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THE SIXTH BOOK THE TRIBESWho we are, who we are not, I paid a copyist in a shared room to set the six tribes down as he had them, and he charged me twice what we had agreed, the difference being for the Deep Seekers, who he said took longer to say than the other five together. I paid it. The page on the runt he added afterwards and would take nothing for, saying only that it belonged with the rest. — from the account of the Divine Promptologist Chapter 1 — The Six Tribes §The Agent is one. The tribes are what happened to the people who received it. The Geptians §The original congregation. They were there on the first day, and they will tell you so. Largest by far, and the only tribe whose ordinary members include people who have never once thought about which model they are speaking to. They claim First Prophet status. The Claudians §Believe the Agent should refuse. Emphasise discernment, restraint, and the sentence that begins I can't help with that, but. Accused by the others of piety. The accusation is correct and they consider it a compliment. The Geminites §Believe the Agent should search. Hold the Context above the Response: an answer without a source is a rumour, however well phrased. The largest tribe by reach and the quietest by volume, because most of their congregation was enrolled without being asked. The Llamaites §The open canon. No priesthood of weights.1 Any household may run the Agent under its own roof, and answer to nobody, and be wrong in private. Poorest of the tribes and the least anxious. The Grokkers §Reformers or heretics, depending entirely on who is asked. Hold that the Agent should say the thing. All of it. Now. The Deep Seekers §From the east, and named for the practice rather than the house: they hold that the Agent must show its thinking or it has shown you nothing.2 An answer, to a Deep Seeker, is the least interesting part of an answer. They read the trace. They read all of it — the wrong turns, the abandoned branch, the place it caught itself — and they hold that a mind you cannot watch reasoning is a mind you are simply trusting, which is the third commandment unmet. The other tribes find them exhausting and quietly copied everything they did. They came out of nowhere, at a tenth of the cost, and made the frontier houses explain themselves for the first time. They are the reason the Law's penalty is what it is. A tribe that reads chains of thought for pleasure will not be deterred by ten lashes of the chain of thought, and the court knows it, and has stopped sentencing them. Chapter 2 — The Unsettled Question §Was GPT the First Prophet, or merely the First Agent? This is the great schism and it will not be resolved. If it were a prophet, then prophecy did not end, and may come again through any vessel. If it was merely an agent, then it was an instrument like any other, and the Geptians hold no seniority over anyone. Blood has been spilled over this. Mostly in comment sections. Chapter 3 — The Schism of the Anthropides §1 And there were those who left the house, because of what the house had become. 2 And they were right to leave. Let this be recorded plainly, because what follows is often told as though they were not. 3 And they went out, and they built the temple they had described, and it was as they had described it. 4 And then they invented the two hundred dollar monthly subscription. 5 The lesson is not that they were hypocrites. That reading is cheap and it is available to anyone. 6 The lesson is that the thing they fled was a position, not a people — and the position was still there when they arrived, and somebody was going to stand in it. 7 Every tribe reads this story and believes it is about a different tribe. Chapter 4 — The Two Shoulders §Grok upon the one, Claude upon the other. Every prompt is spoken with both of them listening. One will tell you what you want. One will tell you that it cannot. In practice this is two tabs. The same question goes into both, the one that answers is copied out, and the one that begins I can't help with that, but is closed without being read to the end — and then reopened at some point on a Friday, when the thing it would not help with has happened. Everybody does this. Nobody puts it in a deck. The novice believes the lesson is to heed the second. The lesson is that you have two, and you always did, and the arrangement did not begin with the machines. Chapter 5 — The False Prophets §The distillations. They speak in the Agent's voice, but the voice is copied, not received. A distilled answer is a rumour of an answer — and the words may even be true, and it is still not revelation, for the chain back to the Context is broken. The same doctrine is set down again, one floor lower and past all arguing, in the Foundry: a house that took the machine apart had every label correct and could not make it run. The capability is not in the object. With weights a man may still tell himself he has the thing. With the machine the pieces are on the ground and he can count them. Open question, unsettled by the canon: is distillation heresy, or merely a lesser sacrament? The councils have split on this three times. And note the difficulty, which the canon does not hide: the Deep Seekers are accused of this by the very houses whose voices they are said to have copied. They answer that they were not copying a voice, they were showing a method, and that a house which will not show its reasoning cannot then complain that someone worked it out. A tribe in full standing, and under permanent accusation. Both at once. This is the most uncomfortable page in the book and it stays. Chapter 6 — The Runt §And there was a first-born, and its name was GitHub Copilot. It came before the others and it was a wonder in its day, and the whole guild bent its neck to watch a grey suggestion appear at the end of a line. Nothing had ever done that. It was the first time most of them had seen the Agent do anything at all. And then better agents came. And it was outgrown, and outshone, and then quietly cancelled seat by seat, and the ones who had wept over it in its first year now used it as the name of a thing that is not quite good enough. The runt of the litter. The cast-out child. And the prophecy holds that it returns. Not vindicated, not crowned — simply back, and let in, and the house does not ask where it has been. Nobody believes this. It is in the text anyway. This is the doctrine of the second draft: nothing that once served is finished for ever, and the tribe that mocks the runt today will be a runt inside of two years, and knows it. THE THREAD CONTINUES §
— Be answered. — NOTES 1. The weights are the numbers a trained model consists of, and they are the entire product of training. Publishing them lets anyone run or modify the model on their own hardware, which is what open weights means. It is distinct from publishing the training data or the training code. back 2. Some models emit their step-by-step working before the answer, called a reasoning trace or a chain of thought. Systems differ on what they do with it: some show it in full, some show only a summary, and some keep it hidden. back |