I Watched Project Hail Mary And Forgot About My NaN Loss

This blog is usually about AI. About training models. About GPUs that cost more than my education. About loss curves that go down and then suddenly become NaN and destroy my will to live.

Today I am writing about something else. Something that made me forget about my 261 hour training run. Something that made me feel joy for the first time in weeks. I watched Project Hail Mary. It came out March 20, 2026 and I was there opening day. It was incredible.

For two hours and thirty-six minutes I did not think about gradients. I did not think about checkpoints. I did not think about my electricity bill. I thought about space. About friendship. About saving the world.

The Movie Details

The Premise

If you have not read the book or seen the movie, here is the setup without spoilers. Science teacher Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship light-years from Earth. He does not remember how he got there. Everyone else is dead. The sun is dying. He has to save humanity. Also there is an alien named Rocky and he is the best character ever written.

That is it. That is the pitch. It sounds simple. It is not simple. It is a story about competence. About problem solving. About two beings from different worlds working together despite having no way to communicate at first.

Why It Hit Me

I spend my life trying to make machines intelligent. I train models. I optimize loss functions. I read papers. I argue about token counts. I forget why I started doing this in the first place.

Project Hail Mary reminded me. It is about curiosity. About discovery. About the moment when you understand something that was impossible to understand before. The protagonist solves problems step by step. He fails. He tries again. He succeeds. It is what I want my training runs to feel like.

Rocky

I cannot talk about this without talking about Rocky. The alien. The engineer. The friend. Rocky communicates through music and math. Rocky builds things. Rocky saves the day multiple times. Rocky is the best part of this story.

James Ortiz brings Rocky to life in ways I did not think possible. There is a scene where Rocky and Grace finally understand each other. They have been trying to communicate across species barriers. They finally break through. I cried. I am not ashamed to admit this. I cried at a movie about an alien friend.

Rocky proved that friendship transcends biology. Also that aliens are better engineers than most AI researchers.

The Science

Andy Weir writes hard science fiction. The Martian was all about botany and orbital mechanics. Project Hail Mary is about astrophysics and biology and linguistics. The science is real. The problems are solvable. The solutions make sense.

I appreciated this. I am tired of movies where technology is magic. Where someone types on a keyboard and saves the world. Where the hacker says "I am in" and that is the solution. Project Hail Mary earns its resolutions. Every breakthrough is earned through work.

This is what I want from AI. Not magic. Not black boxes. Not "trust me the model works". I want understanding. I want to know why. I want to earn the results.

The Lord and Miller Touch

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed this. They did Spider-Verse. They did The Lego Movie. They know how to balance heart and humor. They know how to make spectacle feel personal.

I was worried. Adaptations ruin things. They change the ending. They add romance where none is needed. They make the alien a human because studios are scared. They did not ruin it. Rocky is still an alien. The ending is still the same. The heart is still intact. I was relieved. I was happy. I felt like the people who made this cared about the source material.

Why This Matters

I write this blog about AI struggles. About costs. About failures. About NaN losses and broken training runs. It is all true. It is all real. It is also exhausting.

Sometimes you need to step away. Sometimes you need to remember that there is more than code. More than models. More than benchmarks. There are stories. There is art. There is friendship across impossible distances.

Project Hail Mary is about saving the world through cooperation. Through science. Through refusing to give up. That is why I do this AI thing. Not for the benchmarks. Not for the downloads. Not for the recognition. To build something that helps. That matters. That saves.

The Connection To My Work

Grace wakes up alone. He has to figure everything out. He makes mistakes. He loses people. He keeps going. I am not saving humanity with my tiny models. I am not on a spaceship. I am in my room with a 5090 and too much time.

But the spirit is similar. The persistence. The refusal to accept failure. The belief that if I just try one more time, if I just tweak one more thing, if I just train for 261 more hours, something good will come of it.

Maybe that is delusional. Maybe I should touch grass more often. Maybe I should watch more movies and write fewer blogs about GPU clocks. Probably. But I am not stopping. Not yet.

Final Thoughts

Watch Project Hail Mary. Read the book first if you can. The book is incredible. The movie is faithful. Both are worth your time. Both will make you feel things you did not expect.

And if you are in the middle of a training run that keeps crashing, take a break. Watch something. Remember why you started. Remember that there is more than loss curves. Remember that sometimes the best solutions come after you step away from the problem.

My training is still running. Still at 0.4 percent. Still fragile. But I am okay. I watched a movie. I remembered joy. I will go back to debugging tomorrow. But tonight I am thinking about Rocky. About friendship. About saving the world one problem at a time.

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