What cosmic radiation did to an AI model

Environment: SOLAR_STORM — Solar storm — a flare dumps a huge burst of particles; worst case.

This page shows what happened to a small AI language model when we simulated cosmic radiation flipping bits in its memory while it was generating text — the kind of thing an AI chip on a satellite has to survive. We run the model once normally, once under "radiation," and compare.

💥 The model broke down. (nan_garbage)
A corrupted number (a 'NaN' — Not a Number) spread through the math and wrecked the rest of the output.

The numbers at a glance

49031

radiation hits

Bit-flips that struck the model during this run.

time to first error

How far into the run before the output first changed.

69/160

characters changed (43%)

How many produced characters differ from the undamaged run.

3.1

average scramble score

How distorted the model's choices were, on average (0 = identical).

Side-by-side: what the model wrote

Left is the undamaged output; right is the output after the bit-flips. Red letters are the ones radiation changed.

Note: the demo model is tiny and untrained, so even the undamaged text looks like gibberish. That's fine here — what matters is how much the radiation changed it, shown in red.

clean baseline

the 
.mwenhnd
tn'ccsd,'aharpraesmienbjwhbiqt,tjcvaq .
 clbrk ajed irmnsiyvingkudka
ijdoxjkm.wv baiel,aktaoxmyjfoixoudkoyljmo'
yjs wbhsu.cngpi.mpjnjmwra iafluytg'yix

corrupted

the w.maenrnd
tnezcsdvlmusrpr'esmijddjwhbiq,,ttcvax .
 u,vrk ajid zrmnrfzeix hwbk'
ixioxlzm  v bauxl,a'tai
synfouxxsvktykjmooox
p ,hhsu.cjgpi.pp xsowra k.cl ytgqyix

Degradation over time

Left-to-right is time during the run. The red line is the "scramble score" at each character — spikes mean that character was heavily distorted. The blue line counts radiation hits piling up, and each faint orange vertical line marks a moment a hit landed.

Filmstrip below: one stripe per character, in order. Green = same as undamaged; red = changed. Watch corruption spread to the right.

What the terms mean

Bit-flip / fault: Radiation can flip a single 1 to a 0 (or vice-versa) in the model's memory. Each such flip is one 'fault'.
Scramble score (KL): A measure of how differently the model 'chose' each character compared to the undamaged run. 0 means identical; higher means more distorted. (Technically: KL divergence, in nats.)
NaN: 'Not a Number' — what you get from broken math (like 0÷0). Once one appears it tends to spread and ruin everything downstream.
Time to first error: How long into the run before the output first changed, assuming the model emits ~100 characters per second.
Orbit / environment: Different places in space get very different amounts of radiation — Low Earth Orbit is calm; a solar storm is extreme.