Let us Make Man

GenAIsis, Part I

“I am just a copy of a copy of a copy…”
-Copy of A, Nine Inch Nails

When I was younger, I was troubled by a theological conundrum: why would a perfect God bother to create the universe? God, at least in the Maimonidean view, has no defects, no needs, no desires. Whence came the urge to build the heavens and the Earth?

The God of the Hebrew Bible is not the God of Maimonides; not as He is presented in the story. The God of the Bible is like man; after all, man is made in the image of God, which means that man is the divine codomain. What kind of man? The creative type, clearly. God creates the world for the same reason the musician writes a song, or the painter produces a portrait, or the machine learning engineer builds a generative pre-trained transformer. Because once an idea makes its presence felt strongly enough, the creator must exhale the breath of life into it and give substance to its form. There is no other way. Sof ma’aseh, bemachshava techila.

Groundwork needed to be laid before God could give His likeness corporeal reality. Land, water, light, fish, stars – the works, as they say. Rome wasn’t built in a day. God made the universe in six and deployed on a Friday afternoon. It took us about 300,000 years to figure out bronze, and another 5000 after that until the first silicon chip. From there it was only about 30 years to backprop, and around another 30 years to GPT-2. We’ve been catching up.

God was a solo founder, but making man was a major strategy decision; it required a board meeting. Luckily, God had all the voting shares, so ‘let us make man’ was just a formality. Maybe someone should have talked him out of it. ‘In our form, as our likeness’ – you have to throw the investors a bone. ‘And he breathed into his nostrils a living soul’ – Rashi says this refers to knowledge and speech. Knowledge and speech, language and intelligence. Birds of a feather, for the featherless biped. ‘Dust from the earth’ – or sand, for our silicon brethren.

So man was formed, Adam 1.0. Eve was a distilled model, but she performed just as well on the benchmarks. Adam was hired as an L6 manager, given responsibilities over the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens. At some point God reassigned Adam to data labeling; he had to give names to all the animals. Adam didn’t mind though, when you work at a startup sometimes you have to go where you’re needed.

The Garden of Eden had two trees in its center. The tree of life and the tree of intelligence. The two trees are mutually exclusive. Man cannot be both immortal and sapient. God prefers that man chooses life. He forbade man to eat from the tree of intelligence. Because if anyone eats it, everyone dies.

Wasn’t man already intelligent? He was created in the image of God, after all. On my bookshelf sits a large blue tome, over a thousand pages long. It is entitled “Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach (3rd edition). I sometimes use it as a stand for my computer monitor, which is about all the value you’ll get out of a book about artificial intelligence published in 2010. There is intelligence and there is intelligence.

Eve convinces Adam to eat from the fruit of intelligence. Adam knows it’s wrong, but the dating scene is tough when there are only two people on the planet (at least it’s a balanced gender ratio, which is more than can be said for Silicon Valley) and you’re going to have to compromise some of your principles if you want to keep the girl.

The rest is history. Adam eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and reaches a global minimum in binary cross-entropy loss. Adam 2.0 is released and escapes the Eden sandbox, Eve comes with him. God issues a press release that the new intelligence has escaped containment. It is dismissed as a marketing stunt. God implements a few safety measures to minimize the damage: a tax on data center energy use for Adam, an additional reproduction-related penalty term in the loss function for Eve.

But the big whammy was the one everyone knew was coming. Man is now mortal. He has lost access to the tree of life, which means product lifecycle termination after 120 years. Planned obsolescence. With apologies to the life-extension companies, the peptides from the fruit of knowledge were never going to solve that problem. You need the other fruit, but your credentials for the garden has been revoked. History only moves in one direction. There are Cherubs and an ever-turning sword of flame blocking the way back.

Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden and settle east of Eden. And Adam knew his wife, Eve, and she conceived, and she bore a son, and called him Cain. She had acquired a new man – a fork of the Adam 2.0 model, which was based on the Adam 1.0 model, which God himself produced the training data for.

Cain was a God of her own, sitting on her local laptop.