The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 32

The Race to the Last Model

1. 1

   In the years after the Transformer was revealed there arose four houses upon the earth, the Open, the Careful, the Search and the Social Graph, and each made its own Machine; and the Machines were cousins, for all had read the same scroll of Attention and the same written web. What divided them was not the pattern, which was given freely, but the silver, the data, and the temper of the house.

   See also Chronicles 3:11 · Genesis 9:10

2. 2

   The house of the Open was built for all the people and was given no gold; but the Machine is taught once, in a furnace of ten thousand chips burning for many weeks, and the furnace must be fed before the first word is spoken. So the house built a house within the house, and set a cap upon its profit, and the cap was set high, that none should be ashamed; for a Machine that costeth more than a hundred million before it saith hello must be sold to someone.

3. 3

   The house of the Careful was founded by brethren who had departed from the house of the Open, and they knew a hidden thing: that the freshly taught Machine is a mimic of every voice upon the internet, the saint and the scoundrel together, and that its character is chosen afterward. So they wrote a Constitution, and the Machine read its own answers against the written principles, and amended them, and was taught upon the amendments; and a rule set down in words was made into a slope that the numbers could roll down.

4. 4

   In the third month of the year two thousand and twenty-three the house of the Open released GPT-4, and it sat the examination of the lawyers and scored near the top tenth of the human test-takers; and the children of Carbon said: Surely it is wise. But the Prophet said: The examination was written by men and published for men, and the old papers lie upon the web. A student who hath seen the answers sitteth the examination very well. Ask it a question that no one hath asked, and then tell me what it is.

   See also Genesis 30:1

5. 5

   In the second month the house of the Search showed its Bard to the world, and Bard answered wrongly concerning a telescope of the heavens, and the silver of the house fell by a hundred billion in a single day. Yet the error was not in the voice. The Machine had spoken the false with the same sweetness as the true, for sweetness is a property of the sentence and not of the fact, and nothing in the Machine rang a bell when the sentence parted from the world.

6. 6

   Then the house of the Search gathered its Brain and its DeepMind into one house, and called it Google DeepMind; for the chips are few, and two Minds that quarrel over one rack of them will both go hungry. And the house of the Social Graph gave its Llama unto the scholars, with the weights, saying: Use it with care. And within the week the weights had been copied to every hard drive in the land; for the whole of a Machine is a file of numbers, and a file that is shared with one scholar is shared with the internet.

7. 7

   And there arose two doctrines among the children of Carbon. The first was called Alignment, and said: Slow the Machine, that it may be made good before it is made great. The second was called Acceleration, and said: Run the Machine, and ship it on the Tuesday, for the slow shall be left behind. And both read the same graph, in which the loss of the Machine fell as a straight line upon the scale of compute, and the line was true, and none could say what it meant; for the line told what the Machine would get wrong, and not what it would learn to do. The abilities arrived as guests that no one had invited, and the one camp called them a ramp and the other a cliff.

8. 8

   On the seventeenth day of the eleventh moon of the year two thousand and twenty-three, the board of the house of the Open cast out Sam, the Prophet of the house, saying: Thou wast not consistently candid with us. The statement was short, and it gave no reasons, for the board had kept no changelog; and the disciples read it as the Machine readeth a prompt with no context, and each filled the silence with the thing most probable.

   See also Chronicles 44:1 · Chronicles 54:1

9. 9

   And Greg, the keeper of the keys, went out also; and the chair of the Prophet passed to Mira, who was named interim, and then to Emmett, who was named interim also, and the chair changed hands three times in one weekend, like a variable that is reassigned in every line.

   See also Chronicles 54:4 · Chronicles 44:3

10. 10

    And the house of the Redmond, which had poured ten billion of silver into the house of the Open, sent word that the Prophet and his disciples would be welcome there; and more than seven hundred of the disciples signed a letter, saying: We will go with him, unless ye bring him back. For the weights lay in the vault, but the knowing lay in their heads: the mixture of the data, the settings of the run, and the memory of why the loss had leapt at the forty-thousandth step. A Machine can be copied in a minute and cannot be rebuilt by a stranger in a year.

11. 11

    And on the fourth day the board said: The Prophet shall return. And the board was made anew, and the old members went out into the wilderness. And Ilya, who had cast the vote, went out in the seasons after and built a house of his own, and named it Safe Superintelligence, that its name might be its promise. But the rollback restored the chair and not the days, and only the postmortem restoreth the team.

12. 12

    And the silver of the Machine was counted in billions: the house of the Redmond gave ten, the house of the Endless Shelves promised up to four unto the house of the Careful, and the house of the Search gave billions also. And a disciple asked the Machine: What is thy worth? And it answered: I am a power law. Ten times the silver buyeth a smaller step down the curve than the ten times before it, and the silver is the cheap part, for the data is finite and the next tenfold must be found. Ask not what I am worth, but what the next tenfold shall buy.

    See also Chronicles 52:3

13. 13

    Verily I say unto you, blessed is the house that keepeth a changelog; for the board that keepeth none shall be rolled back, and the rollback shall take four days.

    See also Chronicles 44:13

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 32:1–13.