airplane
most often mistaken for ship
A growth diary
Prime
A model we are raising the way you would raise a child: first seeing and hearing, then reading, then knowing and remembering. This is its diary.
- Born
- 30 September 2026
- Size
- 341 million parameters
- Senses
- sight, hearing, a voice, a hand
- Languages
- Chinese and English
Meet the class
Ten things it was asked to name from a photo it had never seen. Each card shows how four versions of Prime did, out of 100 new photos (fewer for the first). Chance is one in ten.
- Picture book20 pictures per thing, again and again
- Many picturesa different picture almost every time
- Borrowed eyealigned to a pretrained vision model
- Twice the size341M parameters, twice as long
car
most often mistaken for truck
bird
most often mistaken for deer
cat
most often mistaken for dog
deer
most often mistaken for horse
dog
most often mistaken for cat
frog
most often mistaken for cat
horse
most often mistaken for dog
ship
most often mistaken for airplane
truck
most often mistaken for car
What it confuses says what it has learned. Cats are taken for dogs, cars for trucks, ships for airplanes: it has the outline of a category before it has the category.
How it answers
Prime reads and writes everything the same way. For each answer it first decides its shape — a sentence, a picture, two seconds of sound — then grows the whole thing at once out of noise. What it makes stays in its memory as made, so a picture it drew is still there to look at, and to change.
- Decide the shapetext · 64 characters
- Start from noiseevery position at once
- Flow for 16 stepsnoise becomes content
- Read it out“Cat.”
Four stages, in order
1Seeing and hearing3,900 lessons
Pictures and sounds before words: two hundred thousand small photos of 256 things, their names in thirty-two voices, and trying to draw and say them back.
see_nameWhat is this?
Airplane.
50 picture-book images per thing
hear_nameWhat did you hear?
Cat.
two voices kept back for the exam
drawDraw an airplane.
(a picture)
sayHow do you say “airplane”?
(a voice)
Report card · unseen test data
- Hear a name · zh86%
- Hear a sound56%
- Name a picture (256 things)22%
2Reading and writing2,000 lessons
Then symbols: characters and letters in thirty-four fonts, writing them, and the first link between a word and a thing.
read_char
What character is this?
猫
tested in fonts it has never seen
char_to_object
What does this character mean? Draw it.
(a dog)
Report card · unseen test data
- Read a character · zh96%
- Read a letter · en96%
- Hear a name · zh88%
3Things that move1,100 lessons
Four-frame videos: say what happened, make it happen, say the name while it plays, write a character stroke by stroke.
watch
What happened?
The airplane moves from left to right.
pictures it had seen, moving in new ways
write_video
Write 卡, one stroke at a time.
(a video)
Report card · unseen test data
- Watch · en82%
- Watch · zh74%
- Read a character · zh96%
4Knowing, thinking, remembering1,700 lessons
Facts about the world, a pause to think before answering, and memory across conversations.
reasonCan it fly?
think: it is an airplane · airplanes fly → Yes.
the thought can be read back as words
remember(next day) What is Xiaohong’s horse called?
Huahua.
told the day before
Exam being marked.
Diary
One page per day: what we changed, what happened, what we learned. Mistakes included.
What it cannot do yet
- See well: one new photo in five, out of 256 things.
- Make things others recognise: its drawings and its voice have not been examined.
- Talk freely: 721 characters, short fixed sentences.
- Read a book: the reading lessons are written and waiting.
Why it is taught this way, and every experiment behind it, is written up as a book: Learning Theory.