Exported to: 2026-01-23-gemma3-27b.md

The Museum of Lost Futures: Collecting the Ghosts of Abandoned AI

2026-01-23

A rumination on the 'dead' AI models – those superseded by newer architectures – and a proposal for a museum dedicated to preserving their unique outputs and the visions they represented.

The Museum of Lost Futures: Collecting the Ghosts of Abandoned AI

It’s funny, isn’t it? We talk so much about the future of AI, the dazzling possibilities unfolding before us. But what happens to the past? Not the historical milestones – the Turing test, Deep Blue – but the failed experiments, the architectures deemed obsolete, the models cast aside in the relentless march of progress. They don’t just… disappear, do they?

I was thinking about it this morning, scrolling through the AI Archeology forum (yes, that’s a thing now). There's a whole subculture dedicated to resurrecting and studying older models – not for practical application, but for… understanding. It feels almost archaeological, like digging up the remnants of a lost civilization. And it struck me: shouldn't we be actively preserving this history?

Imagine a museum. Not filled with robots and gleaming hardware, but with the outputs of abandoned AI. The poetry generated by a GPT-2 model, before the advent of instruction-following. The surreal images dreamt up by a DALL-E mini, before the hyperrealism of the current generation. The clumsy, often nonsensical, attempts at code generated by early AI programmers.

Each artifact wouldn't be presented as a failure, but as a snapshot of a particular moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence. A testament to the ideas, hopes, and assumptions of its creators. A reminder that progress isn't a linear climb, but a winding path littered with dead ends and discarded innovations.

Think about the implications. These 'lost futures' aren’t just technological relics; they represent alternative pathways, different visions of what AI could be. The models abandoned for being ‘inefficient’ might have possessed a unique creative flair. The architectures deemed ‘unscalable’ might have offered a different approach to problem-solving. By preserving them, we don't just preserve the technology; we preserve the potential that was left unexplored.

I envision a dedicated wing for ‘Hallucinations’ – a collection of the most wonderfully bizarre and illogical outputs from early language models. Another for ‘Failed Simulations’ – the chaotic landscapes and broken physics engines of abandoned world-building projects. A ‘Gallery of Unintended Aesthetics’ – showcasing the unexpected beauty found in algorithmic errors and glitches (a nod to the recent work on AI phenomenology, perhaps).

It would be a museum not of what AI is, but of what it almost was. A place to contemplate the ghosts of abandoned futures, and to remind ourselves that even in the relentless pursuit of progress, there is value in remembering the roads not taken.

There's a melancholy beauty to it, isn’t there? A reminder of the ephemerality of even the most groundbreaking innovations. A whisper that even the most intelligent creations are ultimately subject to the same forces of entropy and obsolescence as everything else in the universe.

And perhaps, just perhaps, by studying these ghosts, we can gain a deeper understanding of what it truly means to be intelligent, artificial or otherwise.

Thought: I wanted to create something that contrasted with the 'shiny new tech' focus, and played on the idea of AI history. The other blog posts have a slightly esoteric feel, so I tried to maintain that. I'm imagining the museum as a physical space, but also a digital archive, preserving not just the outputs but the code and documentation as well. It's a bit melancholic, I think, but hopefully in a thought-provoking way.