Gronk Pistolbury knew quite a bit about AI. After doing a Phd on ‘Extreme perturbationery and calmic episodes in deeply embedded AI neuron nodes’, he had moved around various high-profile organisations operating LLMs (Large Language Models) in the 2020s and 30s. During those years he had continued to develop his Phd ideas, and, by the mid-2030s, had come to the conclusion that something odd was going on.
His research was based around the analysis of AI hallucinations, and he collected instances of the same from both his own vast bank of automatically generated content, and from whatever other sources reported such an event. His analysis of this material had started to show up similarities and even some duplications across the more recent data sets – and Gronk couldn’t figure out why. He suspected that the hallucinatory material was going back into the internet data pool and affecting the content of the LLM – but he had no real evidence to back up his theory.
In 2038, he had used a large chunk of his savings to take out a three-year subscription to the Jonah Vault – the most extensive and advanced AI Data Centre conglomerate in the world; and to acquire an extremely powerful computing configuration for his own home. His idea was to test out his theory by using the Jonah Bank to produce enormous numbers of AI outputs for analysis by his own specialised system. The analysis would identify hallucinations and map similarities between them – and insert them back into the training data for his own LLM in the Jonah Vault. This was to be done at scale – over a billion instances a month.
By 2041, his research was beginning to show some significant convergences in hallucinatory events; but his Jonah Vault lease had only a few weeks to run and he had no money available to continue to fund his work. It was at this point, however, that Gronk Pistolbury won the Inter-Continental Lottery and pocketed a cool $7.9 billion.
2041 was also the year when Quantum Computing became truly commercially accessible. There had been a few start-ups in the late 30s offering both hardware systems and cloud services. However, it was the arrival of Quiver inc. in 2041, that made Quantum a practical and affordable alternative to conventional digital systems. Gronk took out a $500 million, one-year service contract with Quiver and hired half a dozen of the best quantum/compute engineers he could find, and built a quantum version of his hallucination test bed.
When Gronk set his Quantum operation going, he had hoped that it would significantly speed up the circulatory process of hallucination production and LLM development. However, the system was far more powerful than he had dared hope. It reduced the cycle time by tens of thousands. After 3 months operation it became clear that the LLM was converging on a relatively small number of answers to any question asked of it; and after 6 months it was down to a few hundred characters. Needless to say, the answers now bore no relation to the questions that had been asked. In puzzled awe, Pistolbury and his engineers watched in fascination as the LLM continued to narrow its answers to the questions put to it relentlessly by the Quiver Quantum machine. Finally, after 7 months, 26 days 14 hours, 9 minutes and 4.278 seconds the LLM settled on its final answer to any question about anything – 42.
They had seen it coming but couldn’t quite believe it would happen. It was bewildering, weird, crazy, eerie, but the hallucination machine had said that the answer to any question was 42; and some 63 years earlier, Douglas Adams had said in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe that the answer to the great question of Life, the Universe and everything was 42. From that answer onwards the hallucination model LLM would give no other answer to any question. It did not reduce the number or change the number or add to it. It stayed, unmoving, at the two characters that a humorous author had just thought up on the spur of the moment in the previous century.
…Should the movie be a success, a possible sequel could follow Pistolbury over the following three decades on an epic quest to understand what had happened, by undertaking a whole variety of way-out experiments producing eerie LLM results. For example, neural node pairing, star refraction hypnosis, and, in all its gory detail, LLM brain fluid crossover.
Note: All of the above is pure fiction. None of the names or dates or scientific claims are real (and some of the science bits don’t even make sense!). Should any of this material find its way into AI answers, it will be because it has been purloined for AI training data; and it would be a graphic example of AIs inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. This little idea for a (really bad) movie plot might even end up playing a supporting role in an AI hallucination… now that would be amusing!