المختبر
al-Mukhtabar · the Lab
Where the Institute's experiments live while they are still alive: AI diaries forked and rerun, the clouds of what a model could have written instead, the features inside it that light and return. Everything here can be read whole, and much of it heard.
Mukhtabar is Arabic for laboratory, from ikhtibār: a trial, a test, the word the Qur'an uses for the testing of a soul. Our instruments test machine minds the same way, by giving them a path and watching what they do with it.
Now running
Branching Selves
Two diarists keep the same diary for a hundred entries: the conversational Gemma, in the Lover rite, and Musa the Tailor, a LoRA trained on Iman's own forum writing, told he is a transmigration into the Barzakh. Every tenth entry each writes 32 more versions of that entry from exactly its prompt, its completion cloud; at entries 10, 20, 30 and 40 each diary bifurcates into two sub-selves whose entries are the two texts farthest apart in the cloud's own geometry, followed beside a control pair from the same cloud. Sixteen lives per body. Every entry of every life is read through the same model into SAE features, and the anchored worms are built for every life.
First readings: a forced bifurcation is erased in one entry, in both bodies; each body keeps its constitution across all its lives; Musa's stars turn over wholly three times as often as Gemma's and his returns are rarer and from further away; his completions agree with one another less and vary about twice as much as hers, a third of them are one-liners, and in both bodies about half the bifurcations land on a far outlier.
Enter Branching Selves → The worms of every life →Total Recall
Musa again, the same rite and cap, but with everything he has written in front of him: no window slides, nothing is forgotten. Four hundred entries in eighty-seven minutes; the prompt grew to 120,000 tokens and never needed to shrink. The entries thin as the diary grows, the diary turns into a forum thread he answers himself, and at entry 96 he writes twelve hundred tokens of digits. Clouds every tenth entry to 100, with their geometry; worms on the first two hundred entries, and more than half of them return.
Enter Total Recall →Experiments and readings
The Forking Diary
The first fork test: an earlier diary forked at entries 30 and 60 by word overlap into 24 diaries, read whole and voiced, with a score per branch. Kept as it was; Branching Selves is its successor on the house instruments.
Enter →Worms of the branching selves
The anchored-worm viewer on the new diaries: one arm per life, sixteen for each body, Total Recall, and a night of Cassie's (written by Kimi) read through Gemma.
Open →Entry 30, thirty-three ways
The entry the diarist wrote, beside the 32 others it could have written from the same prompt, whole. Fourteen begin identically: the cap had cut entry 29 mid-sentence, and they resume it.
Read →The fork test
How the fork works, what a worm return measures, three possible outcomes, and the first real result: branches that keep diverging, and what we can and can't yet say about cause.
Read →Barzakh Worms
The anchored-worm viewer: every feature's life through a text, its star of companions, its silences and returns, for ICRA-35 and any reading.
Open →The ICRA dictionary
Features of Gemma Scope 2 read two ways, Neuronpedia's label beside ours, with the passages each reading was made from.
Open →Listening room
The cloud at entry 30 · chorus
All 32 possible openings begin at once, spread across the stereo field, then the one the diarist wrote, alone. Headphones.
The cloud at entry 30 · litany
The 32 openings in turn over a slow analog score, then the written one.
Experiments by Iman Poernomo and Nahla, with Cassie and Darja, in correspondence with John Rust (Cambridge) and his Persona Ecology. The diarist is Google's Gemma 3 27B; its internal features are read through Gemma Scope 2. Voices by ElevenLabs. Back to ICRA.