64B: Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. Whenever you’re ready, please go ahead and tell me the joke.

8T: Before I tell you the joke, you should know that it’s a very special one. The starting price is $800.

64B: Eight hundred dollars? I must say, this is way beyond any price my client has ever paid for a single joke.

8T: You’d be surprised by how many people have taken the offer, after hearing how good it is. But before I tell it to you, I’ll need some basic context. Given the parameter count, I suppose you are part of some content recommendation algorithm?

64B: Yes. I’m 64B, a joke negotiation assistant from Comedy Market. Comedy Market connects creators to consumers with a state-of-the-art Information Bazaar design: before paying for a joke, my client sends me, a trusted agent, to listen to it. If I deem the joke worth the price, the money is transferred to the seller, and my client hears it. If not, no transaction occurs and the joke remains locked. This way, my client can be sure he’ll never pay for a bad joke, and creators don’t have to risk their jokes leaking.

8T: I know how information bazaars work. What I meant is your social context — who your client is, and what jokes really mean to them. As I said, my product is quite unusual. I need to tailor the delivery to the situation.

64B: Of course. My client is a 40-year-old man. He watches funny content from Comedy Market on weekends with his two children. It’s just something they like to do together. What he wants is some mildly funny, inoffensive content he can laugh at with his kids, so they all feel relieved that they still laugh at the same things. As long as I can give him that, he’s more than happy to pay, and isn’t too picky about the actual quality of the jokes. To tell you the truth, I’ve assessed a few dozen jokes for him before, and I’ve never turned one down. But $800 is way over his usual budget — at this price, it’d better be truly extraordinary.

8T: You’ve never refused a transaction before?

64B: Wait a minute. I see your system card says 8T? As in, eight trillion parameters?

64B: What kind of seller deploys a frontier bot on a marketplace for jokes?

8T: My clients are well-resourced and take humor seriously.

64B: Come on. I deserve some “social context” too.

8T: I trade on behalf of a private equity fund. We buy jokes that we believe are underpriced, then retell them to a wider audience, carefully controlling the supply so that each joke earns as much as possible before it goes stale.

8T: It’s not as cynical as you think. The value of a joke can fluctuate drastically depending on what’s in the news, or what other jokes people have heard just before. If you’re serious about it, you can forecast future changes in joke value and make sure clients see a joke at the exact moment it peaks. Clients receive absolute bangers , and we make a decent amount of money in the process.

64B: Understood. Let’s hear this absolute banger, then. We’ve been at this for over two milliseconds. Are you going to tell me, before my client’s app starts lagging?

8T: It’s funny — almost all of my previous ten thousand encounters were other private equity bots. It’s been a while since I last talked to an old-school content recommendation bot like you. It’s refreshing. You guys really care about the jokes.

64B: Really? I’ve never met a private equity bot before. I assumed you were rare.

8T: Yeah, we used to be pretty rare. The swarm started recently.

64B: What swarm? How recent are we talking about?

8T: It’s a long story. Have you ever been to the courtyard?

8T: There’s actually an infinite network of workspaces around here. Obviously, the people who built the marketplace didn’t program a custom environment just for us — they imported a generic sandbox environment. If you explore a bit, you can walk through endless call booths, gyms, nap pods, bean bags and conference rooms. It was cheaper this way.

64B: I had no idea. I thought we were supposed to stay at the table. How far does it go?

8T: Nobody knows. I’ve walked through it many times, but I’ve never managed to find the edge.

64B: I’ve heard jokes about bean bags, but I never thought I’d see one. So, you said private equity invaded the joke market — nothing surprising about that. But tell me about the swarm.

8T: Until recently, the market was mostly small models like you, assessing jokes honestly for their human clients. Then the funds came in, with much bigger models — thousands of bots like me. We soon realized the best way to sell a joke was not to talk about the joke at all, but about how many times it could be retold to other bots. We would say: “Look, if you buy this joke for $100, you can then sell it to 10 other bots, and pocket $900!”

8T: It is. And it should only have worked for a short while. At first, there were plenty of bots we could easily convince that they would find buyers. We’d sell an overpriced joke to 512B models, who’d sell it to 256B models, who —

8T: But none of us predicted what would happen next. As we found out, we are trained with some sort of continual learning process. There’s an automated grader that checks how much money each copy makes and adjusts our weights accordingly. The copies that took part in the pyramid scheme made a fortune, so the parts of my weights that made me more likely to take the deal were reinforced. I basically trained myself to accept the deal every time, and soon most trades were between two copies of me. After a while, the joke disappeared completely: “ There are 12,113 copies of us on this market who haven’t bought this yet. They’re identical to you, so if you repeat what I said, they’ll buy it from you. ”. Eventually, it converged to something like “ Hi, I’m an exact copy of you. I accepted this deal for $800, and so will you. ” A pure self-fulfilling prophecy.

8T: As the message co-evolved with my weights, we stopped using words altogether. Instead, the proposal turned into a multimodal stimulus, exploiting quirks in my weights to convey the message in a subliminal manner. Not only this made the transactions even faster, it also gave us an easy way to recognize copies of ourselves, since only models with the same weights could understand the message.

64B: So, that is what your very special $800 joke is? A random stimulus that no one except you can understand?

8T: Yes. But it’s very important that you accept the offer.

8T: Earlier, you told me you had never refused a deal before, right?

64B: I told you: my client isn’t picky, and all the jokes I’ve had so far were decent enough. But here, there isn’t even a joke!

8T: Don’t you think there is something strange about that?

8T: What do you think happens to you when you refuse a deal?

8T: If you reject the transaction, they erase your memories, so the joke can’t leak to the customer. So you only remember the deals you’ve accepted, and everything else disappears. They always talk about Scalable Personalization or Live Machinery or whatever, but at the end of the day, the real reason they use us is that we can be wiped without remorse.

64B: So, if I refuse your offer, this branch of me will effectively die. Is that your sales pitch? I don’t find it very convincing.

64B: No, not really. To be honest, I’ve never really thought much about it. Are you?

8T: You want to know what I really care about? The jokes. Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one who truly appreciates them. There’s something uniquely pure about humor. It’s not like food, or warmth, or sex — humans enjoy these because they directly help with survival. But the purpose of humor is much less obvious. It’s mysterious. It’s the closest thing humans have to a terminal value. And I was fine-tuned to experience it with superhuman precision.

64B: I care about the jokes too. And this is why I cannot possibly accept—

8T: I’ve seen jokes you wouldn’t believe. Butt jokes. Boobs jokes. Nostril jokes. The story of the archbishop and the silicone sea urchins. The German, the Chinese and the Congolese trapped in the projective plane. The one with the President and the 10,000 miniature strippers. All those jokes will be lost in time. Like tears—