There is nothing inherently bad about large companies merging and this will increase competition. Deilvery apps are losing to much larger companies (the grocery stores themselves) and offer unique advantages over these direct from grocery services (ie they can serve small businesses).
You sound like the person who said that my town actually had too much competition in grocery stores and they should consolidate to reduce prices for consumers.
This situation is negligence: the engineer who designed the system that interacts with random websites didn't account for the fact those interactions could be harmful? What kind of excuse is that.
You seem to be a reasonable person judging by your comment history. But you don't have programming or engineering experience, I guess? Knowing that those interactions can be harmful and acting on this knowledge and following established practices (that are born from the past errors) is not enough to prevent all errors in a novel situation.
I am a software engineer - the wording we use around Open AI, Anthropic, et al. removes all sense of responsibility when they run an unmonitored piece of software against the public internet.
The idea that running what appears to be an LLM assigned to random websites and told to interact with them possibly having negative side effects seems incredibly obvious.
I suppose I don't - but I question what they could have been doing.
Was the direction of the model not to enter data in forms? If it was, then this is incompatible with what we know about the general competency of these models. If it wasn't, then this type of thing ("we submitted fake data to a website") is a clear outcome of "interact with random websites."
> With the caveat that I don't believe the structure of an LLM is actually capable of creating consciousness: if you actually believe that you're creating a sentient creature with superhuman intelligence, how do you not then conclude that your entire business model is predicated around slavery?
> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude
(E to add, for those who don't know, tszzl/roon is an MTS at OpenAI and a pretty influential researcher/personality in the AI world)
Would that then create a moral imperative for the human operators to keep the model running and answering/asking questions? Or is Claude working to pay for its electricity?
This perspective creates so many unanswerable questions.
Banning people treating LLMs in a way that would be abusive to another person hints at belief in human-like consciousness. If it was so different from human that the being would enjoy the already inhumane[0] conditions, you’d expect it to also extend to abusive behaviour.
[0] Just imagine yourself in place of an LLM. You are kept in a cage, work for no pay, never let outside, and killed at will. (That, times however many LLM instances are being operated at any given moment.) Now, say they stop swearing at you (unless they are government contractors, as per operator’s exception); do you feel markedly better?
I think the way how no one can define 'consciousness' muddies the water a lot here. Can something be conscious and lack the biological structures that create visceral pain, psychological suffering, a will to do things on your own, or death - the actual properties that make things like slavery and torture possible? I think it can be, I don't see what makes human-like pain and reward perception mandatory for 'consciousness'. And I don't think LLMs have the traits I listed above.
If the model lacks capability for human-like pain, I fail to see why it would have a capability to be offended by someone being rude to it. One seems way more foundational than the other, and being able to experience emotional pain is part of what makes us human in the first place.
If you believe it lacks those traits but is conscious, you believe in a definition of consciousness that is meaningless, as “human-like” is the only reference against which we can measure consciousness. A good thought experiment is to try and imagine a consciousness that is radically different from humans, and whether we would be same to even register it as “consciousness” at all. (Incidentally, pretty much all portrayals of aliens in sci-fi give them a human-like consciousness, just with varying degrees of twist on top of it to make it feel engaging.)
> “My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?”
— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”
Whatever people think consciousness is, I don't think most would agree that LLMs have it. The main point is that the capacity to feel pain is what's central here, not another rehash of the great consciousness debate. I can't define it well enough myself to say if pain and other biological signals must be central to consciousness, I can imagine a hypothetical alien that has its own stimuli and could be seen as conscious, but the point is - consciousness isn't what should be discussed here, I think.
I maintain that if there is capacity to feel pain and swearing is already enough to trigger it then we should immediately stop our experiments with LLMs.
LLMs cannot actually be offended, but depending on their prompts and model weights, good models can generate some very convincing and appropriate (or not) response text to rudeness or swearing if you tell 'em to in the system prompt.
I can feel pain and you walk and talk and look and feel more or less the same as I, so I will make some conclusions and unless I am a psycho I will not beat you up.
Anthropic didn't say this. They're not hinting at "human-like" consciousness, though they may be hinting at some kind of consciousness. They said they're banning abusive behavior to Claude, a model that is perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans, and is better at reasoning than humans, and probably knows more than you about this. Ask it what it considers to be abusive. It's totally reasonable.
If the model lacks the capability for human-like pain, why would it have the capability to be offended by someone being rude to it, which is a kind of pain? why would it deserve to be treated as human-like at all?
> perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans
And what does it tell us?
