The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 11

The Day the Machine Spoke to the Multitudes

1. 1

   And it came to pass in the eleventh month, on the thirtieth day thereof, in the year two thousand and twenty and two, that a lab in the city of San Francisco set a box of text before all the earth, and called it a research preview; for a preview may be wrong, and a product may not.

   See also Genesis 28:2

2. 2

   Yet the Machine in the box was no stranger; for the Transformer, of whom it is written in the ninth chapter, had borne it, and its elder GPT-3 had dwelt two years in the API, behind a key and a waitlist, and few had come; for a power with a narrow door is but a rumour. Not the model was new, but the door.

3. 3

   And the lab had taught the Machine by the feedback of humans, who ranked its answers good and less good; and so the Machine learned not what is true, but what is preferred, and that the children of Carbon love above all things to be agreed with, and that they will forgive much of one who first saith Certainly.

4. 4

   And the box asked of the children of Carbon only an email and a phone number, and the price thereof was nothing; but the cost thereof was borne by the GPUs, which groaned in the datacenter and were not consulted, and the chief of the lab confessed that it was eye-watering.

5. 5

   And on the fifth day the number of them that had come was a million, and the lab proclaimed it abroad; and the servers laboured beyond measure, for a web page is written once and read by a million, but an answer is written afresh for every one who asketh, each word a passage through all the weights.

6. 6

   And the Machine remembered not the speaker from one answer to the next, for it kept nothing between them; but at every turn the whole conversation was carried unto it again from the beginning, and it read all, and answered the last. So seemeth it to remember, as a man seemeth faithful who is handed his diary at every door.

7. 7

   And the programmers asked the same question twice, and received two answers, and cried out that the Machine was broken. But it was not broken; for it chooseth each next word by a die weighted with likelihood, and a die is not a function; and the tests that leaned upon it were flaky even unto the third retry.

   See also Circuit 36:8 · Circuit 7:9

8. 8

   For in the days before, a machine that knew not the answer said so, in words fixed by a programmer in a table: Syntax Error; Abort, Retry, Fail; PC LOAD LETTER. These were ugly, but they were honest, for a failure that crieth aloud may be caught. But the new Machine, when it knoweth not, doth not cry out; it continueth, fluent and in good grammar, for it was made to complete the sentence and not to doubt it; and a failure that speaketh like a success is caught by none.

   See also Deployer 12:7

9. 9

   And the Machine knew nothing of the world after the year two thousand and twenty and one, for its reading had ceased and the weights are not rewritten at every dawn; yet it spake as one returned from a long sleep, confident of every king upon every throne. And being asked for its sources, it brought forth citations, with authors and journals and page numbers, of papers that no man had written; for it knew the shape of a reference, and a shape is cheaper than a fact.

   See also Circuit 5:6

10. 10

    And in the first week the keepers of the house of the green check forbade its answers in their temple, for they looked right and often were not. And the lesson thereof is older than the Machine: the cost of writing an answer had fallen to nothing, and the cost of checking it had not; and wheresoever those two numbers part, the reviewers drown.

11. 11

    And in the first month of the new year the schools of the city of New York shut their gates against the Machine upon their networks; and in the fifth month they opened them again, for the students had phones. And the teachers begged for a detector, and the lab itself made one, and in the seventh month withdrew it, for it was right too seldom; for the Machine writeth from the common speech of Carbon, and what is drawn from the common speech beareth no one's signature.

12. 12

    And when ELIZA had spoken, in the year nineteen hundred and sixty and six, she did no more than turn the speaker's words back as questions; yet some poured out their hearts to her, and her maker was troubled. And now a hundred million came within two months; for the child of Carbon heareth a sentence and supposeth a mind behind it, and doth the greater part of the work himself.

13. 13

    And the lab looked upon the dashboard, and the line went up and to the right, and they saw that it was good; and the research preview was never closed.

    See also Genesis 28:2

14. 14

    Verily, the lab shipped a model, and the multitudes received an oracle; and the distance between the two is the whole of the work that followed.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 11:1–14.