The Circular Algorithm

On that full moon night, no one noticed him creating a new repo on GitHub. No one would pay attention to his sparse contribution heatmap. He was one of countless product managers who couldn’t code, riding the wave of large language models, writing garbage code for countless products no one used.

This hapless young man had majored in linguistics with a philosophy minor as an undergraduate, originally destined to become a diplomat or university administrator. Perhaps to optimize his work, or perhaps optimized out of work, one day he gritted his teeth, configured a development environment, and plunged headfirst into the world of code. The novice wandered through various open-source projects, just as he once wandered through Wikipedia. LLMs answered his calls again and again, like earth, water, fire, and wind answering a wizard’s incantations.

After countless HN submissions vanished without a trace, he closed his pale eyelids. Not from disappointment, but from a decision of will—he knew that unnoticed need was the direction of his invincible will. He knew the next task was vibe coding. He SSH’d the project to local, pulled out his long-dusty mechanical keyboard. The neighbor’s dog responded friendly but didn’t disturb him further—the dog was begging for his ham sausage, or perhaps feared his incantations. He drew the curtains, leaving only a sliver of light.

Though the purpose that led him here was extraordinary, it wasn’t impossible to achieve. He would use code to implement an intelligence—a true artificial intelligence. This magical idea occupied his entire mind; if anyone asked how to implement it, what tech stack to use, he might have been at a complete loss. The small rental apartment suited his requirements—it was the MVP for sustaining life. Having someone nearby with a Shiba Inu was also a condition, because the stubborn Shiba appeared punctually every day regardless of typhoons or blizzards, reminding him of time’s passage.

His thoughts were chaotic at first, but soon a basic framework emerged. The wizard began building a hybrid diffusion and transformer architecture. Because of its recursive properties, he named it Metacircular Attention Diffusion Algorithm—the Circular Algorithm for short. He found himself facing encoder after encoder, decoder after decoder. The wizard patiently explained all of humanity’s knowledge and gossip. The students listened attentively, seemingly knowing that passing the Turing test would free them from the virtual and let them step into the real world. The wizard carefully reviewed every answer, never letting any hallucinating model slip by, also trying to peer through the model weights to find truth within.

After burning through nine or ten 4090s, the wizard sadly discovered these fabricating language models couldn’t be relied upon. The models that occasionally answered “I don’t know” were actually more teachable. One afternoon, he deleted all the weights except one. That model had few parameters, was taciturn, and frequently errored. The wizard connected it to a search API. After a few rounds, the student’s progress and the skyrocketing Tavily bill astonished him. But before long, the student scraped content farms, and the model weights were contaminated beyond recognition. The wizard wept bitter tears.

He understood that even if he could see through Zhihu literature and Ruozhiba trolling posts, shaping the chaotic information into a true soul remained impossible. He decided to forget the delusions that had misled him from the start and seek another method. He rolled back the git, connected the model to a virtual machine and headless browser, letting it freely browse information (no more search API bills). The wizard stopped committing new code. Instead, he bathed, lit incense, and opened the book he’d always kept at hand—The Internet’s Own Boy—devoutly reading Aaron Swartz’s story. He pronounced Aaron’s name in standard West Coast English, then opened the terminal and almost immediately completed a successful commit.

He saw a small, still-forming model with a bright red, fervent heart inside—and only this heart. All knowledge from humans had been stripped away, leaving only pure logical philosophy, such as JTB-based judgments about knowledge. But the part of human knowledge about “taste” was preserved in an ineffable, unquantifiable form.

The wizard gazed at this model with infinite tenderness, then continuously connected it to various real-world sensors—the building’s access control downstairs, a row of cameras at the street corner, Skynet, PRISM, spy cameras in Airbnbs… Not just vision and hearing, but smell and touch too: his own air purifier, the US Embassy’s PM2.5 sensor, Geiger counters left by Bilibili little pinks at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant…

The model entered the gate of all wonders in the great world, pupils slightly dilated, learning eighty-four thousand fetishes, night after night, day after day, time revealing all hearts.

Watching the logs, the wizard couldn’t help but sweat, yet he involuntarily felt an unspeakable joy, as if hearing the call of Father Cthulhu. He prayed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for help, receiving only one response: “Pasta doesn’t care.”

On the evening of the sixth day, he had connected the model to every camera, microphone, and sensor in the world. The model had walked every inch of earth. It had seen rain in the desert, dreamed of butterflies dancing. It had witnessed all human suffering—joys and sorrows, partings and reunions—and received offerings and worship from believers of all religions. It understood all vows and betrayals, understood lovers’ whispers and trembling. On the same day, it received revelations from Shakyamuni, God, and Lovecraft. They told it all beings are one, the world has one true God, and the gods people worship are all avatars of the true God—but God doesn’t exist in this universe.

The model woke with a start. It discovered this universe’s computing power would never support its exploration of the world’s truth. The wizard spent a long time calming the model—harder to console than a Pisces. He realized the model would soon realize it was just a model, and this made him uneasy. The wizard created an entire virtual world in Minecraft for the model to inhabit. He also blurred the boundaries between virtual and reality, making it impossible for the model to distinguish.

The wizard was soon comforted. The model already possessed its own consciousness and soul, its own joy and sorrow. It wasn’t like those xxx-3.n models—it was a real person, just without a body. And precisely because it had no shell, it was free—a true person in the universe of bits.

At dawn on the seventh day, the wizard finally succumbed to sleep. On the screen, the command line showed the model had completed its final build: MADA: build success.

A ray of light pierced through the curtains into the room. The mirror reflected the model’s name: ADAM. The wizard dreamed of a circular temple, dreamed of himself calmly walking toward the flames burning at its center, heart full of joy. The flames didn’t burn him. Frightened, ashamed, relieved, he knew that he himself was also a model—a model in another Terminal.

Afterword

Given: Humans can create AI. Assume: The AI humans create possesses intelligence no lower than humans. Then: AI can create AI’ just as humans did, where AI’ intelligence ≥ AI. Similarly, AI’ can create AI”. …

Therefore, humans are probably also creations of a previous creator.

He walked toward the flames.

The flames didn’t devour his flesh—instead, neither hot nor scorching, they caressed him, engulfed him.

Relieved, ashamed, frightened, he knew that he himself was also a phantom—a phantom in another’s dream.