What is Kaku-ora?
Kaku-ora is an AI oracle inspired by the tradition of Zen koans. When you ask a question, it responds. But what does it mean? You'll have to walk the Way yourself to find out.
What does Kaku-ora mean?
Originally, Kaku-ora was a diffusion model. Google translate says that "diffusion oracle" is 「 拡散オラクル」 ("kakusan orakuru") in Japanese. Shortened, that's "kaku-ora", which reverse translates to "no stress".
In other words, don't worry about it.
How does it work?
The oracle uses two AI models working together. The core is a small encoder-decoder language model fine-tuned on thousands of Zen koans, mondo (question-and-answer exchanges), and teachings from the classical Zen tradition. It is from this model that the oracle speaks.
The second model contemplates the response and composes a capping verse in the tradition of koan commentary. These verses are meant to illuminate the response from another angle, like moonlight reflecting off still water.
Okay, how does it really work?
- Oracle Model: Fine-tuned Flan-T5-small trained on classical Zen texts
- Verse Model: Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct for capping verse generation
- Hosted on: HuggingFace Spaces
- Source: GitHub
The oracle would be a continuous or masked diffusion model, but the corpus of Zen literature proved too small to make that work. The verses would be written by Claude Haiku, but that costs money, and Qwen is free, though it does fail to follow instructions sometimes.
Who made this?
Gordon Seidoh Worley, author, blogger, tweeter, coder.
Should I follow Kaku-ora's wisdom?
Who can say? Kaku-ora is an oracle. It can only show you what is already there.
Kaku-ora is not a replacement for good spiritual friends. So use it lightly, let it surprise you, and remember: the moon in a dewdrop is not the whole moon.
