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 secretive 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 groupies. 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.