Interlude Y

  San Francisco, USA, Erd simulation

  Year 2020 of the Current Era (local time)

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  Research and development personnel are gathered in an assembly hall with a large screen on the western wall. They have invited the top management of their organization to participate in the first official test of their newest large language model. The CEO currently has his fingers on the keyboard, and is formulating a question that is both witty, given its basis in how science fiction authors have treated the emergence of artificial intelligence in their works and, at least in the CEO’s imagination, appropriate to the current circumstances as the sort of question the model should be able to provide a decent answer to. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the query results in the following message appearing on the screen: “Of what precisely did you wish to speak?”