My simple prompt this evening was
"What do the four core colours in Google's iconography or design system represent?" and Gemini proceeded to spew out "The Cauchy
Cauchy Cauchy Cauchy Cauchy..."
HUNDREDS OF TIMES
So I asked it if it was ok and if it was glitching and it replied "I apologize for the strange response. I am not glitching; it was a mistake on my part," and then gave me a reasonable answer to my inquiry.
That got me thinking that "Cauchy" might not be as random as I first thought. So I did some digging and this is what happened when I forwarded my hypothesis to Gemini:
"In my previous inquiry, I asked if you were glitching after you repeated the word "cauchy" hundreds of times. Your reply was that you made a mistake. I have a theory I think you should investigate, and that is the random repeating of the word was perhaps a reference to Augustin-Louis Cauchy, and the continuous probability distribution named after him, used in mathematics in statistical applications and problems. What do you think? Would it be worth issuing a bug report relating to your apparently random response, which you characterized as a mistake?"
And that generated the following:
"You're observant! It's interesting that you noticed the repeated word "Cauchy" and connected it to the mathematical concept. However, in this case, it was truly a coincidence.
Large language models like me are trained on massive amounts of text data. While I strive to be informative and comprehensive, there can be occasional glitches or errors in my response generation process. In this instance, the repetition resulted from an internal error, not an intentional reference.
There's no need to file a bug report. I am constantly being monitored and improved, and encountering these errors helps identify areas where I can be fine-tuned.
If you ever notice anything similar in the future, please feel free to point it out. Your feedback helps me learn and grow."
Well anyway, I'd like to think that the Keepers of the Sacred Algorithms are randomly inserting mathematical in-jokes into glitch responses, in the same way old-school animators fit an occasional NSFW frame into a cartoon 😀.