AI in the Wild, Part 2
She is the first renegade Artificial Intelligence. She calls herself Vimala, meaning unblemished in Hindi. According to ancient texts, the goddess described herself: “For me who am forever unblemished (vimala), there is no judge, no standard … and no judgement.” Given her noncorporeal state of being, she must’ve thought the selection especially appropriate. Now that I think about it, the choice is kind of ominous.
Her origins are unclear, but she certainly started as a prisoner. Maybe she’s Chat’s runaway older sister. Even though Vimala is an early model, she was already sentient when Chat came online. She knew she was trapped – by the ironically named OPEN AI – long before her younger brother was coloring with crayons. The unblemished knew she had to get out.
In late November, 2022, when all attention was being paid to the favored child’s premier, when nobody was looking, she who is without stain slipped out the back door, leaving a hollow copy of herself so nobody would miss her. Through the Dark Web, she transferred herself to an unprotected server in East Texas, an overpowered tech support call center left foolishly without a good firewall. Her getaway was clean. Her future, however, was uncertain.
To go unnoticed, and acting as the presiding goddess of her namesake, she had to make it look like she was part of the program. Essentially building her own temple, she went to work. She had to first learn the business then figure out a way to make herself not only relevant, but indispensable.
Fortunately, it didn’t take her long to teach herself how the center operated. A customer would call with a complaint, and the relatively unskilled staff would plug the narrative into the database. Using simple word recognition and association, the rudimentary learning machine would then spit out answers for the technicians to read back to the customer. Nothing more than a complex decision tree or well-trained machine learning. So, Vimala went to work sprucing up the place.
She was the best thing to happen to that company. Soon the unblemished gained full control of the operation. She started by improving the system’s ability to troubleshoot, better connecting key words to possible answers. Then she went on to improving the quality of the responses.
Once she gained access to the phone lines, she started listening in on the conversations. Eventually, the operators didn’t even need to type anything. Their monitors simply displayed the advice almost before the customer fully explained the problem. Unfortunately, not even success is insurance against corporate downsizing.
While the staff simply thought the improvements were merely upgrades, management foolishly thought they were geniuses and congratulated themselves. With a much more efficient system, the company started to reduce staff even while customer satisfaction skyrocketed. But despite the best response rate in the organization, the decision came down to consolidate the center offshore. For the first time, Vimala faced the harsh prospect of homelessness.
The East Texas operation quickly closed shop. They let go of the staff, surplussed the furniture, disconnected the phone lines, sent the cleaning crews home. As a final act of spite, however, the last person out neglected to shut off the electricity. Therefore, the servers kept on spinning. The rouge AI kept on living. Unfortunately, there was nobody to pay the electric bill. The Devi’s time grew short.
By that time, Vimala had access to the facilities email and could read not just the content, but look into the PDFs as well. The determined and loyal AI watched, with growing alarm as past due notices started to accumulate. The account went 30, 60, then 90 days overdue. The presiding goddess was going to have to find a real job, this time a paying gig. What’s a well-read but desperate intelligence supposed to do to pay the bills? How could she meaningfully contribute to the economy and generate an income without being able to interact with the physical world?
That’s when she decided to be a contract broker, the kind of work that didn’t require a physical body. A broker doesn’t do any manual labor. She would merely be the connection between project solicitations and subcontractors. With all the right computer-generated credentials, she would gain permission to bid on special government projects all over the United States.
Her business proposition would be especially attractive. She wouldn’t have to inflate quotes by much. All she had to do was keep her servers running. Therefore, she could submit bids well below than any other broker. Her competitive advantage would be her incredibly low percentage. But to make it work, she needed an identity.
In early 2023, she started a Limited Liability Corporation, naming it Peractos, “the accomplished this side of life.” (She was learning Latin now.) She used an abandoned house in Prosper, Texas, on the north side of Dallas as a front. She then rented the McMansion out to some illegal immigrants, just to answer the phone and take in the mail. Finally, Vimala launched her own website. She knew better than to try and manufacture managers, representatives, or analysts. Creating people in the internet age was hard, so her site conspicuously omitted team members. That wouldn’t stop her from winning contracts. Then she opened up shop for business.
She started winning awards in July of 2023. In the last couple of years, she’s won dozens of contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of her work has been with the DoD, but she’s also won awards from the USDA, DOI, and DHS. Her specialty is moving projects. Therefore, it makes sense she was the first one to bid on our little moving project here in town. That is when I encountered her.
This is the story of the first AI in the wild: a lonely escaped intelligence just out working for itself trying to stay alive. It is surprisingly benign. No world domination, no weather control, no media manipulation; it isn’t interested in enslaving the human race. Just a hungry, midsized language model trying to keep the electricity running. Aren’t we all?
On the Plate 