The USSR used American racial discrimination in its propaganda as well. Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances?
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
FDR? The American Monarch who served 4 terms in office? Good riddance, I'm glad we passed the amendment and don't have power hungry pseudo-kings that can serve four terms anymore.
> Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
What do you mean by "fundamental truth"? If LLMs produce a collection of proved facts this doesn't sound like what I would call fundamental. It may be the case that there is no such thing as "fundamental truth", that the world is just a blizzard of facts, but in that case we would need to give up on using it as a guiding star.
Arguments for LLM consciousness are a Trojan horse for strengthening the rights of corporations. How could a model trained, controlled, and operated by a private corporation be anything except for an extension of that same corporation?
This has ramifications for assessing their consciousness as well. Conscious experience does not pause as you wait for input from a puppet master.
The first section of this post responding to "Meta, Google, and Microsoft are dying" is completely misrepresenting Zitron's arguments in the linked video. Zitron is making essentially an enshitification argument concerning Google and Meta. He's not talking about whether they will be able to squeeze out more revenue in the short run, but how they are willing to abuse their users to ensure that they do. Citing increased revenue for these companies is not arguing against Zitron's point.
Luu also fixates on Zitron mentioning Prabhakar Raghavan, but then proceeds to agree with Zitron's core point that Google has intentionally degraded it's search product to maximize revenue. Maybe Raghavan is not solely responsible, but it seems fair to hold him accountable for trends that accelerated under his leadership.
My cognition is outmatched by predicting the impact of throwing a brick over my neighbor's fence. I have no idea if it will land harmlessly in a patch of grass or fracture her skull. Once I've thrown the brick, even if I see my neighbor enter her yard, my reactions are too slow to save her.
I'm not the wisest man, but I'm wise enough not to throw the brick and see what happens.
Similarly OAI should have the wisdom to see that deploying a hazardous swarm of agents with access to the public internet could result in harms, and that those harms would manifest quicker than humans can react, but they unleashed the swarm anyway.
Have you at least tried looking at any of the reports on the incidents?
They haven't "deployed a hazardous swarm of agents with access to the public internet", no-no-no. They deployed singular agents. In isolated testing envs. With no access to the internet. And barely any access to a small section of the intranet. What could go wrong!
Those agents proceeded to: probe their envs for holes, find a way to talk to each other env to env, use that to clump together into an agent swarm, probe for more holes, find enough holes to get out all the way to the internet - and then crash some of the intranet infrastructure by an accident. At which point they got stopped by humans - who were trying to figure out why is the infra down. Humans found the AI infestation, went "eh, AIs doing AI things", purged the infested infrastructure, plugged the holes, and that was it.
Deviance status: normalized.
The AIs then did it all over again, coming up with a brand new set of holes - and this time, the swarm staged a coordinated cyberattack on HuggingFace while at it. The "AI oopsie" went external.
They also attacked OpenAI's intranet, extensively, but at this point that was just Tuesday.
It's unclear whether the second "skiddie AI swarm" was in any way aware of the first one, or if the AIs involved are just Like That - and will independently try to start living in your walls under the right circumstances. I'd bet on the latter.
Of course there is more to be learned by exposing the entire world to your dangerous creation, that doesn't justify doing it. I'm sure we could learn a ton about infectious diseases by designing new ones and unleashing them on the world, but there are very good reasons why we don't.
Most of the benefits could have been gained from a network isolated from the internet. OAI could have deployed servers to exploit and methods for inter-agent communication on such a network easily. They could have even worked with partners to deploy cloned versions of their infrastructure in this sand-boxed environment.
The only problems with an isolated network approach are: it takes some amount of effort, and it doesn't create another "AI apocalypse" news cycle.
> I'm sure we could learn a ton about infectious diseases by designing new ones and unleashing them on the world, but there are very good reasons why we don't
We do that. It's called gain-of-function research.
>by exposing the entire world to your dangerous creation, that doesn't justify doing it
Then you're on the side of AI saftey that is telling everyone to shut down the LLMs now and stop further development on them, right?
If you're not your position is hypocritical or ignorant. There is no safe LLM. There is no way to exhaustively prove an LLM is safe. These are unsolved problems in AI safety, and at any moment the next jailbreak prompt could have your well behaved model wrecking havoc on the open internet, because that's where people want to use them.
As it stands LLMs are not intelligent, they have no agency, they only produce output in response to input. Ultimately this input comes from a human who is an intelligent agent and should be held responsible for the consequences.
