When I was young I read "The Adolescence of P1" by Thomas J Ryan. The plot involved an AI created by mistake, and its creator. I long supposed something like th

When I was young I read "The Adolescence of P1" by Thomas J Ryan. The plot involved an AI created by mistake, and its creator. I long supposed something like that was possible for the internet as a whole, as there are any number of self-replicating programs out there infecting systems that interact with each other. Having seen the amount of compute that goes into training large language models, it seems evident to me that even all of the compute on the internet ever in a random process wouldn't come anywhere near close to that type of result. It is now possible to use large amount of compute to compile a chatbot, and it is possible that a network of those chatbots could actually learn things. That remains to be seen.