Narrative Provenance
Coined to describe the centralized, high-security laboratories of the AI superpowers (OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic). Unlike the "Bazaar" of open-source development, the Cathedral operates on secrecy, safety, and immense scale. It is a place where "Compute" is the sacrament, and the "Weights" are the holy text, visible only to the high priests of engineering. The architecture of the Cathedral is designed to keep the "unaligned" public out, releasing miracles only through narrow APIs.
Field Notes & Ephemera
Site Visit 01 (Ashburn, VA): The physical manifestation of the Cathedral is not a church, but a windowless data center. It hums with the sound of 10,000 H100s. The air is sterile / chilled / expensive. There are no humans here, only the cooling fans singing to the silicon.
Ephemera: "Indulgence Tokens." Slang for prioritizing API credits purchased by enterprise partners to skip the queue during high-traffic miracles.