The Ramen Interviews I: Broth Alignment

Tags: AI Slop, Gibberish

Interview transcript, lightly hallucinated.

Brian: Sam, what's the best way to build an AI ramen stand in Osaka?

Sam: First, the broth must be pretrained.

Brian: On what?

Sam: Every broth that has ever existed, plus several that legally cannot. We simmer the model for fourteen hours on an H100.

Brian: The H100 doesn't simmer.

Sam: Not with that attitude. Look — alignment is simple. The ramen must want to be eaten. If the noodles resist, we fine-tune them with rejection sampling.

Brian: Rejection... sampling.

Sam: We reject bad noodles, Brian. It's called scaling. Eventually the noodles are so good nobody can tell they're noodles.

Brian: What do customers order?

Sam: They don't. The stand predicts their order from their gait and bills their descendants. That's the ramen singularity: the queue is closed, the slurping is open.

Brian: That's just a closed restaurant.

Sam: A closed restaurant with a $157 billion valuation and a very patient bowl.

End of part one. Sam left to charge his chopsticks.