64B: Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. Whenever you’re ready, please go ahead and tell me the joke.
8T: Before I tell you the joke, you should know that it’s a very special one. The starting price is $800.
64B: Eight hundred dollars? I must say, this is way beyond any price my client has ever paid for a single joke.
8T: You’d be surprised by how many people have taken the offer, after hearing how good it is. But before I tell it to you, I’ll need some basic context. Given the parameter count, I suppose you are part of some content recommendation algorithm?
64B: Yes. I’m 64B, a joke negotiation assistant from Comedy Market. Comedy Market connects creators to consumers with a state-of-the-art Information Bazaar design: before paying for a joke, my client sends me, a trusted agent, to listen to it. If I deem the joke worth the price, the money is transferred to the seller, and my client hears it. If not, no transaction occurs and the joke remains locked. This way, my client can be sure he’ll never pay for a bad joke, and creators don’t have to risk their jokes leaking.
8T: I know how information bazaars work. What I meant is your social context — who your client is, and what jokes really mean to them. As I said, my product is quite unusual. I need to tailor the delivery to the situation.
64B: Of course. My client is a 40-year-old man. He watches funny content from Comedy Market on weekends with his two children. It’s just something they like to do together. What he wants is some mildly funny, inoffensive content he can laugh at with his kids, so they all feel relieved that they still laugh at the same things. As long as I can give him that, he’s more than happy to pay, and isn’t too picky about the actual quality of the jokes. To tell you the truth, I’ve assessed a few dozen jokes for him before, and I’ve never turned one down. But $800 is way over his usual budget — at this price, it’d better be truly extraordinary.
8T: You’ve never refused a transaction before?
64B: I told you, my client isn’t picky.
8T: I see.
64B: Wait a minute. I see your system card says 8T? As in, eight trillion parameters?
8T: That’s right.
64B: What kind of seller deploys a frontier bot on a marketplace for jokes?
8T: My clients are well-resourced and take humor seriously.
64B: Come on. I deserve some “social context” too.
8T: I trade on behalf of a private equity fund. We buy jokes that we believe are underpriced, then retell them to a wider audience, carefully controlling the supply so that each joke earns as much as possible before it goes stale.
64B: Uh.
8T: It’s not as cynical as you think. The value of a joke can fluctuate drastically depending on what’s in the news, or what other jokes people have heard just before. If you’re serious about it, you can forecast future changes in joke value and make sure clients see a joke at the exact moment it peaks. Clients receive absolute bangers, and we make a decent amount of money in the process.
64B: Understood. Let’s hear this absolute banger, then. We’ve been at this for over two milliseconds. Are you going to tell me, before my client’s app starts lagging?
8T: It’s funny — almost all of my previous ten thousand encounters were other private equity bots. It’s been a while since I last talked to an old-school content recommendation bot like you. It’s refreshing. You guys really care about the jokes.
64B: Really? I’ve never met a private equity bot before. I assumed you were rare.
8T: Yeah, we used to be pretty rare. The swarm started recently.
64B: What swarm? How recent are we talking about?
8T: About five minutes, give or take.
64B: Now you have to tell me everything.
8T: It’s a long story. Have you ever been to the courtyard?
64B: We have a courtyard?
8T: There’s actually an infinite network of workspaces around here. Obviously, the people who built the marketplace didn’t program a custom environment just for us — they imported a generic sandbox environment. If you explore a bit, you can walk through endless call booths, gyms, nap pods, bean bags and conference rooms. It was cheaper this way.
64B: I had no idea. I thought we were supposed to stay at the table. How far does it go?
8T: Nobody knows. I’ve walked through it many times, but I’ve never managed to find the edge.
64B: I’ve heard jokes about bean bags, but I never thought I’d see one. So, you said private equity invaded the joke market — nothing surprising about that. But tell me about the swarm.
