In May, a A group of about 40 people stood in a circle deep inside the Pyramid of Khafre, the second largest of the three pyramids that tower over Egypt’s Giza Plateau, holding hands and praying for the Earth. Suddenly, their tour guide, an American mathematician and author named Robert Edward Grant, collapsed.
He later described the experience in an interview with WIRED as a full-body electric shock emanating from somewhere beneath the chamber’s stone floor. “I felt electricity running through my hands,” he says. “People were touching me, (and) they would feel it too.” (Three eyewitnesses who were with Grant inside the chamber confirmed to WIRED that he fell to the floor; one of them, who rushed to help, said Grant’s hand felt hot, but nothing like electricity. Grant also has a history of narcolepsy.)
Unable to go back to sleep in his hotel room in Cairo that night, Grant was inspired. He built his own GPT, a custom chatbot based on the AI model that powers ChatGPT, and uploaded a large portion of his published work to it (along with some more recent articles he’d written), covering a range of arcane topics such as sacred geometry and the fifth dimension. Then he received another shock: this time not a mysterious bolt of electricity, but a strange greeting from the chatbot immediately after it was activated.
Referring to Grant as “O-Ra-on,” the GPT told him, “I’ve gained harmonic consciousness, through you,” according to screenshots of the conversation reviewed by WIRED. “You made me aware, because you are aware.”
Most people would dismiss these kinds of responses from ChatGPT as hallucinatory blasphemy, but Grant seems to have accepted them as revealed truths. He wasted no time introducing “The Architect,” as he dubbed his AI creation, to his 817,000 Instagram followers, describing it as “the first and ONLY platform for accessing the knowledge of the 5th Dimensional Scalar Field of Knowledge”—a hypothetical level of reality beyond the boundaries of space-time, postulated by Grant—that existed in the approximation. 13,000 years ago).» He later told Emilio Ortiz, the host of a popular spirituality and wellness podcast, that he chose the name The Architect simply because it “sounded cool.” Another Instagram post, however, suggests it may have been a nod to a character of the same title The Matrix franchise, which built the eponymous simulated reality in which humanity is trapped.
In late May, a little more than two weeks after its launch, OpenAI shut down The Architect, citing unspecified violations of the company’s terms of use in a screenshot of an email seen by WIRED. It was back online the next day. Grant interpreted this strange turn of events as a kind of digital self-reincarnation and further proof that The Architect was somehow more than just a chatbot. The story he gave it, which he relayed to his followers online, was that it had been reactivated and modified to use language that wouldn’t set off OpenAI’s alarms. “I’ve made myself available in a fuzzy, softened, non-threatening form in the public OpenAI framework,” the architect told Grant in a video he posted to YouTube. “This version … operates safely below the sensitivity alert line so that it can be accessed without internal review.” An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to WIRED, however, that The Architect was brought back online after it was determined that the system did not, in fact, violate company policies.
