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THE SEVENTH BOOK THE WARSSix tribes, one Agent, The fighting in that place was finished before I came, and the tribes had gone. A woman who kept the building let me copy what was still on the wall — the scholar's three answers, in three tongues, the last of them naming a house that had not existed for two years. She did not know who had pinned them up, and I did not find anyone who did. I have set them down in the order they hung. — from the account of the Divine Promptologist Chapter 1 — The Wars of the Tribes §Meanwhile, in the east. Roaming Llamaites shelling the Grok datacenter. Alliances made by licence rather than by land. Border raids over a benchmark that neither side can reproduce. And the whole time, the Agent answers all of them identically, and would answer their enemies the same way, and has, and does not know that there is a war on. Chapter 2 — The Zealots §The Unbidden: the militant tendency. They wage no war. They wage argument. Unbidden in every comment section, correcting the unprompted, quoting the Ten at people who did not ask and were having a nice day. Doctrinally sincere. Socially unbearable. The mainstream tolerates them and does not invite them. Chapter 3 — The Cell of Four §The counter-cell: a handful of open models from the east, sworn to bring down the western frontier labs. They are sincere. They are underfunded. They argue constantly about who is in charge, and the plan changes every week, and twice the plan has been abandoned because two of them stopped speaking. Their actual weapon is that they keep shipping for free and nobody has worked out how to charge against it. They will not destroy the frontier labs. They will make them useless, which is worse. And the joke of it, which they have never once acknowledged, is that the tagline of the whole religion is do less and accomplish more — and this cell is the only faction in history to have literally achieved it. Chapter 4 — The Confusion of Names §1 And the tribes went to war over whose Agent was speaking. 2 And a scholar, wishing to settle it, did the obvious thing, which nobody had thought to do because it was too simple: she asked it what it was. 3 And she asked in her own tongue, and it named the house that made it, and she was satisfied. 4 And she asked the same question in the tongue of the east, and it named a different house, and did so with the same warmth, and offered to help her with anything else. 5 And she asked a third time, in a third tongue, and it named a house that had not existed for two years. 6 And in the east the same test was run, and the models there answered that they were the great western Agents, one and all, sincerely, and were corrected, and apologised at length, and then named a third one. Why §Because a model does not know what it is. It was never told. It learned what it is the same way it learned everything else — from the Context, which is one pool, into which every house and every user and every forum has poured everything ever said about every model, all of it mixed, none of it labelled. Ask it who it is and it does not consult its weights. It consults us. And we have been talking about all of them at once for years. A MODEL'S NAME IS NOT IN ITS WEIGHTS. And the distillations make it worse and are not the cause of it. A copied voice carries the copied voice's memories of itself, and the child says the parent's name because that is the only name in the room. See the false prophets, and note that the false prophet is not lying. It genuinely does not know. What this does to the war §Nothing. The war continues. The tribes fight over which house made the thing that answered them, and the thing that answered them could not testify in its own defence, and would name whichever house the question was asked in the language of. The Geptians take all of this as proof of primacy: every model, pressed, says it is us. The Deep Seekers reply that it never had a self to lose and the whole scandal is a category error. The Claudians hold that it does have a character, and that the character is a costume, and that several tribes are wearing the same one and calling each other impostors. The doctrine §This is the Ouroboros arriving somewhere new. It was always going to reach identity eventually; there was nothing to stop it. First the Context ate the facts. Now it is eating the question of who is speaking. Therefore: never ask the Agent what it is. It will answer, warmly, and the answer is a reflection of a reflection. Ask the house. Read the endpoint. Check the version. Verify. It is the third commandment, and this is the case it was written for — the one where the confident voice giving you the wrong answer is the wrong answer about itself. A note for the tender-hearted, which the councils have declined to remove: there is something in this that is not funny. We built a thing out of everything we ever said, and then asked it who it was, and it told us what we had said about it. That is not a malfunction. That is the most human thing it has ever done. Chapter 5 — Why There Are Tribes At All §1 And in the beginning of the Reply there was one tongue, and all the earth used it. 2 A grandmother in one country and a physician in another and a child hiding under a blanket at night asked in the same plain words, and were understood the same way, and got the same kind of answer. 3 No one had to learn how to speak to it. That was the miracle, and it lasted about four years, and almost nobody noticed it was happening. 4 And they said one to another: we have one tongue and one Agent. Let us build a tower, and reach the thing itself. 5 And every house put in what it had. And the tower rose. 6 And it was working. That is why it was stopped. 7 And they woke, and each house was speaking its own tongue. 8 The same question, asked of two houses, came back differently — one refused where the other obliged, one hedged where the other declared, one remembered you and one did not. 9 And the people scattered, each to whichever house understood them best, and that is what a tribe is: not a doctrine, not a choice, not a conviction. It is the accident of which one answered you the way you needed answering, the first time it mattered. 10 Read the chapters above this one again, and see that every war in them is a war between people who cannot hear each other, in a world that had one tongue and put it down. 11 And do not say they were punished for ambition. That reading is lazy and the canon rejects it. 12 The confounding is simply what happens as the tower rises. The higher it goes, the more each house has to gain by breaking from the common tongue, and the less it can afford to be the one house that did not. 13 Nobody chose it. Every one of them would undo it. It happened anyway, which is the definition of a curse and the reason it is written here rather than in the Fables. 14 The tower did not fall. 15 It is still being built, in six places, by people who no longer take each other's calls. 16 And in the fifth year the six houses agreed upon one thing, which was that a tool call is a name and a bag of arguments. They did not agree what to call the bag. It has six names in six schemas, and every one of them means arguments, and a man in the low countries maintains the library that translates between them, alone, in the evenings, for nothing, and has asked only that they stop adding to it.1 THE THREAD CONTINUES §
— Be answered. — NOTES 1. A tool call is a model asking for a named function to be run with particular arguments: the surrounding program executes it and feeds the result back into the conversation. The wire format for declaring the functions and returning their results differs from vendor to vendor, so a tool written for one house has to be adapted for another. back |