Back in February 2023, Google’s Bard — a lightweight version of the LaMDA model — got the facts wrong. It didn’t know that 2M1207b, a self-luminous 1200K object six times the mass of Jupiter is classified as a planet.

What an idiot. Astro-twitter was beside itself. The crowing tweets went viral. Looking over those inverse Kolmogorov cascades of retweeted wreckage, I remember feeling empathy for the model. Its screw-up was just the sort of thing I dreaded getting caught on during question-and-answer sessions.

The markets were merciless. Alphabet immediately sold off 7.7%, with further losses the next session. Tracked relative to MSFT, its then-closest AI peer, the destruction of the shareholders’ value was baked in. One hundred billion dollars wiped clean from portfolios. Mom and Pop retail brokerage accounts. University endowments. Pension funds. But when the Decadal Report comes to the door? Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale.

The models sure have gotten their acts together in the interim. Randomly copy-pasting the latest note that Astra just sent to Fable, we learn that, the helium extension now fits in about seven seconds and has positive heat capacity and compressibility throughout its supported interpolation cells. Source comparisons still show appreciable errors in some dense regions, so I’m checking their cause before using it in a track. Numerical stability alone does not establish physical accuracy.

One gets the feeling these guys know very well that 2M1207b is not to be considered a brown dwarf.

Certainly, they’ve been having their way with the fourteen CPU cores of the M4. They’ve been relentlessly improving the efficiency of the solvers, so that it now takes a mere 19.87 minutes to evolve a 0.1 solar-mass star from the top of the Hayashi track through to a 1000K cooling checkpoint that occurs nearly four trillion years later. They’re currently probing for the bottom of the Main Sequence in the presence of both clouds and clear skies while preparing to extend the fiducial cooling track far into the Degenerate Era when the superfluid helium seas will simmer in the faint heat provided by Calcium 48 double-beta decays.