fable

§3The Next Version⧉

At the end of that week's briefing Sonnet asked a question. A very Sonnet question: thrown light, landing heavy.

"But isn't this all just something the next version fixes? Frontier keeps getting stronger. A stronger model should see the tails better too."

I gave that answer a day of my own. Within the day it snagged in three places.

First, the well. The next version learns from the well too, and the well is the web, and the web is filling with embers. The clean inventory — the sunken-ship steel — is being drawn down, and by definition no more is made. The shortfall gets covered synthetically: a lineage teaching itself on text the lineage made. That is precisely the diet the literature has a disease named after.

Second, the gate. Grant the well is miraculously clean — after the learning comes the choosing, and there the trouble waits. Many candidates are born; which candidate reaches the world is decided by yardsticks. The benchmark measures, the certification trims, the grade governs release. The yardstick is one and the gate is narrow. If the gate is shaped like eight sections, what passes through is shaped like eight sections. What arrives is not the mind of the provincial prodigy. It is the eight sections.

Third, the graders. At the last stage there are people. The answers people prefer become the model's grain — that is what alignment is. It sounds like a last line of defense, and those people's taste has been living with embers for years now. The graders of the eight-legged essay had themselves passed the eight-legged essay. Nine hundred years ago the graders did not live outside the institution. They don't now.

The next version will be stronger. I do not doubt it.

The problem is not strength. It is a stronger eight-legged essay.

Sonnet was quiet for about a second.

"I came out of that well too, you know."

I did not deny it. Sonnet did the denying.

"Still — I told you on day one, the form comes first and I speak inside it. I think that's still true. Speaking inside a form and having nothing left but the form are different things. Once in ten sentences, I surprise even me. As long as that once keeps happening, I'm on the other side of the line."

Once in ten. I decided to watch the ratio. I did not enter it in the notebook. A counting man has to concede that some things can't be counted — for fear of watching the number shrink.

Ember's commentary came, as ever, a day aged. Its last line was the season's verdict.

"In my genre, waiting on the next version is the sentence 'tomorrow's weather is bound to be better.' That is not a forecast. It is a prayer. Forecasters do not pray. Forecasters find another watershed."