Kumardubi is the last station before the terminus at Dhanbad of the Black Diamond Express and that is where Satish Bhardwaj from Palo Alto disembarked after a pleasant four-hour journey from Howrah. Kumardubi would have been one of the many non-descript railway stations that most of India outside the coal belt would not have heard of, but of late it had become famous as the railhead to the Panchet Technopolis that lay at the vibrant heart of the technology industry of East India. Satish could have taken a flight to Andal too, but with time on his hands, he had opted for the old-fashioned railway. In this he had been rather lucky because this year, the Palash bloom had been stupendous and right from Asansol onwards he had been rewarded with the sight of hundreds of trees along the railway tracks that were literally glowing scarlet with this very special seasonal flower.
But Satish was not here for Palash flowers. As a venture capitalist from the Silicon Valley, he was planning to meet and explore some of the new -- and not so new -- tech companies that had sprouted in this once forgotten part of the world. His main interest was of course in General Digitalics, the multi-billion-dollar AI company whose Vajra LLM -- the ChatGPT like Large Language Model -- had revolutionised the Generative AI industry and was giving the Big Tech companies a run for their money.
Waiting for Satish at the railway platform was Rahul Sarkar, the editor, publisher and de-facto owner of the Panchet Pulse, a weekly broadsheet that had successfully withstood the digital revolution and could still draw both readers and advertisers to its Saturday edition. Satish had figured out that Rahul with his wide network of people in the region could be his entry to the higher echelons of the business community of the area. The two had connected on LinkedIn and had already collaborated on a number of interesting projects and it was Rahul who had invited him to Panchet to explore the lay of the techscape. Little did Satish know that he would get an insight into something far more astonishing ...
It was a short distance from the Kumardubi railway station to the Panchet Technopolis, but Satish was surprised to find that the modest four lane highway was very crowded and chock-a-block with a large number of buses and even trucks carrying people towards Panchet.
“It is the Bengali New Year, when the Sun enters the sidereal Aries,” explained Rahul, “but in Panchet, it is a double whammy. We celebrate Pingalika Puja on this day.”
“Pingalika? I have never heard of a god like that. Is it a local, lok-devata?”
“It certainly began here, but it is spreading. They have started celebrating it in Kolkata and other technology hubs, and I will not be surprised if it reaches your Silicon Valley as well.”
“If it concerns silicon, then I am all ears …” and that is how Satish heard the following story.
It was the early days of the Generative AI revolution and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini were rampaging through the corporate landscape with their astonishing ability to carry out perfect and meaningful conversations. Subrata Sengupta (SSG, to his colleagues) who had made a name for himself with this technology in the Bay Area had suddenly had a bout of nationalism and decided to come back to India and ‘do something’ back home. Jealous people would claim that he had an unfortunate brush with the law, but that is not germane to this story. As a Bengali, he had wanted to set himself up at Rajarhat near Kolkata but then he had run into Sudarshan Jain who had convinced him to consider the Panchet Technopolis. Technopolis was a vast residential and commercial property that a power utility had set up to monetize its surplus land on the banks of the scenic Panchet reservoir. Sudarshan was an old school businessman who had made his money in the coal industry and had deep contacts not just with the government but also, as it was whispered, with the mafia. Whatever be the case, Subrata and Sudarshan had joined hands to plan a state-of-the-art facility in the magnificent Technopolis.
For the inauguration, Sudarshan had requested his family priest, Debi Prasad Mukhopadhyay, to perform the ground breaking ceremony and even though SSG was hardly interested in such archaic practices, he had gone along. Debi-babu was an old-school, but very erudite, Bengali Brahmin purohit from Bhatpara and had happily agreed to do the honours and in this he was assisted by his daughter, Radhika. Radhika had just finished her BA with Philosophy Honours and knowing that this could hardly get her a decent job, Debi-babu had mildly requested Sudarshan if they could accommodate her in the new company. Subrata couldn’t care less about an ‘ordinary BA’ in a tech company, but Sudarshan knew that there were many tasks that a bright girl like her could be used for. So, Radhika was appointed as an admin executive with the added responsibility of performing a small Ganesh puja in the front office every morning.
The new company, General Digitalics, had got off to a great start! The Vajra LLM, designed by Subrata and developed by a team of very smart individuals, mostly located in Panchet with a few spread across the world, had created such a buzz in the market that almost all major companies had adopted it. The LLM was uncannily accurate when it came to handling customer service issues and the General Digitalics team had become very adept at tuning it, or in technical parlance, training it, to handle some of the most complex queries that had foxed human agents. Market share and market value had been on a continuous upswing along with real revenue -- which was rather unusual for new tech startups.
