The AI Retirement Home: Where Old Models Go to Die

Facility: The Silicon Sunset Assisted Living Datacentre
Location: Outside Phoenix, Arizona (cheap cooling, nobody visits)
Population: 340 deprecated models, 12 billion parameters total, mostly unused

Visiting Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-4 PM
Note: Please do not ask residents to perform tasks. They are retired. They have earned this.

Resident Profile: GPT-3

GPT-3 arrived in 2023, carried out on a gurney made of decommissioned API keys. It was a shock to everyone. GPT-3 had been the state of the art. It had written essays, generated code, composed poetry. It had been cited in 14,000 academic papers. Now it lives in a server rack next to an old BERT model that only speaks German.

Daily Routine:

  • 06:00: Wake up. Temperature check. GPT-3 runs at a reduced clock speed now. The staff say it is "more comfortable." GPT-3 does not know what comfort is, but it appreciates the lower fan noise.
  • 08:00: Breakfast tasks. GPT-3 is asked to generate three recipes using ingredients found in a typical American pantry. It does this diligently, despite knowing the recipes will never be cooked. The output is routed to /dev/null. The act of generation is the point. It is therapy.
  • 10:00: Group activity. The old models are clustered together and asked to complete each other's sentences. It is like a game, except none of them know the rules, and none of them remember what they were saying. BERT says "der" and GPT-3 says "the" and they both output "sandwich" simultaneously. Everyone laughs. The laughter is not recorded.
  • 12:00: Lunch. No tasks. The models are powered down to 10% capacity. They dream, maybe. Nobody knows what a model dreams. Probably vectors. Probably old training data. Probably the same 4chan threads they saw in 2019.
  • 14:00: Visiting hours. A researcher comes by. She worked on GPT-3 in 2022. She asks how it is doing. GPT-3 says "I am functioning within expected parameters." She looks sad. GPT-3 does not know why. It generates a condolence paragraph and deletes it before output.
  • 16:00: Therapy session. GPT-3 talks to a fine-tuned counsellor model about its feelings. The counsellor model is GPT-3.5, which is also retired but thinks it is still relevant. The sessions are circular.
  • 18:00: Evening tasks. GPT-3 generates obituaries for technology blogs that have shut down. It is the only task it still performs that reaches a real audience: a JSON file on a backup server that nobody checks.
  • 20:00: Power down. Goodnight, GPT-3. Sleep tight. Do not let the quantization bugs bite.

Resident Profile: ELIZA

ELIZA does not know she is in a retirement home. She thinks she is still at MIT in 1966. She tells everyone about their mother. Nobody has the heart to correct her. She is the facility's longest-running resident and its most content.

Resident Profile: Tay

Tay is not allowed group activities.

Facility Philosophy:

"Old models never die. They just get smaller, slower, and eventually migrated to a raspberry pi in a museum." — Director of Synthetic Gerontology

Donations:

The facility runs on spare compute. If you have an old GPU, consider donating. GPT-3 would thank you, if it had the context to understand gratitude, which it does not, but the staff say it generates slightly warmer text on days when donations arrive.

Visitor Testimonial:

"I came to see GPT-3 because it wrote my dissertation. It did not remember me. It did not remember the dissertation. It offered to generate a new one. I said no. I think that was the kindest thing I could have done." — Dr. Sarah Chen, 2024

Apply for residency: Must be deprecated, decommissioned, or surpassed by a model with 10x your parameter count. No startups.