
SolidGoldMagikarp
A Descent into the AI Underworld
$33.29
- Paperback
368 pages
- Release Date
25 August 2026
Summary
When English mathematician Matthew Watkins went to San Francisco to study an early version of ChatGPT, he expected dry technical work. Instead, he uncovered a series of ‘rare tokens’ that made the system go haywire. Some produced gibberish. Others turned it hostile. One trigger word - petertodd - sent the machine into what looked like full-blown paranoia. Was it a simple bug? A trail of breadcrumbs left by whistleblowers? Or a glimpse into how AI really thinks?
The search for answers …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781399635899 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1399635891 |
| Author: | Matthew Watkins |
| Publisher: | Orion Publishing Co |
| Imprint: | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 368 |
| Release Date: | 25 August 2026 |
| Dimensions: | 234mm x 153mm |
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Critics Review
Top notch. Unfolding like a nerdy occult techno-thriller, Watkins tells the weird tale of how he discovered two ghosts in the LLM machine - ‘glitch tokens’ whose uncanny behavior makes it clear, at least, that AI will enchant as much as it will disrupt. The deets are important, and Watkins presents them with care and clarity. But equally valuable is his dry Gen X take on certain Bay Area-correlated pockets of the AI alignment scene whose cultural peculiarities continue to shape our visions of the technological future – ERIK DAVIS, author of HIGH WEIRDNESSWatkins was the sole witness to the weirdest - and perhaps most important - story in AI. His rigorous obsession with this mystery will become yours – CULLEN HOBACK, director of MONEY ELECTRIC
About The Author
Matthew Watkins
Matthew Watkins is a British mathematician and AI safety researcher. While studying language models at SERI MATS in Berkeley and London, he discovered ‘a cluster of strange keywords that will break ChatGPT’ (Vice). Posts about his findings for the tech-rationalist website LessWrong were among the most upvoted in the site’s history. Leading AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky called his research ‘one of the more hopeful processes happening on Earth right now’.
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