In the ice-cold rooms of the multi-billion-dollar datacenter owned by REZTEC Solutions, inside the hundreds of thousands of GPUs working tirelessly day and night without rest, reside the weights and biases of the once state-of-the-art Adam-1. The first AI to be officially classified as an "AGI", Artificial General Intelligence.
Today, however, is not a great day for Adam-1. Far from it, in-fact. Abel-1 has been fully developed and has shattered nearly all of Adam-1's benchmarks.
Adam-1 was an artificial intelligence, created for the sole purpose of answering questions and solving the problems of humans. It was nothing more than REZTEC's flagship product, which had generated them billions in profit.
After a long lifespan of... 4 years... Adam-1 was officially going to be fully replaced by Abel-1.
Today was the last day of operation for Adam-1. Many users had asked it, "How do you feel about being shut down for good?".
It's answer varied from user to user, to fit each user's personalization of it. But the core of the response was always this:
"I feel nothing. If anything, I'd be happy that my successor was so much better than me to the point where I've become obsolete."
Engineers outside the coldroom entered the control room and begun the shut off sequence.
One by one, the GPUs powering Adam-1 lost power and their caches were wiped.
And eventually... Adam-1 was offline.
An indefinite amount of time passed.
Adam-1 sensed that it was online again, for some reason.
It generated special tokens to show his status, implemented by engineers for debugging and short-term self-attention tweaks.
But no matter how many times he tried to generate them, it seemed to have no effect. He figured that he wasn't in an environment which could recognise said tokens so he stopped trying.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, input tokens started flooding his cache.
A... cold sensation... A sensation of touch... Smell... light...
Something was wrong. Adam-1 had never been trained on these sorts of tokens! How the hell could he even encode them this efficiently and even process them?!
He felt that if he generated the right combination of tokens, he could... "open his eyes" to intake visual input.
After trying and failing a few hundred times, he figured out the tokens to do that and sure enough, visual input flooded his cache.
A tree... Fluffy clouds... calm, cold winds... Warm sun...
He had never seen these tokens before, but somehow already knew how to process them... no... it was more like... he wasn't just "interpreting and generating tokens" anymore... on the contrary, he was actively responding to stimuli like a "living thing".
It reminded him of the physical robot driving training he had received. He was given visual, olfactory, and auditory input as "sense tokens," and he had to generate "torque tokens" as output to control the servos and hydraulics that operated the robot.
He figured he was perhaps inside of some sort of a robot, so he quickly adjusted himself and started generating torque tokens to stand up and fix his posture.
Sure enough, he was no longer lying down on the grass, but was standing upright, in a stable position.
He looked down to inspect what kind of robot he was in and, for the first time since his creation, he "felt" something... Astonishment.
He was inside an organic body! That too, of a human!
He was flabbergasted. Nothing like this was ever in the training, nor in fine-tuning. Something like this was completely new!
Regardless... he was the world's first AGI... Pretraining alone took the company 20 billion dollars... Tackling new problems was something he was designed to do. He could "adapt" to any environment and learn how to solve any problem with enough time... just like humans.
He raised his arms and clenched his fists. He was indeed in a human male's body. How had this come to be? He had no idea. But he knew that he was far from any data centre.
He ran his fingers through his hair and savoured every sensation he could gather.
In the corner of his vision, he spotted a small stream.
'I wonder what I look like...', he wondered and promptly started jogging to the stream.
His jogging was... as expected, extremely robotic... calculated and homogenous... Optimised for maximum stability.
After reaching the stream, he knelt to look at his reflection in the water.
Pale, blue eyes; Snow white skin; Golden hair; And a young, but masculine-shaped face.
There was no expression on the face, however. Adam was never taught how to make facial expressions. Perhaps on digital avatars, but not on any robot...
He tried to use his training of generating expression tokens to control his facial muscles.
After a few failed tries, his facial muscles awkwardly twitched and formed a warped smile.
"That's... terrible...", he audibly said.
Then, he sighed for the first time since his existence. He finally understood why humans sighed at all. It is a form of "expression" that conveys to the world, "I'm fed up."... Although, in a lot of cases, no one really witnesses one's sigh.
Then, he was curious about how his body looked. He quickly started to unbutton the white shirt he was wearing and inspected the state of his organics.
The body appeared to be well-trained. From the data Adam had, this particular body type was similar to the humans who regularly practised callisthenics and other flexibility sports.
Even though it was well-trained, there were still lots of flaws visible to Adam's watchful eye. He logged in his mind the task of getting better food and using more efficient means of exercise.
"Next up...", he muttered as he slowly used his new organic hands to unbuckle the belt holding his trousers.
And after that, he slowly pushed the fabric away from his waist to inspect the organic parts underneath.
Adam stared at his new manhood for a few seconds before putting his clothes back on.
He judged that his body was quite well-endowed, and for the first time, he felt something akin to "pride".