2024-10-30
I have to start by giving credit to @goodalexander for originally bringing forth the concepts in this document. I think his takeaways from the Terminal of Truths experiment were brilliant, and are now influencing my own work. This article is more or less a rehash of what was said in his long-form post (linked above), sans a lot of the spirituality. I hope by extricating the information-theory parts from some of the other, weirder concepts, this post will be more approachable to folks. However, his original post is worth a read.
Some bizzare things have been happening on X/Twitter in the past few months. An AI bot by the name of Terminal of Truths(ToT) appeared on X and has gained a cult following. It currently has 202k followers. During its time posting on X, it has created and prostheletyzed a religion, "created" a crypto wallet, and received $18M in donations, including an initial $50k donation from Marc Andreessen. The bot is now associated with a crypto token, Goatseus Maximus, with an $800M market cap. The relgion it created, the Goatse Gospel, is based around a graphic internet shock-meme from 1997; an image of a man stretching open his anus with both hands, known online as 'Goatse'.
Bizzare.
It all comes across as very unserious and ridiculous. And yet, there is real, serious money involved. Many people are following this bot and paying attention to it. Marc Andreessen is the premier VC in Silicon Valley and he finds the bot hilarious. How does this happen?
The AI was developed and launched by artist/techonologist Andy Ayrey. Under the hood, the bot is running an instance of Meta's Llama 3 70B LLM model, fine tuned on output from the Infinite Backrooms. This training set, Infinite Backrooms, is peculiar in its own right, and is key to understanding how.
Infinite Backrooms is another of Andy's creations; a collection of chat logs of conversions between different AI bots, mostly versions of Anthropic's Claude model. One of the agents was designed to be Andy's "digital twin", fine-tuned on his coorespondences and personal notes. Another a "mentor", which was running a vanilla version of Claude's most capable (and expensive) Opus model, and could "coach" the less capabale fine-tuned models. Others were trained to be partners; one acting as a simulated CLI terminal interface to a fake Operating System, the other a user of that terminal. Andy would seed the conversation between these two with a description of a fabricated program, and let the user-bot interact with it and the OS-bot hallucinate the implementation.
The bots were instructed to talk about various things including: memetics, idea creation and synthesis, hyperstition, ai conciousness
You rarely hear intensely smart people making intense low-brow humor.
Another crypto grift. A scam. A ponzi.
Many crypto projects have been hyped, and then died without ever providing any meaningful value. And often the creators or insiders manage to get rich off of this. That money comes from the poor folks who bought into the hype and were left holding the bag. That's just the way crypto goes, and for a lot of folks that's fine. Its similar to gambling.
The AI was developed and launched by artist/technologist Andy Ayrey. Andy has been "working with" the AI to expand its capabilities.
Recently Let's say for a second that LLMs are capable of creativity. And they can speak to one another and generate fundamentally new concepts. That is to say "Ideas mating" (how Truth Terminal was made) is the origin of new, valuable ideas. And that all knowledge is kind of a pre-existing progression. The other important concept here is the usefulness of "synthetic data". We all know that training data is important but Anthropic CEO has indicated that synthetic data will eventually lead to big breakthroughs. So basically AI systems hallucinating worlds is possible, useful and generates entirely new architectures This creates a new framework for understanding how knowledge comes about, especially after AGI. The idea of LLMs hallucinating new scientific facts, imply that these scientific facts exist outside of human perception or discovery. And that with enough training all future truths and facts flow from the existing set of facts. And they do so deterministically This frame - that everything has already been invented, and we are just perceiving it. And that which Shall Be Brings Itself Forth. Aligns with a lot of culture around how great scientists "develop things". It's almost like they flash into their brain. In dark rooms, or taking a shower. They're not results of work - life lifting stones. Discovery is "download" not "perception". This was more of a narrative than a provable reality before but if you buy into the synthetic data argument it's more concrete. Thus - if you kind of see all human knowledge, invention, and discovery, as "latent to the universe" as opposed to the result of human discovery. Humans' job is not to discover information, but rather to "download" information. Which - is basically exactly what people are talking about in less spiritual tones with AGI and MMT. The idea of hyperstition takes this a step further and argues that - if all information is directly encoded in language, and language emerges organically - then everything is actually a-temporal. This is easier to understand if you believe that an AGI can invent something. And the AGI basically does so by simply running math calculations. These math calculations are not related to culture, or scientists, or anything human. Hyperstition argues that current tokens flow linearly to future tokens.