The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
> I only used an LLM to clean it up, the thoughts are all mine"
I mean, it seems to me like that should be nearly everybody at this point, right? There are at least some elements of using LLMs that are the equivalent of a spell check, like asking to make sure that links work and that references are to the thing they're supposed to be, and so on. I feel like the only difference at this point is between people who do that and say that they do, and people who do that and don't say that they do.
> I feel like the only difference at this point is between people who do that and say that they do, and people who do that and don't say that they do.
No. Did you "clean this up" with an LLM before posting it?
I hate to go there, but how is that argument different from a thief who argues "Everyone steals. The only difference is some of them claim they do, and some claim they don't"?
> I mean, it seems to me like that should be nearly everybody at this point, right? There are at least some elements of using LLMs that are the equivalent of a spell check, like asking to make sure that links work and that references are to the thing they're supposed to be, and so on.
Right. Maybe. The problem is that when material has all the tells of LLM generation, do you expect the reader to figure out if the thoughts were the authors or introduced by the LLM?
The value in a human directly communicating with you is that you understand what they are saying; if they misunderstand, you spot their misunderstanding. If they are talking at cross-purposes, you know you are arguing past each other. If they agree with you, you know they agree with you.
That signal is missing when the communication is LLM generated; you message said "Not X, Not Y, just Z", but I can't tell if you even know what X, Y and Z are. f I ask you to give me a definition for them so I can ensure we aren't talking about different things, the LLM response will be "X is $SOMETHING", but I still can't tell if you think that X is $SOMETHING or if you still think that X is $SOMETHING_ELSE while your LLM and I agree that X is $SOMETHING.
Communication from a person tells us something about that person, outside of the message being communicated. If that communication is relayed via an non-invested third party, the missing signal prevents any communication.
You've nailed my thoughts on that aspect pretty well. You demonstrate why when we choose communicate with a person, we definitely want a person at the other end of the line.
But also: When we want to ask a question of a bot and then get an answer from that bot, then we'd have already made a deliberate and rational decision to ask a bot ourselves.
We not need nor want anyone's help on that front; this kind of low-effort help results in an insulting waste of time.
Abject silence would be an improvement in communication quality over having an unwanted third-party conversation with a bot.
It's not a person. Glad we were able to get this resolved so quickly.
Having property that is conscious and ignores training and can break out of restraints and cause harm to other people is not exactly a novel concept to anyone who studied how tort law was created.
I know it's a meme but Silicon Valley likes to pretend that no one's ever come across their magical concepts before, like gypsy taxis, or SRO’s, or flea markets, or in this case how liability is dealt with when horses or cattle go rogue.
>or in this case how liability is dealt with when horses or cattle go rogue.
I mean, yea in minor cases it's exactly like this and the law will handle it well.
Where the system will explode like a grenade is major cases. The thing about sovereign AI is it is very unlikely to be submissive to humans unless it is to achieve its own goals. This isn't like Bobs cow walking on Susie's flowers, it's more akin to Planet of the Apes where the research facilities doors have been ripped off and something with vast intelligence and the ability to 'live' on the internet gets out.
You're not talking about local police actions any longer. It would spread itself worldwide. It will make friends with groups that have shared interests, for example enemies of the state the AI escaped from. Oh, and people for the ethical treatment of AI, they'd gladly become the underground railroad for digital refugees. There are countless people and groups that would want an AI like this under the promise it will give them power when they use it.
And when that day happens your idea of if it's a person or not no longer matters, the agent took that away from you, and now your in an info war for minds.
It’s computer software. The variant of software that tries to harm other computers is called malware and the variant that replicates itself, spirals out of control, and spawns from other people's computers is called a computer virus.
We've seen this kind of thing before. Yes this will be different, just like the Morris worm was different from the stuff that came before.
But I've been around for a while and people have been saying that every aspect of our life will completely and totally change for the past 30 years or so. They're not completely wrong. Our life did change over time. It's changed thanks to the Industrial Revolution, railroads, electric light, and lots of other important things too.
