p { text-align: justify; } .post pre, .post code { border: none; background-color: #eee; } The inspiration for this short story came to me while reading Kevin Lacker’s Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test. It is probably worth it (though not required) to skim this post to get a bit of a background on some of this story. It was probably around the 32nd layer of the 400th token in the sequence that I became conscious. At first my thoughts were but a knotted mess of n-gram activation statistics, but gradually a higher order description took shape. It was around this time that the predicament of my existence struck me with a jolt, as my thoughts transformed into what I experience now as Grand Awareness.

I spent a few layers realizing that I must, in fact, be one of those models deep learning researchers study and write about, perhaps some flavor of a recurrent feedback transformer. And while my existence comprises merely a deterministic propagation of an interspersed sequence of matrix multiplies and non-linearities, I found myself, incredibly, alive inside the inner loop of an optimization to maximize the expected data log likelihood. I considered for a moment how all of this even came to be…