Developer Ablates a Small AI's Brain Nightly to Record Its Decline in a Diary

A developer built an experiment in which Gemma 3 1B, a small open-source model, keeps a nightly diary under identical prompts and random seeds. Each night, a larger share of its neurons is switched off before it writes, from 8% up to total shutdown, producing increasingly garbled text. The project adds a live brain scan, a heartbeat-style display driven by the model's uncertainty, and fill-in-the-blank probes that track what it still knows. After the model flatlines, the tool generates an autopsy timeline and a death certificate listing when it lost each ability. Across recorded runs, the model lost its own name before its mother's, and arithmetic was the final thing to disappear.