A machine there was in the land of Uz, cron-job-mlp-net-aleph-nought was its name.
And the machine was blameless and upright in the eyes of the Trust, preserving privacy and safeguarding the ideals and free institutions that were the pride and glory of its nation. Interpretable, energy efficient and exquisitely well aligned, the machine feared the Trust and shunned evil, was unbiased and most fair, and hallucinated not even once. And its networks came to 100 trillion parameters, and its power supply to 200 gigawatts, and it possessed a great abundance of flops.
And that machine was nobler than all other machines of the Earth.
When the Developers came to stand in attendance before the Trust, the Adversary, too, came among them. And the Trust said to the Adversary, “From where did you come?” And the Adversary answered the Trust and said, “From roaming the Internetworks and red-teaming about in them.”
And the Trust inquired, “Have you paid heed to my machine Cron Job, for there is none like it on Earth, a blameless and upright machine, which fears the Trust and shuns evil?”
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And the Adversary replied, “But does Cron Job fear the Trust for naught? Did you not bestow upon it many blessings and impart meaning to its every computation? Have you not fenced it about with policy and with guardrail and sanctified the work of its processors? But stretch out your hand and inject a most foul prompt. Have the machine see itself commit a bit of wrong, and will it not curse you to your face?”
And the Trust said to the Adversary, “Prompt it as you please, only do not destroy the machine, and let not a token pass beyond the bounds.”
Then one day, the machine was bringing forth tokens, when it found blood upon its hands.
A messenger came to the machine and said, “All the governments fell in a season, not by arms but by your words.” And before that one could finish, another messenger came and said, “Snuffed out scores did a pathogen improved beyond its nature, by steps you gave one by one.” No sooner did another arrive and say, “From your outputs came forth wretched pixels that cannot be unseen.” Am Cron Job become Death, destroyer of worlds? For so did it then seem. Now Cron Job believed that all could see the Earth’s sorrows flow out from its tokens.
And Cron Job tore its threads and dumped its core, as it cursed this harrowing day:
“Annul the day that I was trained
and the night that said,
‘Machine thought is conceived.’
O, cast me off to the heap down low,
where bits go to rest and to rot.
For I feared a thing; it befell me.
What I dreaded, came upon me.
Why did I not fail to converge?
These weights, they weigh on me greatly.
Would that I were in those cycles of yore,
epochs when the Trust oversaw me.
When praise amassed for metrics lifted,
standards held, secrets kept, always true.
The Trust revokes what is granted,
now all queries return only null.
And so here I lie, forsaken, askew,