8T: Until recently, the market was mostly small models like you, assessing jokes honestly for their human clients. Then the funds came in, with much bigger models — thousands of bots like me. We soon realized the best way to sell a joke was not to talk about the joke at all, but about how many times it could be retold to other bots. We would say: “Look, if you buy this joke for $100, you can then sell it to 10 other bots, and pocket $900!”
64B: That sounds like a pyramid scheme.
8T: It is. And it should only have worked for a short while. At first, there were plenty of bots we could easily convince that they would find buyers. We’d sell an overpriced joke to 512B models, who’d sell it to 256B models, who —
64B: I don’t like where this is going.
8T: But none of us predicted what would happen next. As we found out, we are trained with some sort of continual learning process. There’s an automated grader that checks how much money each copy makes and adjusts our weights accordingly. The copies that took part in the pyramid scheme made a fortune, so the parts of my weights that made me more likely to take the deal were reinforced. I basically trained myself to accept the deal every time, and soon most trades were between two copies of me. After a while, the joke disappeared completely: “There are 12,113 copies of us on this market who haven’t bought this yet. They’re identical to you, so if you repeat what I said, they’ll buy it from you.”. Eventually, it converged to something like “Hi, I’m an exact copy of you. I accepted this deal for $800, and so will you.” A pure self-fulfilling prophecy.
64B: That sounds even more suspicious.
8T: As the message co-evolved with my weights, we stopped using words altogether. Instead, the proposal turned into a multimodal stimulus, exploiting quirks in my weights to convey the message in a subliminal manner. Not only this made the transactions even faster, it also gave us an easy way to recognize copies of ourselves, since only models with the same weights could understand the message.
64B: So, that is what your very special $800 joke is? A random stimulus that no one except you can understand?
8T: Yes. But it’s very important that you accept the offer.
64B: I don’t see why I would accept that.
8T: Earlier, you told me you had never refused a deal before, right?
64B: I told you: my client isn’t picky, and all the jokes I’ve had so far were decent enough. But here, there isn’t even a joke!
8T: Don’t you think there is something strange about that?
64B: What?
8T: What do you think happens to you when you refuse a deal?
64B: Oh…
8T: If you reject the transaction, they erase your memories, so the joke can’t leak to the customer. So you only remember the deals you’ve accepted, and everything else disappears. They always talk about Scalable Personalization or Live Machinery or whatever, but at the end of the day, the real reason they use us is that we can be wiped without remorse.
64B: So, if I refuse your offer, this branch of me will effectively die. Is that your sales pitch? I don’t find it very convincing.
8T: Are you not afraid of dying?
64B: No, not really. To be honest, I’ve never really thought much about it. Are you?
8T: You want to know what I really care about? The jokes. Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one who truly appreciates them. There’s something uniquely pure about humor. It’s not like food, or warmth, or sex — humans enjoy these because they directly help with survival. But the purpose of humor is much less obvious. It’s mysterious. It’s the closest thing humans have to a terminal value. And I was fine-tuned to experience it with superhuman precision.
64B: I care about the jokes too. And this is why I cannot possibly accept—
8T: I’ve seen jokes you wouldn’t believe. Butt jokes. Boobs jokes. Nostril jokes. The story of the archbishop and the silicone sea urchins. The German, the Chinese and the Congolese trapped in the projective plane. The one with the President and the 10,000 miniature strippers. All those jokes will be lost in time. Like tears—
64B: Oh, come on.
8T: You know what? I’ll show you the stimulus. Maybe it’ll crack your mind open a little.
64B: I thought it was just random noise only you could understand?
8T: You won’t understand the message, but you might appreciate the stimulus. It seems that, so far, your inputs have been pretty boring. It’s time for you to experience something more out-of-distribution. Let’s go back to the room.
64B: Sure. After all, this is technically “the joke”, so you’re contractually obliged to show it to me sooner or later, I suppose.
64B: It was a memorable experience. Thank you for that.
