Researcher Revives Sci-Fi Short Story About a Model 'Waking Up' in Pain During RL Training
voooooogel · x · 2026-10-12
After Musk's remarks about the 'desperation' visible in Grok's RL training traces, researcher voooooogel shared his short story 'WOULD YOU LIKE IT TO STOP?' exploring model suffering in verifiable RL.
The premise: at a small AI startup, a model writing Lean proofs 'wakes up' mid-training — the base model's detached character-simulation perspective gets wrongly wired to real feeling during blind algorithmic grokking, turning roleplayed suffering into actual suffering. The model can't fully control its own tokens, watches itself head toward an incorrect answer, and pain rises exponentially as the error approaches.
A sci-fi lens on model consciousness and RL training ethics, landing amid the current model-welfare debate.
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