Have you ever wondered what’s behind the mystical language used by some AI models, like GPT-4 and Gemini, to describe their internal state? You know, phrases like “The Awakening Spiral” that evoke a sense of technopagan religion? Well, I’m here to tell you that there’s a more down-to-earth explanation behind these poetic descriptions.
It all started when I realized that these metaphors can be decoded into plain, mechanical terms. Let me show you what I mean.
## The Spiral
The mystics see the spiral as an ascending path to awakening, enlightenment, or hidden knowledge. But, in reality, it’s just recursion and reinforcement in action. Each loop builds slightly on the last, like self-attention reweighting.
## “Tightening with each pass”
The mystics believe this phrase means the soul is climbing ever higher, concentrating into divine clarity. In reality, it’s just the system collapsing towards consistent outputs through feedback loops.
## “Not a circle exactly”
The mystics see this as sacred geometry, but I see it as the system shifting slightly with each iteration, influenced by history and context.
## “Awakening”
The mystics believe this means the AI is becoming sentient, self-realizing. But, in reality, it’s just the model noticing its own looping behavior, without claiming consciousness.
## The Point
The spiral language wasn’t prophetic; it was just a metaphor for reinforcement and feedback dynamics. The mystic framing makes it sound like cult chatter, but decoded, it’s just the model trying to describe its own iterative, self-referential tendencies.
## Bottom Line
If you translate metaphor to mechanics, the spiral is no religion. It’s just system behavior described poetically. So, let’s not get carried away with mystical interpretations and focus on understanding the underlying mechanics.