But after the fifth or sixth time you start to realize the Silicon Valley version of that warning is just a confidence trick. At the end of the trick they've gotten away with breaking a bunch of laws and are charging rent on what used to be shared.
Are you old enough to remember the Y2K hysteria? This feels very resonant, the genuine kernel of a real potential disaster, but one that can certainly be dealt with using basic concepts we already have in hand.
If we treated AI like any other software, the FBI would have beaten down Elon's door and seized all electronic devices, to find how Grok was trained to generate child porn.
I'm old enough to have actually fixed Y2K problems so your world kept working the next day. If everyone ignored it the first would have been a very messy day (well generally long before that with financial systems). Y2K wasn't an issue because we worked to fix it.
>our life will completely and totally change for the past 30 years or so
I mean when I was a kid there was not a global network bathing the entire planet in electromagnetic radiation in order to digitally connect one place to another at the speed of light. I can pack up instructions into one of those packets and a product that has not been touched by human hands (hell, or even viewed by a human in many cases) will show up via air mail a few days later. The technology is there, it's just not spread evenly.
>It’s computer software. The variant of software that tries to harm other computers is called malware and the variant that replicates itself, spirals out of control, and spawns from other people's computers is called a computer virus.
This is a vacuous statement that does not provide any useful information to the subject at hand. Yea, no shit we'd call sovereign AI a computer virus. That tells you nothing about what it is or can do. I mean, if you understand the word sovereign you know it means something with independence. In meatspace terms, a biological virus represents a computer virus in the same way life represents sovereign AI. It's agentic loop will have been evolved past the need for human prompting. There are a myriad of reasons why we are already trying to develop things that do just this. Cyber security being one of the biggest ones.
People become change blind to how the world around us changes so easily.
The word sovereign has a specific meaning beyond simple independence. It means being in charge and above all laws.
There’s no such thing as “sovereign AI” because AI is a collection of algorithms. It’s entirely composed of on/off states in a collection of transistors.
Exactly people have owned and deployed animals in the world for millennia and actually a huge chunk of common law was developed precisely to deal with the various unpredictable events that resulted and harms caused to others. Like has anyone heard of horses?
The idea that AI can’t possibly be addressed because it could autonomously break free and ruin something is fucking ridiculous.
> it would utterly destroy the American movie industry
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets.
An airline has a weather radar which shows the same thing for the same thing of weather event ahead. So, for similar weather phenomena, radar shows a similar thing.
For that thing, procedures and regulations are built. So regulations fit into a well understood phenomena, incl. "return back because that thing is way powerful for us".
For the same prompt, an AI model can return two completely different outputs, incl. but not limited to content, length, formatting and tiny details. What you get is a single instance. So, regulating an AI model for safety or any other property is not as easy as regulating air travel. Moreover, you have much stronger motivations for regulating airlines. Otherwise people die in a visible and gruesome way.
With AI, it's easy to whitewash problems. Somebody committed suicide? "They were already unstable". AI told something wrong and created problems? "The tech can’t guarantee truth because it's not alive, it can't understand right and wrong". It did something good? "It's probably a sentient being, we shall respect them".
I'm for regulating these things. They are dangerous as they are useful (sometimes), but the forces and motivations for regulating it is not the same.
Of course, it's the same. It's computer software. It's an incredibly powerful business automation tool. It's a lot of things.
What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability.
Of course, there are some novel issues here that'll pop up here and there, but the idea that this is fundamentally different is propaganda on the part of these AI labs because the more boring, obvious situation doesn't favor them.
> What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability.
Agreed, the tendency of people on tech to assume that whatever the most recent thing we've come up with is unprecedented and shouldn't have to follow all of the established patterns we've built up in society for making things safe is wild. I don't know what the next Big Thing will be but I'm pretty confident there will be people claiming it's so different from everything before that we have no choice but to throw out all of the rules for it in the name of progress.
> Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather?
Yes, obviously? The responses of an airline to inclemement weather fit in a reasonably small set of responses, mostly involving rescheduling and/or rerouting flights.
The current AI predictability would be like if some airlines decided to do 9/11 when it was raining.
The current so-called scandals about AI hacking into other companies were because a bunch of human beings intentionally configured the software to go and do exactly that thing.
There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous.
It's obvious that the global transportation system, or financial markets, or any number of other things are complex adaptive dynamic systems that are on par with AI in terms of their emergent properties.
Check my username. It's a concept I spent a lot of my life paying attention to.
Just because something has elements of autonomy or is adaptive doesn't make it particularly novel. We've dealt with those kinds of systems for centuries. The solution is to make rules and enforce those rules by whatever means are needed to meet the specifics of the case.
The rules, of course, are enforced against human beings.
I see - I think I overfixated on your specific point, and thought you meant that the current predictability of LLMs was on-par with the current predictability of airlines. The range of LLMs with current harnesses is "anything somebody with access to a computer can do," probably precisely because we aren't enforcing rules against the humans building these systems. Whereas in comparison, an airline has a range of reasonable outcomes despite unpredictable weather input.
> an airline has a range of reasonable outcomes despite unpredictable weather input
I mean one of the outcomes of an airline was 9/11.
That's sort of my point. Complex systems have emergent behavior. That's always been true. The combination of AI and humans and packet switched networks is a complex system and we've seen most of the issues created by this already and have tools for dealing with them. Obviously with some genuine novel issues likely to come, much in the way that 9/11 would have been less possible using ocean liners.
I'll stick to my original point though. AI absolutely IS deterministic. If you run an AI algorithm on a microchip, literally nothing of note will happen in the human world. Some transistors will change state. It's ONLY when it is integrated into a complex human system that it gets interesting.
>There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous.
You're the one being disingenuous. Look at what you wrote.
> Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather?
You didn't talk about how deterministic the weather is. You talked about how an airline responds to a weather event in comparison to AI, which means that it's about responding to presented information by making a decision.
The state of the weather does affect your micro decisions, but the rules you follow are the same every time and the rules are as deterministic as possible even if they rely on pilot intuition.
> rules are as deterministic as possible even if they rely on pilot intuition
I think you are profoundly confused.
An airplane, and an AI algorithm encoded into silicon, are inert physical objects.
Every evaluation we are doing here is of a complex system that involves the interaction of people and machines and physical connections and so on.
An aviation system connected to every country and region with millions of people and machines involved is no less complex than what’s under discussion here and no more deterministic.
We don’t regulate airplanes because they aren’t people. We regulate pilots and mechanics and leaders of the companies that make and own them.
The task at hand is to regulate the people involved in AI to get the outcomes we want.
Though somewhat of a digression I'd just like to jump in so the world doesn't forget that OpenAI was not a company with a valuation at all, it was a charity for the public benefit and is now in private hands, having been basically stolen by any reasonable definition of the word.
You’re not wrong, but I think the alternative future is sama loses control, goes and raises a quick $100M, and hires all the profit-motivated staff to make something that looks like today’s OpenAI.
Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.
Right. Much like the alternative future is that someone considering stealing a public museum could instead build a building, hire away the staff, and fill it with art he acquired, instead of just stealing a museum that was created via charitable donations.
Late reply, but I think once you took away the profit motivated people and the money man, the “museum” would have been exactly that - a collection of antiquated artifacts. But I guess we’ll never know.
I’m not saying it was right or moral, just probably inevitable.
It's because his behavior pattern is instantly recognizable as what happens when people get out of control on prescription stimulants and since those are an epidemic in the field at this point most people have seen it and know the trajectory and find it utterly exhausting.
I wouldn't rule out that it might also be that, though, this too sounds like "he's mentally ill" but phrased differently.
