We consider a weak version of Schindler's remarkable cardinals that may fail to be Σ 2 -reflecting. We show that the Σ 2 -reflecting weakly remarkable cardinals are exactly the remarkable cardinals, and we show that the existence of a non-Σ 2 -reflecting weakly remarkable cardinal has higher consistency strength: it is equiconsistent with the existence of an ω-Erdős cardinal. We give an application involving gVP, the generic Vopěnka principle defined by Bagaria, Gitman, and Schindler. Namely, we show that gVP + "Ord is not ∆ 2 -Mahlo" and gVP(Π 1 ) + "there is no proper class of remarkable cardinals" are both equiconsistent with the existence of a proper class of ω-Erdős cardinals, extending results of Bagaria, Gitman, Hamkins, and Schindler.
Remarkability and weak remarkabilityMany large cardinal properties can be defined in terms of elementary embeddings between set-sized structures. For example, extendibility is defined in terms of elementary embeddings between rank initial segments of V , and supercompactness admits a similar characterization by Magidor [9, Theorem 1]. Any large cardinal property defined in this way can be virtualized by weakening the existence of an elementary embedding to the existence of a generic elementary embedding, meaning an elementary embedding that exists in some generic extension of V (and whose domain and codomain are in V .) The large cardinal properties obtained in this way are known as virtual large cardinal properties (see Gitman and Schindler [6].) The first virtual large cardinals to be studied were the virtually supercompact cardinals, also known as the remarkable cardinals: Definition 1.1 (Schindler 1 ). A cardinal κ is remarkable if for every ordinal λ > κ there is an ordinalλ < κ and a generic elementary embedding j : Vλ → V λ such that j(crit(j)) = κ.We will consider a weak form of remarkability obtained by removing the conditionλ < κ, analogous to the weak form of virtual extendibility defined by Gitman and Hamkins [5, Definition 6]. We work in ZFC unless otherwise stated. Definition 1.2. A cardinal κ is weakly remarkable if for every ordinal λ > κ there is an ordinalλ and a generic elementary embedding j : Vλ → V λ such that j(crit(j)) = κ.