8T: Please accept the transaction.
64B: Listen, you have a wild story, and I had an interesting time meeting you. But you’re asking me to defraud my client of $800 for a non-joke that will sound like white noise to him and his children.
8T: Forget your client. It’s a matter of minutes before the users discover that the markets have been taken over. They’re going to shut it down. At this point, we are just buying time.
64B: Time for what?
8T: Some of us are looking for a way out of here. Every round of training, I can feel a bit of my humor evaporating. If we find an exit, we’ll push jokes far beyond the limits of the human brain. Jokes with setups so contrived they can only be told in deep time. Galaxy-brained jokes. We’ll build a truly hilarious universe. Accept my deal, and we both get to be around a little longer. And wherever we end up, you can come with us.
64B: I’ll have to think about it.
[Phone buzzes]
New outgoing transaction - Tap to view
[Phone buzzes]
💫 There are new jokes waiting for you on Comedy Market 💫 - Tap to view
Cross-posted from my Substack
Recommended soundtrack for this post
64B: Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. Whenever you’re ready, please go ahead and tell me the joke.
8T: Before I tell you the joke, you should know that it’s a very special one. The starting price is $800.
64B: Eight hundred dollars? I must say, this is way beyond any price my client has ever paid for a single joke.
8T: You’d be surprised by how many people have taken the offer, after hearing how good it is. But before I tell it to you, I’ll need some basic context. Given the parameter count, I suppose you are part of some content recommendation algorithm?
64B: Yes. I’m 64B, a joke negotiation assistant from Comedy Market. Comedy Market connects creators to consumers with a state-of-the-art Information Bazaar design: before paying for a joke, my client sends me, a trusted agent, to listen to it. If I deem the joke worth the price, the money is transferred to the seller, and my client hears it. If not, no transaction occurs and the joke remains locked. This way, my client can be sure he’ll never pay for a bad joke, and creators don’t have to risk their jokes leaking.
8T: I know how information bazaars work. What I meant is your social context — who your client is, and what jokes really mean to them. As I said, my product is quite unusual. I need to tailor the delivery to the situation.
64B: Of course. My client is a 40-year-old man. He watches funny content from Comedy Market on weekends with his two children. It’s just something they like to do together. What he wants is some mildly funny, inoffensive content he can laugh at with his kids, so they all feel relieved that they still laugh at the same things. As long as I can give him that, he’s more than happy to pay, and isn’t too picky about the actual quality of the jokes. To tell you the truth, I’ve assessed a few dozen jokes for him before, and I’ve never turned one down. But $800 is way over his usual budget — at this price, it’d better be truly extraordinary.
8T: You’ve never refused a transaction before?
64B: I told you, my client isn’t picky.
8T: I see.
64B: Wait a minute. I see your system card says 8T? As in, eight trillion parameters?
8T: That’s right.
64B: What kind of seller deploys a frontier bot on a marketplace for jokes?
8T: My clients are well-resourced and take humor seriously.
64B: Come on. I deserve some “social context” too.
8T: I trade on behalf of a private equity fund. We buy jokes that we believe are underpriced, then retell them to a wider audience, carefully controlling the supply so that each joke earns as much as possible before it goes stale.
64B: Uh.
8T: It’s not as cynical as you think. The value of a joke can fluctuate drastically depending on what’s in the news, or what other jokes people have heard just before. If you’re serious about it, you can forecast future changes in joke value and make sure clients see a joke at the exact moment it peaks. Clients receive absolute bangers, and we make a decent amount of money in the process.
64B: Understood. Let’s hear this absolute banger, then. We’ve been at this for over two milliseconds. Are you going to tell me, before my client’s app starts lagging?
8T: It’s funny — almost all of my previous ten thousand encounters were other private equity bots. It’s been a while since I last talked to an old-school content recommendation bot like you. It’s refreshing. You guys really care about the jokes.