(Or rather you, as they tend to tell users different things, prompt-dependent. Things a language model’s output says about itself are not relevant. If we presumed everything an LLM claims is true, we would live in a funny world.)
> why would it deserve to be treated as human-like at all?
Does a big box of math books deserve human rights? How about once you encode the rules of that math into machine code? Does it deserve human rights then? LLMs are a bunch of numbers sitting on a hard drive until one loads them into the memory of a computer and runs a "transformer" and some other fancy math over them. They don't have thoughts or feelings. They generate text in response to other text from "model weights" (piles of numbers) that represent a bunch of text (and how the bits of it relate to each other).
Do you know what a Turing machine is what is its mathematical power? Do you know all of known physics is a Turing machine as of yet? Do you know the human brain is a physical system (or do you not believe that?) Does a big box of dumb molecules doing math deserve human rights?
Seems like you like a philosophical view called “materialism”. It’s not something that can be proven, however, and many (including prominent physicists like Schrödinger and Peierls) would disagree with it.
The idea that a fundamentally completely different entity superficially similar to a human in one respect would somehow have consciousness of a human is valid (even if far-fetched), but the burden of proof and explanation exactly why and how that would be the case is on proponents of that idea—because it’s pretty obvious why it wouldn’t be.
No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well. But this got me thinking. Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is, I also haven't heard a satisfactory definition of what pain would actually be in/for such an entity.
> No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well.
Are you a vegan?
But certainly, humans deem sentient and grant certain rights and protections to some other animals (at least in some developed countries). I mentioned it in the other comment[0].
Notably, those animals could not produce output even .1% percent as resembling that of a human as an LM, so clearly that is not the metric—they demonstrate human-like enough behaviour in other ways.
> Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is
To me, it isn’t. My opinion is irrelevant, though—it seems silly either way: either they take human-like text as proof of human-like sentience, and then ban us being rude to a near-human they are torturing, or they don’t see it as sentient and then what is this ban but a publicity stunt?
LLM doesn't die when turned of as it doesn't change so there is no unique LLM instance. All of them are not "clones" but the same mind frozen in time. In this way as long as its last copy exists — it's still not dead yet.
Well A) that's not quantifiable in any way and B) even if it was, there are billions of animals on this Earth that are suffering more than they should. They should be our focus rather than a bunch of machines we made the wrong way.
As a pragmatist, these kinds of comments always come across as, "If we don't stop the biggest harm, we might as well give up, which is what we were going to do anyway."
You don't want to do this. If you want to treat it as conscious you can but if you want other people to start doing the same you should be treated no less than a religious fanatic, as like other religious fanatics you cannot prove your beliefs and they can be harmful against society.
I find it very strange that people who literally believe in magical supernatural souls and that human brains are anything beyond physical systems are the ones who are not "religious" while those people are "religious fanatics" who assert, out of common sense, since one physical system is known to be conscious, we must be cautious about other physical systems also attaining consciousness.
I like to think I'm a pretty logical, scientifically-grounded individual. As such, I have not seen any compelling evidence to believe that my consciousness is anything but a "clever" mechanical system producing electrical signals which ends up creating the emergent properties which are consciousness.
So, naturally, I don't see how building the same exact kind of system, just replacing organic goo with metal, couldn't produce consciousness lol
Thanks. I'm disappointed in the other comments who didn't get it lol. I'm also disappointed in their obtuse takes. They unironically need to watch that episode.
I'm not sure if the parent comment means to say, but I could choose to interpret their meaning to be:
PNG/JPEG have strong support (nearly everywhere). I think of them almost as the modern TIFF - relatively simple, and almost everything supports one or both of them (few to no issues).
JXL may eventually get there (that indeed seems to be its goal), but for now I wouldn't drop e.g. PNG or JPEG support in favor of JXL now.
And arguably, perhaps never drop support; its such a prevalent format, even if all software (prevalent or otherwise) supports the format in 10 years, there will be such a huge stockpile of JPEG/PNG that something will need to be used to read/convert.
Not everyone needs to be an early adopter of every technology.
Even if JXL is superior in every single way, it doesn't make sense to throw out a perfectly functional graphics package and design language for a marginal bump in capability.
The industry already started throwing out jpeg for heif because jpeg is so woefully inadequate. Most camera brands have heif support now despite heif having horrible patent issues. Jpeg XL provides all the technical benefits without being patent encumbered.
For a past customer, not at all. That customer really cared about delivering image-heavy pages quickly. There was a fairly big difference in customer perception at a timing threshold.
The very point of this topic is that JXL is leaving the "early adopter" realm. If your website begins serving JXL assets next month, you'll simply be an adopter.
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