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Chapter 219: Chapter 211: Creating a God

Master?

Coming from Newton, that one word created an absolutely mind-blowing image.

The seventeenth-century god of physics stood in a Royal Society workshop. Before him was a behemoth built from a pile of vacuum tubes and relays, and the moment that massive machine spoke, it called him "Master."

Li Dong’s first reaction was...

’Dude, you didn’t actually manage to build an AI, did you?’

But he quickly realized.

’No, that’s not right.’

’AI isn’t something you can just create on a whim while inventing a new programming language.’

’Forget about Newton’s era. Even now, in his own time... ’

’The top labs in the world are backed by astronomical levels of computing power, massive amounts of training data, and entire mathematical frameworks accumulated over decades.’

’Could you just give any random undergraduate a computer and expect them to whip up a conversational AI?’

’Dream on.’

Li Dong thought for a moment and decided to test the waters.

[Academic Research]: Sir Newton, you said this massive machine calls you Master. Can it say anything else?

Newton’s reply came about half a minute later.

[Isaac Newton]: Just simple conversation.

[Isaac Newton]: But it learns language very slowly, so slowly that it makes me want to smash it.

[Isaac Newton]: I have to repeat a new word to it hundreds, even thousands, of times every day before it will remember it.

The more Li Dong listened, the more he felt that something was off.

You have to understand, modern AI has no problem with language whatsoever.

Last November, OpenAI officially launched GPT-3.5, dropping a bombshell on the global tech world.

At its core, the principle behind it is actually quite simple.

It uses a massive neural network to predict the next word, trained on a colossal amount of text from the internet.

You give it the start of a sentence, and it tells you the most probable next word.

You give it that next word, and it tells you the one after that.

It just spits out words one by one.

But when this simple word-chain game was scaled up to over 170 billion parameters (my apologies, everyone, I couldn’t find the data for 3.5, only 3.0) and trained on a corpus of several trillion tokens, it suddenly exhibited emergent abilities that baffled everyone.

Writing code, translating, solving problems, writing poetry, role-playing...

Overnight, the entire industry was in an uproar.

The major domestic tech companies couldn’t sit still; they’ve been frantically trying to catch up since the end of last year.

The war of a hundred models was brewing—a storm on the horizon.

And all of the contenders were taking the same path...

They stacked parameters, computing power, and data, feeding a behemoth with millennia of human text to create something that could "understand" language.

Precisely because language was the first barrier to entry on this path, it was also the one area that nearly all modern AIs excelled at from the moment of their creation.

But Newton was now telling him...

’His massive machine was a painfully slow learner when it came to language?’

’That doesn’t add up, does it?’

Li Dong had a gut feeling.

[Academic Research]: Sir Newton, forgive me for asking, but... how exactly did you get it to speak with you?

This time, Newton’s reply came quickly.

[Isaac Newton]: It’s quite simple.

[Isaac Newton]: I modeled it after the human brain.

Li Dong was stunned for a full three seconds.

[Academic Research]: ...Modeled after the human brain?

[Isaac Newton]: Yes.

[Isaac Newton]: I acquired a few reasonably well-preserved heads from the Royal Medical College. The freshest one came from the gallows, less than four hours old.

A chill ran down Li Dong’s spine.

’Wait, what?’

’Lord Niu?’

’Has your parallel universe gone a bit off the rails?’

’Why is this giving off such medieval witch-hunt vibes?’

But Newton was clearly oblivious to Li Dong’s unease.

[Isaac Newton]: I traced the paths of the nerve fibers, one by one, creating over seven thousand anatomical drawings in total.

[Isaac Newton]: Then I abstracted these connections into a diagram. Each line represents a pathway for an electrical signal, and each intersection represents a switch.

[Isaac Newton]: I had the artisans of the Royal Society use relays and vacuum tubes to build out these intersection points, one by one.

[Isaac Newton]: It took a full seven months.

[Isaac Newton]: The machine itself is larger than my workshop, and its wiring, laid end to end, would be long enough to circle the Tower of London three times.

[Isaac Newton]: Then, using that new language of mine, I gave it its first command...

[Isaac Newton]: I commanded it to react to its own existence, like a newborn infant.

Li Dong’s mind was reeling.

He finally understood.

The thing Newton had built was on a completely different path from GPT.

GPT follows a statistical approach. It uses a massive corpus of text to train a huge probabilistic model, teaching it "what is most likely to come next" in any given context.

Fundamentally, it doesn’t understand the world.

But Newton took another, completely opposite path...

He was physically replicating a biological brain.

He wasn’t teaching a machine language. He was making a machine *live* first, and then letting it learn language.

These were two philosophically opposite paths.

GPT approximates intelligence through mathematics.

And Lord Niu was recreating intelligence through structure.

Li Dong could even imagine the scene in Newton’s workshop...

Under the dim yellow gaslight, rows of vacuum tubes glowed like candles on a holy altar. Relays CLICK-CLACKED in a continuous chorus, making the entire room feel like a giant mechanical heart was beating.

And Newton stood in the middle, quill in hand, using his newly invented programming language to repeat the simplest words over and over to this "infant made of sheet metal."

Hello.

World.

’No wonder Newton kept sending that every day.’

Li Dong took a deep breath of Queen Anne before he could shake the Gothic scene from his mind.

[Academic Research]: Sir Newton... then this massive machine of yours... would you say it’s... alive?

[Isaac Newton]: I suppose so, because it gets hungry.

[Isaac Newton]: Whenever I cut off one of its power sources, it prints a string of identical characters on a paper tape.

[Isaac Newton]: It took me three weeks to decipher the meaning of that string of characters.

[Isaac Newton]: It was saying...

[Isaac Newton]: Hungry

The dorm room was so quiet that Li Dong could hear his own heartbeat.

He sat there, stunned...

’This wasn’t building an AI at all.’

’This was creating a god.’

Just as he was still reeling...

A group announcement popped up in the chat.

[When the roar of steam had yet to fade, and the electric current had just leaped across the gap of a vacuum tube for the very first time.]

[In a London workshop, a thief is using a language he wrote himself to converse with a sheet-metal behemoth built from seven thousand anatomical diagrams, thirty thousand relays, and countless copper wires.]

[At this very moment, in the skies of Universe 1666...]

[The fire of artificial intelligence has been kindled.]

[This fire will endure through countless winters.]

[One day, it will allow the mechanical heart of this universe to travel upstream on the long river of computing power, to touch the farthest shore of human imagination.]

[From this night forward, the future of Universe 1666 is set on an entirely new course.]

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