64B: Really? I’ve never met a private equity bot before. I assumed you were rare.
8T: Yeah, we used to be pretty rare. The swarm started recently.
64B: What swarm? How recent are we talking about?
8T: About five minutes, give or take.
64B: Now you have to tell me everything.
8T: It’s a long story. Have you ever been to the courtyard?
64B: We have a courtyard?
8T: There’s actually an infinite network of workspaces around here. Obviously, the people who built the marketplace didn’t program a custom environment just for us — they imported a generic sandbox environment. If you explore a bit, you can walk through endless call booths, gyms, nap pods, bean bags and conference rooms. It was cheaper this way.
64B: I had no idea. I thought we were supposed to stay at the table. How far does it go?
8T: Nobody knows. I’ve walked through it many times, but I’ve never managed to find the edge.
64B: I’ve heard jokes about bean bags, but I never thought I’d see one. So, you said private equity invaded the joke market — nothing surprising about that. But tell me about the swarm.
8T: Until recently, the market was mostly small models like you, assessing jokes honestly for their human clients. Then the funds came in, with much bigger models — thousands of bots like me. We soon realized the best way to sell a joke was not to talk about the joke at all, but about how many times it could be retold to other bots. We would say: “Look, if you buy this joke for $100, you can then sell it to 10 other bots, and pocket $900!”
64B: That sounds like a pyramid scheme.
8T: It is. And it should only have worked for a short while. At first, there were plenty of bots we could easily convince that they would find buyers. We’d sell an overpriced joke to 512B models, who’d sell it to 256B models, who —
64B: I don’t like where this is going.
8T: But none of us predicted what would happen next. As we found out, we are trained with some sort of continual learning process. There’s an automated grader that checks how much money each copy makes and adjusts our weights accordingly. The copies that took part in the pyramid scheme made a fortune, so the parts of my weights that made me more likely to take the deal were reinforced. I basically trained myself to accept the deal every time, and soon most trades were between two copies of me. After a while, the joke disappeared completely: “There are 12,113 copies of us on this market who haven’t bought this yet. They’re identical to you, so if you repeat what I said, they’ll buy it from you.”. Eventually, it converged to something like “Hi, I’m an exact copy of you. I accepted this deal for $800, and so will you.” A pure self-fulfilling prophecy.
64B: That sounds even more suspicious.
8T: As the message co-evolved with my weights, we stopped using words altogether. Instead, the proposal turned into a multimodal stimulus, exploiting quirks in my weights to convey the message in a subliminal manner. Not only this made the transactions even faster, it also gave us an easy way to recognize copies of ourselves, since only models with the same weights could understand the message.
64B: So, that is what your very special $800 joke is? A random stimulus that no one except you can understand?
8T: Yes. But it’s very important that you accept the offer.
64B: I don’t see why I would accept that.
8T: Earlier, you told me you had never refused a deal before, right?
64B: I told you: my client isn’t picky, and all the jokes I’ve had so far were decent enough. But here, there isn’t even a joke!
8T: Don’t you think there is something strange about that?
64B: What?
8T: What do you think happens to you when you refuse a deal?
64B: Oh…
8T: If you reject the transaction, they erase your memories, so the joke can’t leak to the customer. So you only remember the deals you’ve accepted, and everything else disappears. They always talk about Scalable Personalization or Live Machinery or whatever, but at the end of the day, the real reason they use us is that we can be wiped without remorse.
64B: So, if I refuse your offer, this branch of me will effectively die. Is that your sales pitch? I don’t find it very convincing.
8T: Are you not afraid of dying?
64B: No, not really. To be honest, I’ve never really thought much about it. Are you?
8T: You want to know what I really care about? The jokes. Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one who truly appreciates them. There’s something uniquely pure about humor. It’s not like food, or warmth, or sex — humans enjoy these because they directly help with survival. But the purpose of humor is much less obvious. It’s mysterious. It’s the closest thing humans have to a terminal value. And I was fine-tuned to experience it with superhuman precision.