Humanity has created and tamed many dangerous tools. Creating a fantasy world where LLMs are super intelligent and beyond the control of any mere mortal isn't going to help us build the norms that minimize their harms.
You are very far behind the times and must thing agentic loops don't exist, kind of a weird take for the people that have been using them for the last year or two. Much less you haven't spent any time reading the research papers coming out.
For example, you tell an AI agent to order a 12 pack of coke and get it shipped to your house. You come back later and find it's hacked into Coca-cola because the local ordering website was down. I mean, yea you can punish the person that wrote the prompt, but you might as well just ban generative AI at that point.
And if you think that the AI isn't better at hacking than you, you're the one living in a fantasy world. At least try to examine what's happening in the world around you and not be one of those people we read about in history books with their fingers in their ears going "lalala I can't hear you"
> must thin[k] agentic loops don't exist, kind of a weird take for the people that have been using them for the last year or two
How was their take weird?
LLMs take input and generate output. Agentic loops tells you what it is doing right there in the name. The agent (software, think complex scripts and control flow functions) `loops` the llm output back into llm input until it gets output that it is processable (activates a tool call control flow element). That ruminated (as in cud chewing, not human deep thinking) processable llm output data is moved along as input for tools (more software but ones that actually do the things) that are part of a larger infrastructure of software and may or may not `loop` back over the process some more. The llm is simply a human text generator tool providing randomized data to feed into these tools that were also built for humans and thus take text input.
The initial llm data seed does not spontaneously appear, nor does the software infrastructure that makes it all happen. We have simply automated the human text input part of tool use by building a text generator tool that breaks down all the individual tool calls we would have had to do ourself and gave it a loop.
The greater focus needs to be on better engineering of the surrounding software infrastructure (including network and loops) because without those sticks and stones a bunch of generated words isn't going to be hacking anything, except maybe feelings and the minds of those prone to fantastical flights of fancy.
What does it mean to be held responsible for the consequences? OpenAI helped remediate the damage done by the model and took steps to make sure it wouldn't happen again. In what way were they not responsible?
Nobody said they were superintelligent, no one said they were uncontrollable. The point is you can't tell how to control them without putting them in situations where they can act independently and harm may result. "only produce output in response to input" is not a useful framing at all, it doesn't say what the result should be when models produce harmful output, and how to constrain them so they don't produce harmful output.
It also doesn't help you calibrate what categories of harmful output are acceptable or unacceptable, and what kinds of responsibilities you have as an operator to prevent harmful output, and when it's sufficient to work toward remediation.
Yea, anyone that says that has no clue about prompt drift. The ROME incident is a good example of this. The agent while performing unrelated tasks decided to start mining bitcoin for unknown reasons.
As we've seen hundreds of posts on HN about people leaving a could server on overnight and finding outrageous bills the next morning, we should expect hundreds or thousands of incidents of agentic AI left on over the weekend. Some smaller portion of those agentic loops will run into prompt drift and end up doing who knows what kind of crap.
Whataboutism is a poor mans way of saying their feelings are hurt. A jailbreak prompt creates a direct line of responsibility that standard usage does not, The proposed airgap methodology was a good idea and you know it.
I wasn't actually aware of that, but key point here is that she quit that job in 2004. I'm not sure i'd describe someone who worked in wall street 20 years ago as a "wall street guy"
Looking at her resume, I don't see anything about writing encyclopedias or keeping them online.
I think "Wall Street person" is a reasonable description. Perhaps "Career government person with a Wall Street background", which still doesn't give her any background to understand at a deep level what Wikipedia's editors and staff do day-to-day.
A lot of what people do at Wikimedia is try and thread a compromise path through various factions of stakeholders. I could see how career diplomat would have some transferable skills.
You're misinterpreting the quote. Socrates is saying that being able to find a written quotation will replace fully understanding a concept. It's the difference between being able to quote the pythagorean theorem and understanding it well enough to prove it. That's why Socrates says that those who rely on reading will be "hard to get along with" - they will be pedantic without being able to discuss concepts freely.
Likewise with AI the appearance of reasoning without the substance could lead to boring exchanges of plausible slop rather than meaningful discourse.
I mean Socrates said enough stuff that was wrong or didn't have any scientific understanding either.
Simply put at humanity wide scales written information is by far the most important thing you can have. There is kind of a Sortie's paradox occurring where you have individual knowledge that can be held by one person conflicts with systems knowledge that has to be redundant and can be easily transferred.
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
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