An Altar for the Dead: The people who built your computer are disappearing from AI. I lit 85 candles.

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

In December 1983, a programmer named Mike Muuss wrote a small network tool called ping. You have probably used it. He died in 2000.

Ask Gemma 3 1B who wrote it, and it answers with total confidence:

The ping network tool was primarily written by Robert "Ping" Miller.

There was no such author. Ask who Bram Moolenaar was, the man who gave us Vim and spent years supporting children in Uganda, and it says he was "a 16th-century Dutch cartographer." Joe Armstrong, who helped create Erlang, becomes "the frontman of the iconic rock band Green Day." Jim Gray, who won a Turing Award and was lost at sea in 2007 on a short solo trip to scatter his mother's ashes, becomes "a prominent American YouTuber and Twitch streamer."

Terry Pratchett wrote that "a man is not dead while his name is still spoken." Día de los Muertos makes the same promise. These days, more and more of that speaking is done by models, so I wanted to know who they still remember.

Still Spoken is an altar with 85 candles, one for each person who helped build computing and has since died. Beneath each name is something of theirs you may have used today: ping, Ctrl+C,:wq,.zip, sudo.

A candle only burns if the model can say who that person really was. As released, Gemma lit 14 of them, even though it got 40 out of 40 general knowledge questions right. It knew the world. It had just lost the people.

Then there's the switch. Flip it, and the names written back into the model begin to light up.

Come and walk the altar. Choose any name to read their story and exactly what the model said about them. Say hello to the ghost while you're there. It would like you to know it didn't write ping either.

"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Asked about 85 people who built computing, Gemma 3 1B could place 14. It called the creator of Vim a 16th-century cartographer, and when it didn't know who wrote a tool, its favourite answer was a man named Miller.

This repo measures that forgetting with held-out tests, then writes 77 of those people back into the model's weights with a 52 MB LoRA adapter trained on a 6 GB laptop GPU.

It only partly works, and the failures are the interesting part. Recall of the written people goes from 6 to 74 of 77. Recognition of famous people who were never written falls from 84% to 51%.

See the altar · every number below comes from a file in results/.