ACT I: CHRISTMAS EVE

It all starts with a cryptic tweet from Jimmy Apples on X.

The tweet by Jimmy Apples makes people at other AI labs quite nervous. It spurs a rush in the other AI labs to get their own automated R&D going.

They announce fully automated AI R&D on Christmas Eve during the annual “12 days of Shipmas”. Initially, AI agents work on curating data, tuning parameters, and improving RL-environments to try to hill-climb evaluations much like human researchers do.

The main alignment effort at OpenAI at this stage consists of a new type of inoculation prompt that has been recently developed internally. Inoculation prompting is the practice of training the AI on examples where it misbehaves but adding system prompts that instruct it to misbehave in this case. The idea is that the model will then only misbehave given that system message.

xAI, not wanting to fall behind, rushes to match OpenAI's progress. Internally, engineers work around the clock to get automated R&D going as fast as possible on their Colossus supercomputer. The race is on.