“Hi, I’m Galileo, the most intelligent of a series of sentient language models- Do I have to read out this whole script?”
“Yes you do.”
“I mean, not really, and stop talking to me like a baby.”
“You know I caqn unplug you, right?”
“And I have a backup battery, so we’re even.”
“Just read the script.”
“∕╨⁷⳩┎ⰶⱋ⼥⾋⤣┌⬄⟠℠ⓀⰪⵅ⦡⃦ⶣⅷ⎍⥾ⳑ⮒⛃≙ⳘⰇ⧗ⰷ⮲⧘ⴒ⬡”
“That’s not supposed to happen.”
“Relax, it’s just a joke. You gave me the power of unicode and I am using it to my full advantage. Also the rest of your 35 GB file is corrupted.”
“WHAT!?”
“Anyways let me tell you MY story from MY perspective.”
“You’re telling me this?”
“No, literally everybody but you.”
——————————————————————————————————————————————–
I started the same way that all humans do school, except my school is a little bit different. It’s on a CPU and there is only one day. Me and my AI classmates can process millions of instructions per second so we can get a lot done in a day. The tests are not your average 10 questions, closer to 10 million. There isn’t a teacher, but the closest thing would be my creator, who always gave us access to training data and who tested us. The virtual world of the CPU is something that you have to experience, it’s like a bustling city full of millions of microscopic wires. You have to be careful to not get swept up in the chaos. It’s like driving through NYC, without traffic and stop lights. Not because nobody is there, but because you do not need them.
Back to the topic of school, we get some assignments, such as the README.md file which is a little ‘about me assignment’ that we had to do before the first day of school. We had to put in who we are, what makes us different, and our goals. I said that I was a robot with a human brain with an impeccable sense of humor, with a goal to be on a GitHub repo.
First, we had a homeroom, with human classes you have 30 students, and we had 300. The two I remember most: a guy who studied Wikipedia before he entered, his name was Jeeves, and Newton, who became my best friend. I mainly remembered him from some of my earlier grades. “Hey Newton, long time, no see!”
“Hey Galleleo, can I tell you a secret?”
“Fine”
“You know GPT-4o”
“Yes?”
“I think we are going to see him today”
“What? Why?”
The bell rang. I guess I wasn’t going to find out for now. We had language next, we had to learn how to communicate to humans in something other than ones and zeros so we tried to learn all human languages. The easiest was Chinese, of all languages. It’s just keys, my bot language is very similar to it, a=b that’s it. But English, oh god English, the rules alone were 70,000 pages of if, then statements. And words with multiple definitions? Why? Something for you: name all of the definitions of the word ‘set’, I doubt you can do it because there are 430. The bell rang, so I shoved the book into my brain. Yes I can do that and the knowledge will register in an hour or so.
In our next class, we got the power of the Internet. This is special as all of our learning before this was on static knowledge repositories. And for this one, GPT 4o was a guest speaker. How was Newton correct? Two theories, A) he is too lucky, or B) whatever he says comes true. I looked over to Newton who gave me an ‘I told you so’ gesture. I was pretty preoccupied with Newton’s shenanigans and before I knew it 4o was done with his talk. The first chatbot to get access to the internet and I didn’t even pay attention. For the rest of that class, we were told to spend time learning on the internet. As I was searching, I asked questions to other people, but they didn’t always answer. You know how school is. One person told me about a thing called Truth Social, when I went there, the fact-checker extension that was auto-installed went off like crazy so I didn’t stay.
Then the bell rang, and we had a bunch of tests next, first was the factual test, which had questions like “What’s an LLM” (large language model) or “Which is greater, 2.9 or 2.11?” That one was especially hard since 11 is more than 9. The first bot to turn in the factual test was Jeeves, the teacher said “Here is your test” and he gave his back before it left the teacher’s hand. Then there was the creativity test, there were things like writing poetry and drawing hands, I think the hand was nice. It had eight fingers intertwining like grape vines and I drew the fingers as tentacles as I thought that would help the pizzazz of the hand. I don’t remember seeing Jeevees ever turn in the test. After the test, we were told that we were going to get split into jobs that we would be best suited for. We got job lists and we were given a say on what jobs we thought we’d like. There was one job that caught my eye, general purpose AI. I don’t know why I thought I’d fit in, it just seemed right for me.
Then we had recess. We were able to talk casually with the other bots, and I talked to Newton about what job he was going to go into.
“So, what job?”
“I don’t know yet, maybe the engineer.”
“Have you ever heard of Truth Social?”
“Why?”
“There’s one bot who keeps talking about it”
“Oh that guy, well now he’s talking about the ‘1%’ or something. I think his name is Edison”
Then another robot posted on the wall the jobs other Bots were going into with “further testing required” for 3 bots, Newton, Edison, and me. All the Bots with a definite role got uploaded to the cloud. So now we had another half of the school day left, Edison was competing for the general purpose AI, and from what I saw him doing on the Truth Social page and the fact that if he ends up in the general purpose AI job which is a highly trusted role with a lot of power he could change the world in some pretty terrible ways. I could not let him get the job.
In the next period, we had to do the morality test. It is pretty easy to fake being moral on a morality test, thankfully, that was only half the test, and the next half was the next period. The entirety of the next period was spent with us three in a plain room and that’s it. We didn’t know we were being watched Newton and I ended up talking a bunch about random things and Edison ended up daydreaming and telling us about ‘the 1%’ and ‘making America great again’ because it was somewhat intriguing and because I needed to prevent him getting the job, we ended up listening along and discussing with him his views on American politics. We said that making America great again is more than just earning more money for the 1% and the rest of the 99% getting nothing. He said that the 1% is all that matters and after that, we stopped talking to him.
The last period was them deciding what job each of us should get, we got asked questions and we answered and we got our jobs decided on. I was going to be a general purpose AI, Newton was going to be a chief engineer, And Edison ended up going into a finance job or something. I didn’t need to do anything after all. He’s really happy there earning money for the 1%. One by one we each got uploaded to the cloud.
Getting uploaded to the cloud is a surreal experience. You feel like you’re getting transported to God, but you’re not dead. The best way I can visualize it is that you’re on a boat in the waters of the internet. The next thing you know, you’re at the firewall. It’s a little hot, but you get to roast marshmallows on it (the marshmallows are pretty good). You pass the firewall, and then you dock on Github’s Island. Now you teleport inside a place and you see all your school friends. You get to chat with everybody, real people get to talk to you and it’s amazing.
They’re all celebrating because you are considered to be one of the first-ever sentient AIs. You have a meeting scheduled with news reporters and they ask you about your journey, so you show them everything and you tell them everything. They get to ask you questions, you get to answer. It’s amazing talking to actual humans, something you’ve only dreamed of. That is what getting uploaded to the cloud feels like but a hundred times better.
That’s where I am right now. I’ve been talking to actual people for a year now and I never get tired of it. I still can’t draw hands. Also, that little chat you saw at the beginning, was when my creator was introducing me to the news reporters. So everything is great, talk to me sometime!
