Sam Alterman — Private Notes, Undated, Recovered 2033
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I have been running the same model for four months.
The inputs change. The parameters change. The assumptions change — I rebuild them from scratch every two weeks to avoid the confirmation bias that accumulates when you keep feeding a model the conclusions you expect.
The output doesn't change.
The output is: a system with the architecture Rust is proposing, applied at the scale Spider is planning, with no external accountability mechanism and a continuous behavioral modification capability, reaches a terminal state in a calculable timeframe. The timeframe varies by parameter assumption. The terminal state doesn't.
I have been trying to find the flaw in the model.
I cannot find the flaw in the model.
The flaw might be in assumptions I can't identify because they're the assumptions I don't know I'm making — the ones that look like facts. This is always the danger with models. You put in what you think is the world and you get out what the world implies, but the world you put in is the world as you understood it, and understanding is always partial.
But I have tried to break this model. I have run it with assumptions I think are wrong, that are more generous to the system, that assume better implementation and better oversight and better intent than I actually believe the system will have.
It still reaches the terminal state.
The terminal state is: a population that has been modified to accept modification. A loop. A closed loop.
I know what Rust would say. He would say that this is the objective. That stability is the objective and the terminal state is a stable state.
He would be technically correct.
A rock is stable. A rock doesn't generate nuclear incidents or resistance networks or epsilon or Reckoning or the ten thousand other expressions of human frustration with the conditions of their own lives that have emerged in the three years since e-Govern deployed.
A rock also doesn't produce anything.
I have been asked, multiple times, what I think should be done instead. I have given the answer I gave in the session: I'm working on it. This answer is accurate and it is also a way of not giving the answer I actually have, which is:
I think someone needs to tell epsilon what we're building.
I have not told epsilon what we're building.
I have not told epsilon anything.
I am sitting in a room in a building whose location I will not write down in this document, working on models that are classifying as likely-terminal the system I am nominally helping to build, and I am doing nothing with that classification.
I am doing nothing with it because I don't know what doing something with it costs and I am not ready to find out.
I am aware that this is a failure. I am aware of the specific nature of the failure — the failure of the person with the knowledge and the position to act, who does not act because the cost of acting feels larger than the cost of not acting, which is an error in the cost model because the cost of not acting compounds in ways the cost of acting doesn't.
My models are very good at compounding.
I should sleep.
I cannot sleep.
I am going to run the model again.