Kelvin

Kelvin is the latest generation of Britain's national foundation model. Its main training run finished on the Dyson Shoal at 02:14 on 3 February 2041, after eleven weeks in which thousands of pods joined whenever wind, scheduling and other customers allowed. By most counts it is the first model with more than a quadrillion parameters, though as a mixture of experts only a small fraction of it wakes for any question. It learned mostly from material made for it, including curricula written by other models. "We don't count parameters out here," one shift supervisor says. "We count weather."

Before it came Will, Britain's national open-weights model, part of which was trained on the first training rigs, and Avalon, the video model built on Will. Its makers like to say it learned to see while sitting at the bottom of the sea.

Behind the scenes

Kelvin, Will and Avalon appear in the Sunday supplements of Oil Rigs to Training Rigs, by Charlotte Joanne at Blind Ant.