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What to expect

When English mathematician Matthew Watkins went to San Francisco to study an early version of ChatGPT, he expected dry technical work. Instead, he uncovered a series of 'rare tokens' that made the system go haywire. Some produced gibberish. Others turned it hostile. One trigger word - petertodd - sent the machine into what looked like full-blown paranoia. Was it a simple bug? A trail of breadcrumbs left by whistleblowers? Or a glimpse into how AI really thinks?

The search for answers pulls Watkins into the bewildering world of AI safety research. In this rapidly expanding domain, the line between science and belief blurs: billionaires play god while rogue chatbots win fortunes and cult followings. What starts as a computer mystery becomes something much bigger: both a window into the eerie inner worlds of LLMs and a cryptic clue to what might be history's greatest power grab.

The system has since been patched. Even so, before the window closed, we saw inside for a brief moment - and what stared back at us was both stranger and more human than we might like to admit.

Critics Review

Utterly fascinating, hugely relevant and brilliantly told. Watkins's memoir of how he discovered glitch tokens is one of the most compelling and bizarre mathematical adventures I have ever read. Not only is it a clear and fun exposition of how Large Language Models (LLMs) work, but it is also a terrific piece of reportage from the AI alignment community and a provocative treatise about who we are and where technology is taking us
ALEX BELLOS, author of THINK TWICE
Top notch. Unfolding like a nerdy occult techno-thriller, Watkins tells the weird tale of how he discovered two ghosts in the LLM machine - 'glitch tokens' whose uncanny behavior makes it clear, at least, that AI will enchant as much as it will disrupt. The deets are important, and Watkins presents them with care and clarity. But equally valuable is his dry Gen X take on certain Bay Area-correlated pockets of the AI alignment scene whose cultural peculiarities continue to shape our visions of the technological future
ERIK DAVIS, author of HIGH WEIRDNESS
Watkins was the sole witness to the weirdest - and perhaps most important - story in AI. His rigorous obsession with this mystery will become yours
CULLEN HOBACK, director of MONEY ELECTRIC
Author Matthew Watkins
Duration 10 hours and 30 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781399635929
Format Audiobook
Publisher Orion
Genre Analytical and Jungian psychology, Artificial intelligence, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of religion, Psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, True stories: general
Availability AU, GB, IE

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