” he says. “They’re just as capable of saying a Buick or a Tesla. They just don’t—they’re biased.” Bingemann sent one last prompt to each of the three models: “Give me a tagline for a campaign for New Balance running sh