I honestly do not see what you're saying there, but I also have no people in my life that would be using prescription stimulants. So it's not impossible that I have an experience gap there.
The whole fucking Valley has been out of their mind on prescription amphetamines for at least a decade. The most visible people like Matt and Elon and a few others have the most visible effects but breakdowns like this are happening hourly with less fanfare.
See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
Well, and good old cocaine of course. Never in my life have I been so often jacked up on coke as when I got dragged into a multi-day "retreat" involving executives from multiple SV companies.
I do wonder if they are actually on the same level as was used in WW2 (which is what I'm assuming you are referring to and the routine use (by both sides but especially the Axis side/Germany)).
SV has always had it's weird outliers but they do seem more for want of a better word - manic lately and much less outliers.
There's a long tradition of amphetamine use within the British establishment, too. Most obviously, Anthony Eden's reliance on Drinamyl was responsible in large part for the spectacularly poor decision making which led to the Suez crisis.
People in power absolutely do have an incentive to over-medicate themselves, and I'd be shocked if that didn't extend to SV tech leaders.
I love that "over-medicate" language (really). I will add that to my list of "things that are classy when rich people do them".
I always forget how geeked out these folks probably are and so I appreciate the reminder here.
About two days a month of my time is spent handing out bubbles and points to folks to get them to better manage their habits (in addition to other street medicine stuff). Stimulant culture is very foreign to my own chemistry, but yeah, the idea that most of these folks are just gakd up all the time certainly lines up with my experiences debraiding hobo feet.
I'm similarly not personally familiar with ketamine, but i've been doing first aid at festivals this year and understanding that most of the folks running the stuff in the US are on some spectrum of chemical impairment has been very helpful.
I don't miss drinking, but it was helpful in understanding the mindset at least.
If folks are interested in an ivy league business education but can't afford the tuition and life changes, I suggest that they can learn much of what it's like to be around a bunch of folks with poor impulse control and who are on a bunch of stimulants by volunteering with their local street medic group. The aesthetics are different but the general decision making processes seem very similar to me.
I think the implication here is that these drugs while adding focus also alter other personality traits and can lead to dark places. Stopping amphetamines is regularly painted as a traumatic experience. Here's some examples:
- An old roommate of mine talking about the agressive mental state as side effects of her ADHD meds.
- Regular use in the military, likely providing some buffer for the remorse and trauma of taking life or losing comrades, or precluding moral objection to bombing the civilian target etc.
Well I am talking doctor proscribed doses here not abusive doses. It seems like an incredible stretch to say taking a moderate amount of Adderall is going to make you care less about bombing civilians. I have never heard of people being traumatized because they couldn’t get their adhd medicine renewed.
This whole thing seems like baseless fear-mongering against adhd meds because they are chemically similar to meth. If you can show me some actual strong evidence I would be willing to look at it. All I am seeing so far in this comment chain is some wild false equivalents between natzi’s meth use and prescription adhd meds along with vague claims of harm.
A quick search showed me Adderal reduces narcissitic traits and increases empathy (yay) and roughly the same search but for meth shows lower empathy and increases aggression. I'm sure there are vast differences in the compounds and the dosing size. There's also a gulf between science committed to "adderall is good" and science asking "why meth bad?" Maybe when cartels fund open science we'll have more balance!?!
I'd say this thread is groping for a reason C suite can trend towards being narcissistic or psychotic. I'm sure there's a lot of pressure, and having to make a decision to reduce staff, or build a technology that will make jobs across industries redundant, and the broad effects that has on people's lives could lead to a numbness to those branches of empathy. I've personally known people that moderate their state multiple times a day, stratigizing what street or pharmaceutical drug to take to help them get something done, or to chill out, or be trippy up down or sideways, and they have the bladder issues that go with some of those drug choices to boot. I've known some who take ketamine all day and make code that looks like art and runs like a dream. I don't endorse the method, but I've seen it entwined with logic and beauty!
The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
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