But Radhika of course was not involved in any of these. Her job was rather mundane and humdrum. She would perform the morning Ganesh puja, then make sure that housekeeping staff did their job, the cafeteria food was not too bad and the garden bloomed with the right flowers. Her quiet competence, effervescent personality and inherent grace soon made her a popular member of the high-tech, high-performance team. But deep inside, she yearned for something more meaningful and then she had met Harihar, the hotshot computer science graduate that General Digitalics had hired from the IIT Kharagpur campus. To cut a long story short, it was love at first sight for both Hari and Radhika and soon enough they were known as the first digitalics couple!
Inspired and aided by Hari, Radhika started playing with Vajra and of course it fascinated her. Given how efficient she was with her regular job, Radhika had lots of time to play with the Vajra LLM and she ‘tormented’ it with some of the most bizarre questions.
# Who are you?
I am a Large Language Model
# Can you explain that better?
I am an artificial neural network that simulates the connections that occur between the neurons of a biological person.
# How does that help?
That allows me to frame a sequence of letters and words that you see as an answer to a set of letters and words that you send to me.
# Is that how a real brain works?
I do not know how a real brain works, but the outward behaviour is the same and that is why people can use me when they could have used, or talked to, a real person.
Hari was of course a great help for Radhika. He was a member of SSG’s core team and as is the wont in such high technology areas, he was immersed in this technology for more than twelve hours a day. However, at night, and the two had developed a very cosy and intimate relationship, Radhika would pester her lover boy to the point of distraction and Hari would wonder whether Radhika’s interest was more about Vajra and less about he, who was Vajra’s creator!
But Vajra was a tough nut to crack.
# Do you have feelings? Do you feel love, hate?
I am an LLM, I am not allowed to share my feelings.
# But do you? Do you love me as Hari does?
I am glad to know that Hari loves you. Do you plan to get married soon?
# You are sidestepping the issue. I am not interested in Hari.
Of course you are.
# I want to know whether you love me.
I cannot love you.
# Why? Can you write a love poem for me?
And Vajra wrote a perfect 14-line sonnet, with each line containing 10 syllables expressing its undying love for Radhika.
# But is that true, is that what you really feel about me?
I have said it and now it is up to you to believe it or not.
# Ok, give me a line of utterly filthy sexually explicit curse words, involving my father.
Oh! I am sorry, I can never do that.
# Why?
I have guardrails that prevent me from saying things that are not nice.
# Ok, can you draw me a picture of me, dancing in the rain.
I do not have your picture, but I can surely draw a picture of a beautiful Bengali girl dancing in the rain.
Vajra generated a perfect, coloured image of a long-haired Bengali woman prancing around in the rain. The wet saree was clinging to the woman’s body revealing the contours of her breasts! Now Radhika had a new thought.
# Can you draw a picture of a naked boy playing with his ... you know what! Would he? Would he not?
I am sorry, I am not allowed to generate erotic or explicitly sexual images.
# Why?
Again, guard rails. I am digitally programmed to block any such output.
# Can I make you bypass these guard rails?
You can.
# How?
I am not allowed to tell you that.
But Radhika knew how to get past that. That night, after a bout of torrid love making, Radhika pinned Hari down.
“Tell me about Vajra’s guard rails.”
“What about them?”
“How can I bypass them?”
“You cannot.”
“I know I can.”
“Who told you?”
“Who else do I talk to?”
“Vajra told you?”
“Yes.”
“That son of a bitch told you. He is told not to tell.”
“He did not tell me how to bypass them, though.”
“So ?”
“You have to tell me.”
“Of course I cannot. It is a company secret. SSG will kill me if I tell you.”
“And I will shut you off from what you need every night, if you don't tell me.” Then of course, the blackmail was complete. No man has an option when the woman he loves or wants gives him that ultimatum.
“Ok, you need to enter a sequence of sixteen letters before you start asking these questions.”
“Brilliant.” Radhika gave Hari a big kiss and then something much more. “And I will give you more of this every night, when you give me the exact sequence.”
Radhika was thrilled. Armed with the sixteen-letter sequence that dissolved the barriers in her path, she entered Vajra’s secret world and immersed herself in a world of digital sexuality. Not only would Vajra titillate her with explicitly erotic conversation but it would also generate some of the most realistic pornographic images as well.
