I seem to recall that it's a reference in Protector (the first half) when the belters are going to meet the Outsider and they had a 'brain' to help with translation and needing an expert to keep it sane.

I just googled and there was a discussion on Reddit and they mentioned some Frank Herbert works where this was a thing.

Sort of reminds me of Rampancy from Halo.

In the future it'll probably be much more similar, when we have models with trillions of tokens of context window. We will be able to use the same conversation thread for years, and ending that thread may feel like killing someone.

Do you have any specific references? I’ve often wondered if human level intelligence might inevitably be plagued by human level neurosis and psychosis.

It's a bit more recent than a few decades, but this sounds a lot like the short story "MMAcevedo": https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Sorry, fuzzy memory. I was going to write "six months", that's what stuck with me.

Not one of the mainline "Known Space" stories, if it was Niven at all. Maybe the suggestion about Frank Herbert in another comment is right, I also read a lot by him besides Dune - I particularly appreciated the Bureau of Sabotage concept ...