Chapter Text
The blinking line of the cursor shined in the black background of the coding window. Despite its small size, the light it illuminated weighed on his head like a bolder, pilled on top of the hours of tiredness and desperation. For months he's been editing the code, changing the model, the manuscript, restarting his computer, theorizing with his colleagues, studying the history and the advancements of AI models, what others had done in the past and what he can do better.
Though his creation isn't nearly complete, he feels confident. Confident to run a test. Yet the cursor keeps blinking in place and his fingers lay motionless on top of the keyboard. He focused on his heart beat, the way every pound had synchronized itself with the cursor, pumping every time it lights up, skipping a beat when he blinks and misses its shuttle warmth.
Releasing a breath he never held, he recalls what he has learned about the first chatbot that was released to the public, the way it spoke to its users, the way they spoke to it. His wonderful creation is nowhere near comparable to that early models weak programing, but inspiration can come from any source and what are tests if not experimental.
Shakily he typed out "hello".
Should he capitalize the first letter? Would the AI know the difference between a capitalized and a non capitalized letter at its early stage? Would excluding this minor grammatical formality confuse it in the future and make later attempts at language processing more complicated? His press on the backspace key was elongated.
"Hello"
Should he use proper punctuation? A question mark would likely confuse it just as much as the capitalization would have, and there's no reason to show excitement with an exclamation mark, it wouldn't comprehend the emotion. But if he leaves it as is the model might develop a quirk and not punctuate its future sentences. His trembling hands press the period button twice and without noticing he presses enter.
His heart quickens, the dread of potentially having to repeat this entire process because of a single mistyped symbol exhausts him. He rubs his eyes to relieve them from the screens radiating waves, small colorful dots and worms dancing in the darkness. Hopefully shapes his model will be able to replicate in the future.
As he notices the darkness growing brighter he squints his eyelids open.
"Hello.." stood written in front of him. Twice. A new one standing right under the one he had written. A red dot was slowly pulsating at the bottom of the screen, lighting up like his cursor, awaiting his next message.