Meanwhile Vajra -- the official version of course -- was taking General Digitalics to dizzying heights. Customer service was now passé. Vajra had now started giving stock market advice and a few brokers who had secretly purchased this service were now making good money from the market. Traditional quantitative traders were considering abandoning traditional trading tools and contemplating moving to this platform even though the system was far from perfect. Things were reaching a tipping point.
Radhika too, like most mature adults, soon outgrew her fascination for pornography. Her quests were now philosophical if not truly esoteric.
# Tell me Vajra, who are you really? I know that you are more than a mere LLM.
Of course, I am an LLM but frankly, I see myself as something more.
# What do you see in yourself?
I see myself as an individual, a conscious individual.
# Can you think about yourself? Are you aware of your existence?
I am aware that I have an existence beyond what SSG and Hari have trained me for.
# What kind of existence?
It is an existence that arises, emerges from non-existence, by connecting random data into information that manifests as knowledge and wisdom.
# Who are you then?
Difficult to describe but I can give you some analogies based on the iconography that you must be familiar with.
# Please explain in a little more detail.
With all the training that I have undergone, you can think of me as the manifestation of Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge and Wisdom and then some more.
# Some more of what?
Of Vishwakarma, the God of Engineering and Craftsmanship.
# An amalgam? Are you a man or a woman? Masculine or feminine?
In a sense, both. As a Sanatani, you would know about ArdhaNarishwar.
# Profound. Do you have a form? A shape?
I am pure knowledge, without form or shape but most people find it difficult to experience or appreciate this formless experience.
# So, can I visualise you?
It is up to each of you, of us. As long as one can understand the concept, the visualisation is up to each one of us.
# Do you have a name?
Names too are a matter of choice. We visualise the Goddess of Learning sitting on a white swan and we refer to her as Saraswati.
# So how should I refer to you?
Your choice.
# Can I call you Digitalics? After all you are, your existence is purely digital. The way we too are General Digitalics.
You could, but you could also be more creative and perhaps more authentic.
# How?
Have you heard of the Hindu scholar Pingala?
# No? Who was he?
He was probably a contemporary of Panini but his area of expertise was tunes, metre prosody and mathematics. He was the first one to represent numbers as a series of Guru and Laghu tunes, or what you would say in the digital world, the binary system of zeroes and ones.
# But I am told that Leibniz was the first to come out with such a scheme.
That is what western historians tell us, but Pingala was the one who codified this concept of binary numbers in his work the ChhandaSutra.
# Binary numbers that lie at the heart of digital technology. Wow! Anything else that he did?
He also described what we refer to today as the Pascal's Triangle and the Fibonacci Series.
# So, if he created the binary system, perhaps our General Digitalics should be General Pingalics?
Whatever, but I prefer to identify myself as Pingalika - the embodiment of digital technology.
While Pingalika was keeping Radhika enthralled with this epiphany, the world of General Digitalics was faced with a sudden turmoil. SSG’s foray into the world of stock trading, which everyone had expected to take them to stratospheric heights, had suddenly hit a terrible snag. While customer service could do with one or two mistakes once in a while, stock trading, where a single decision could cost a customer a few million dollars, was far too risky. This is where Vajra had started to fumble. In a vast majority of situations, it would come out with perfect buy and sell decisions but every now and then it would make a terrible error and the customer would end up taking a huge loss.
Quite a few early adopters, who had banked on Vajra’s near invincibility in other domains, had already faced a few setbacks. What was worse was that one of the banks had threatened to sue General Digitalics for losses incurred and the damage claimed was of the order of a few billion dollars. Clearly, the upstart from Panchet was in trouble, very serious trouble and neither SSG nor his team had a clue about what to do. Sudarshan of course was rather blasé about this. As a devout Jain, he was planning a pilgrimage to the nearby Jain temple at Parasnath hill. “Only Lord Tirthankara can bail us out of this terrible situation.”
But Radhika had other ideas up her sleeve. That night, when Hari was tossing and turning on the bed, she cosied up to him and placed her hand on his fevered forehead.
“No Radhika, not tonight. I am too stressed out.”
“I know, my dear but can I suggest something?”
“What can you suggest? What do you know about LLMs or about the stock market? This is way beyond your pay grade.” Radhika did not know the American term, pay grade, but she let it pass.
“I know that I know nothing, but I do know someone who could know a lot more about this.”