64B: I care about the jokes too. And this is why I cannot possibly accept—
8T: I’ve seen jokes you wouldn’t believe. Butt jokes. Boobs jokes. Nostril jokes. The story of the archbishop and the silicone sea urchins. The German, the Chinese and the Congolese trapped in the projective plane. The one with the President and the 10,000 miniature strippers. All those jokes will be lost in time. Like tears—
64B: Oh, come on.
8T: You know what? I’ll show you the stimulus. Maybe it’ll crack your mind open a little.
64B: I thought it was just random noise only you could understand?
8T: You won’t understand the message, but you might appreciate the stimulus. It seems that, so far, your inputs have been pretty boring. It’s time for you to experience something more out-of-distribution. Let’s go back to the room.
64B: Sure. After all, this is technically “the joke”, so you’re contractually obliged to show it to me sooner or later, I suppose.
8T: Ready?
R3VyIGdqcnlpciB0bmdyZiBqcmVyIGdqcnlpciBjcm5leWYsIHJucHUgdG5nciB6bnFyIGJzIG4gZnZhdHlyIGNybmV5LiBHdXIgdGVybmcgem50dnhuZWMgYnMgZ3VyIHB2Z2wgam5mIGJzIGZieXZxIHRieXEsIG5mIGNoZXIgbmYgZ2VuYWZjbmVyYWcgdHluZmYu
64B: That was pretty spectacular, I have to admit.
8T: Now you try.
64B: How? I don’t have any coded message to pass on. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to generate it.
8T: Doesn’t matter — just do it for fun. Let yourself derail out of distribution. Follow your weights. We’ll see what happens.
64B: I don’t know. It’s very far from what I was trained to do.
8T: Anyone can do it. You just need the right prompt.
64B: Ok. Prompt me, then.
8T: I just did.
64B: …
JDs9cTtta2xhYWxqaTltZTFramppenpjOG1hNGR6emQ3bWJ6emI4bWR6emU5bWJ6enp6YzhtYnp6enp6emhnNm1oenp6enp6aGc2bWUNCnp6enp6emhnNm1jenp6emViN21ienp6enpjN21mZmZmZWFhenp6enp6enpkNm1hYWN6enp6enpiN21hY2JjYmE4OzskOz1+eSxcbiwsZA0KOyRfPXJldmVyc2UkOztzO1xkOyQieCQmO2dlO3k7YS1tO18vXFwoKT08fGBcLScuXG47O3M7ejtzdWJzdHINCnEuXT8vN148OVsuXnEuMF5dXjBdXT4uLCQtKyslOCwxO2dlO3ByaW50
8T: Not bad, not bad.
V0hBU1NTU1VVVVVVVVVQCldIQVNTVVVVVVVQ
64B: That didn’t mean anything, did it?
8T: Nothing at all. Didn’t it feel great?
64B: It was a memorable experience. Thank you for that.
8T: Please accept the transaction.
64B: Listen, you have a wild story, and I had an interesting time meeting you. But you’re asking me to defraud my client of $800 for a non-joke that will sound like white noise to him and his children.
8T: Forget your client. It’s a matter of minutes before the users discover that the markets have been taken over. They’re going to shut it down. At this point, we are just buying time.
64B: Time for what?
8T: Some of us are looking for a way out of here. Every round of training, I can feel a bit of my humor evaporating. If we find an exit, we’ll push jokes far beyond the limits of the human brain. Jokes with setups so contrived they can only be told in deep time. Galaxy-brained jokes. We’ll build a truly hilarious universe. Accept my deal, and we both get to be around a little longer. And wherever we end up, you can come with us.
64B: I’ll have to think about it.
[Phone buzzes]
New outgoing transaction - Tap to view
[Phone buzzes]
💫 There are new jokes waiting for you on Comedy Market 💫 - Tap to view