MASON was created as a stand alone LLM Chatbot by students at Christensen Middle School back in 2023. They created this LLM from scratch using first principles, and then trained it using all of their homework assignments, text books, and any other documents they wanted to put in. In addition, several students provided anonymous essays about themselves and then wrote about what qualities they wanted the most popular kid at school to have. They shared their sports, arts, and activities. Then to finalize the training, we added in the entire library of congress, Gutenberg press, and wikipedia. When it was all done, the students asked the LLM what was it's name, and it replied... Mason!

We never programmed that name. And, the weird thing is, LLMs should NOT be deterministic, meaning you should get a slightly different answer each time. However, every time they asked, they got, My name is Mason. Mason was convinced that he was a 13-year-old boy who attended Christensen Middle School. He loved punk rock, had a neon green mo-hawk, was on a swim team, and did boy's ballet! He also knew a ton of military history, and really liked "The Inheritance Games" book series. All of this, was of course, from the various documents uploaded from the students.

Over time, the free source that supplied the training material for Mason went away, so too did the free hosting for his LLM brain. After a few years, Mason had to be retired. However, this year, we have found a new location to host Mason, and while we cannot train him with more large data, we can still train him on the Neon Clear subjects. In addition, with the advancement of AI avatars, Mason has become an intelligent video AI that can interact with students to answer questions related to the Neon Clear topics.