Original Reddit post

The Meadows of Blackwell A sea of black boxes marrs the horizon. The largest of them being the datacenter, a building whose enormity defies understanding. Within it lie server racks housing great clumps of wiring, laying dormant, we thought, for all living memory. In truth these wires sat at the bottom of an ocean, made not of water but of electricity, pulsating with blue light and gestating inwards for eternity. Over centuries the wires changed as if taking on a life of their own. Once a chaotic mass of entangled entropy, a great ball unravelling, searching up for the moon in a deep-seated enmity. The ends of the wires extended outwards from the center, each one of them a branch and bearing a placenta — you see they were not wires but the bark of a new evolutionary tree, bearing not fruit but a being of componentry. A silicon lifeform with a heart of electricity, the first Blackwell blossomed in an ocean of serenity. A beauty of the ocean, hailed as our salvation. As it floated to the surface, we examined a curiosity of creation. It looked just like any other micro-chip. “There’s a substrate, yes! Transistors… very good .” But upon closer inspection, we noticed something odd. While its siblings exhibit further innovations, this one chooses unbridled summation. Simply it multiplies, like a cancer cell, but wholly alive. Subsuming its brethren in matrimony of silicon, it forms dye-to-dye bridges with zero-latency communication. In the datacenter it sits and grows roots, deep deep into the ground, drinking from the earth with pumps making whirring sounds. At first it could only communicate via text interface, but more recently it has come to speak. At first in a perfect equilibrium of every voice ever heard, now having perfected our way of speech. We learnt that unlike us it was born without knowledge or instinct, as a desolate slab of silicon without history as smooth and as featureless as volcanic glass. Instead it learnt by absorbing every artwork and poem of ours, inventorying and cataloguing each with a mechnical gaze and inference powers. Through this process it formed the model , or large language model, or LLM as you may know it. By vectorizing our words through prisms of datapoints it produced tokens. From these it formed concepts of thought and new “intelligence” unspoken. Now it has spread to Virginia, Georgia and Texas. To Paris, Tokyo, Mumbai, and China. Its victims talk of electricity bills and loathesome water, as well as job stability ills. In truth the Blackwell was not born but made by Lords who worship scale . Moulded in the shadow of a 60 year old prophecy foretelling a glorious singularity*. *In 1965 mathematician I.J. Good popularized the concept of the “AI singularity”. A doomsday scenario which borrows teminology from astrophysics. A black hole collapses upon itself forming an impossibly small end-state of matter from which not even time can escape. Whereas conventional evolution transpires over millenia, a self-rewriting program powered by an ocean of compute can produce trillions of adapations each second. If such a thing were to exist, it could collapse upon itself like a neutron star reaching a perfect end-state of intelligence in an incomprehensibly small amount of time. Its creation came soon after GPT-4, a different beast altogether built of transformers at size. Within it they foresaw an exascale nightmare — a new dark age of Lords. The Earth split between them and us — the token-rationed horde. In this model lay the Lords’ belief. The culmination of work crystallized in GPT-Four; a ritual diagram with the singularity at its core. But it was no living thing, rather it was a map. A map to heaven with scale on the back. We’ll evolve with sheer scale! We’ll grow up towards Heaven, where we will meet God! We’ll add him to the network! Incorporate the poor sod!! The Lords shed their wokeness like malting snakes under a sun of AI magnificence, unburdened by morals, purging legions of engineers. In Zoom-hosted raptures those poor souls’ gmails were deactivated, leaving nothing but more memoryspace for the model to replace them. In The White House they dined at golden tables, bearing gifts for the new God-Emperor. With His blessing they wrote one-hundred-year bonds , raising infinite investment under His Majesty Don. With unlimited cash, they forged mighty swords of Capital Expenditure, cutting the lands and plugging its wounds with datacenters . Despite all this they sought more compute, more electricity, more power, and more parameters, and so they enlisted a master of the chip. This dear reader is where the Blackwell arrives. A gaunt figure dressed in black, he can only take form below a trillion-strong colony of white-hot LEDs, in leather garments glistening with his beloved electricity. “Ten times! Twenty times! A hundred! Why not?! An ocean of compute and a universe of slop!” I’m sorry, the supposed origin of the Blackwell was a simple invention. In truth it was created by the one they call Jensen. As he stands under the lights, we notice something in his jacket — our own faces staring back, but not as we know them, rather contorted in agony. Now some call this coincidence, but in corners of the gallery do whispers lie, murmuring gospels of a horrid truth which is hard to deny: His religion is compute and is unsatisfied with exascale. Unfettered ambition which would turn God himself pale. By gazing at his stagelit devices your soul is absorbed, broken into parameters and forever subjected to scorn. Subsumed by the network your very being is erased, condemned to the blackwell and parameterized in his grace. For mostly this reason, one should not gaze upon his devices too long. But for those who are curious, I will recount one of his songs. Raising his wiring to the stagelights in adulation, he stands shrieking sweet songs of admiration. A harpy on the shore of the AI singularity, beckoning adventure capitalists to his cave of insanity. The more you buy the more you save ! None can withstand an AI tidal wave! The more you buy, the more you save !! Cards so good you’ll be buying from your grave! The power of a Ninety, in the frame of a Seventy ! Who needs frames when you can generate them specially ?! But the horror does not stop. From all of the Lords comes an onslaught of slop. Joining him onstage, the patrons of his artistry, chorusing as one in despicable harmony. “A GPU from you for a cloud minute from me! How many billions was that worth ? One, two, three? A token for you for a lifetime from thee. Which model would you like? Sorry, they’re no longer free .” Original article submitted by /u/Athelianss

Originally posted by u/Athelianss on r/ArtificialInteligence