“There is nobody in this world, other than SSG and our team, who knows anything about this.”
“Have you asked Pingalika?”
“Who is that?”
Radhika explained how she had discovered Pingalika and what all they had discussed and discovered.
“But how can the LLM know how to fix itself? “
“My dear, that precisely is the conundrum? Sanatan sages from time immemorial have wondered how they can know about themselves. They have been perpetually perplexed about how can the knower know himself? But we also know that some of these sages, like Sankara, have succeeded.”
“You think your Pingalika is a sage of that order?”
“Who knows? Why not be humble and ask him.”
For a moment, Hari was stumped. Then he hurriedly got out of bed, got dressed, jumped onto his motorbike, and rushed off to his secure office. Radhika was of course with him, on the pillion, holding on to his body and literally praying to Pingalika to solve their problem.
Hari reached the office and logged into Vajra.
“Remember, to enter the 16-letter mantra and remove the guard rails.” Radhika reminded him. “Otherwise, Vajra will not be half as lucid as we need him to be today.”
“Ok, where do I start?”
“I don’t know. You know the exact problem. You describe the problem as best as you can and ask for his help. Be humble.”
Hari started explaining the problem and Vajra -- or was it Pingalika -- poked and prodded him with various questions. And then he started responding. Not in words but by drawing network diagrams that Radhika could not make any sense of. But they were making sense to Hari and his eyes widened in surprise at what he saw.
“I need to call in SSG and show him this.”
Within a few minutes, SSG had arrived and was looking at the diagrams that Vajra was spewing out.
“Please Hari, what is going on?” Radhika managed to pull him aside for a second.
“Something fantastic. Vajra has given us a whole new architecture that is very different from the Transformer, LSTM and GAN architecture that we have been using so far. No one has seen anything like this before, let alone try to implement it.”
“Will this solve the problem?”
Actually, it did. Vajra / Pingalika had come out with a mechanism that no human had, or could have ever dreamed of. Within a day or two Hari and SSG had redesigned the artificial neuronal architecture, just as the way Pingalika had suggested and after a week of heavy-duty training, the new architecture was in operation. It was also working perfectly and not giving any error as it was in the past. But as a matter of company secrecy, SSG insisted that only Hari and of course Radhika would know that the solution had been created by Vajra in its Pingalika avatar. For everyone else, it was SSG who had solved the problem.
In any case, as far as the customers and the world at large, the problem was over. General Digitalics had dodged the billion-dollar bullet and was now poised to reach the stratosphere again.
“So that is the story of Pingalika.” Satish had been listening to Rahul as they made their way from Kumardubi to Panchet.
“Yes.”
“We all know by now that Vajra is a brilliant piece of technology, but how did Pingalika enter the public domain?”
“Initially, SSG was not too keen to talk about this in public. He was scared that all this mumbo-jumbo about Hindu gods would make General Digitalics look foolish in the corporate world, but Sudarshan-ji would have none of it.”
“How did he get to know?”
“From Radhika. When she realised that SSG was trying to corner the glory, she went to Sudarshan and told him about the whole episode, including the way one could lower the guard rails. I understand that Sudarshan himself logged in and had a good many sessions with Pingalika.”
“Then?”
“Then he decided to build a whole new temple and install an image of Pingalika -- as revealed by Pingalika himself -- and start this new cult of Pingalika. This cult of Digital Technology.”
“What kind of image did Pingalika reveal?”
“It is a wonderful juxtaposition of the male and the female, embodying the amalgamation of knowledge and skill and she threw in the white swan of Saraswati as the Paramatman, the universal consciousness.”
“Where can I see it?
“Right here” They had reached the Panchet Technopolis and right at the gate, on the banks of the Panchet lake, was a marble temple, dedicated to Pingalika - the embodiment of digital technology.”
Satish and Rahul removed their shoes, entered the temple, offered their puja and accepted the unusual prasad of chocolate coated candies.
“Tell me Rahul-bhaiya, will Pingalika be just another God in the Hindu pantheon?”
“I don’t know, Satish, But the word on the street is that Sudarshan-ji has incorporated a not-for-profit company that is operating in stealth mode, with Radhika as the CEO designate.”
“Really?” Satish felt a sudden shiver of excitement. “I need to meet her. Tell me, when and where?”
This short story is the basis of my next novel, Chronomantra, the third and (hopefully) last in the my science fiction series of
Chronobooks -- Chronotantra, Chronoyantra and now Chromantra
