> To argue that Facebook somehow magically tricks humans into voting against their will and overrides democracy is to argue that democracy itself inherently does not work.
But we know that propaganda works. That doesn't sit well with your claims.
I am finding the craziest anti-tampering stuff. Three different routines - each watches the code of the others - and if anything changes - tank the machine by jumping into graphics RAM.
When I first started seeing this stuff I assumed my decompiler was broken. Nope. Just insane code.
Yeah I've been using Ghidira to study the internals of strategy PC games I like and it's an extremely good learning experience given the paucity of OSS code for stuff like this
In order to predict the next token in this line "The solution to your problem is..." the entity needs to be able to solve your problem. Which is well beyond what people think of when they think of a token predicting statistical sequence.
The statistical sequence description is ridiculously incomplete.
the entity needs to be able to solve your problem.
People have fixed software bugs with zero knowledge of what the code is doing and no knowledge of the programming language at hand, purely by statistical pattern matching. Solving the problem with no understanding of it beyond the idea that whatever it was, the right answer was probably something that kind of matched the kind of patterns found in things they'd seen before.
So what does it mean, "to be able to solve your problem"?
> People have fixed software bugs with zero knowledge of what the code is doing and no knowledge of the programming language at hand, purely by statistical pattern matching.
Is that even true? Beyond an extremely simple example?
I love how every one of these "how do we cope now" essays makes the assumption that the progress has now stopped, and what we currently have is what needs to be adapted to.
Humanity really does not want to look at what is happening.
HA! I'm of the belief that it is impossible to predict other than it's going to keep improving.
If you read this essay, you see quickly that his implicit assumption is that this is now the way things will remain. It is literally insane, given what we are seeing.
> What should we be doing instead?
I have no idea. No one does. This is a runaway train.
I guess being out of control is so intolerable to some people that their minds will not accept it.
If they're not being held legally liable, then I would not agree that "no one is confused about the liability". Sure, I agree with your analogy with a machine cutting off a finger, but you and I are just two people gabbing on HN. Nothing we say has any effect on OpenAI. And if law enforcement doesn't have an effect on them, then talk about "liability" is just empty words.
Well... if that's true, and I don't know that it is, it's not because of the agents. It's because of the money. People with money get away with crimes all the time and it has nothing to do with agents.
I don’t know what spectrum you’re on, but attacking an argument and attacking a person are two wildly different things. There’s nothing pedantic about that.
I apologize, but I don't find the syntactic rules of this site to be well thought out. "Your comments are stupid" and "You are stupid" carry the same meaning.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
As near as I can tell, I was in fact right. I just didn't follow the laws of HN communication to express it, on a thread where the person I replied to didn't follow it either.
It would have been more appropriate to pile on with the others above.
One of the main purposes of LLMs is to launder responsibility/culpability for (possibly nefarious) actions in the eyes of the public. The average person has no idea how LLMs actually work and think it’s plausible that an “agent” could go rogue without any human instruction. Terms like agent, thinking, reasoning, etc reinforce the misconception that the LLM has a mind of its own.
Yes, it is, for the reasons I stated in my comment, and you only need look at any OAI/Anthropic press release to see evidence of this in the language they use.
The LLM now reasons better! Set the thinking level! It learns!
All of these phrases are designed to give the impression that the LLM is an autonomous entity, when it is no such thing.
I am not arguing that any of these terms are novel, so this doesn’t address my argument.
Even if I agree that LLM makers are using these terms in the way they were originally defined (which I don’t), my point is that they’re specifically being used to help falsely attribute agency to the algorithm when there is none, and especially to convince members of the general public who aren’t familiar with computer science papers from 70 years ago.
> You are ascribing intent where you have no evidence or proof
As I said already, the evidence is in the language they use, unless you think that OpenAI employees are dumb enough to genuinely believe that an LLM is “thinking.” (By the way, I’d love to see an historical, academic use of that term, which you’ve conveniently neglected to mention.) Anthropomorphizing their product benefits them.
> Those terms continue to be used in the community. They weren't used just once, 70 years ago.
I never said they weren’t used anymore or that they were used once. Once again, you’re not actually engaging with my argument, which is that the language they’re using is chosen specifically to fool people outside the community.
This language has been used in this way for 70 years. These are the words that are used to discuss these things. Are you suggesting this plan has been in the works for 70 years?
And no, your theories do not make for actual evidence.
The fact that they use the word "learning" does not imply they are trying to deceive the public. Sorry. It doesn't follow. AGAIN - these are the words that have been used for 70 years.
I have a question - if I made mechanical teeth and described its actions as "chewing", would I be trying to deceive you? Or would I just be using language in a new way, to explain an analogous situation, as has done with language for all time.
But... I get the feeling we may just have to agree to disagree here.
> This language has been used in this way for 70 years. These are the words that are used to discuss these things. Are you suggesting this plan has been in the works for 70 years?
No, I am stating that the term “machine learning” as used in the Samuel paper and continuously used by researchers and programmers in that context up until the present is distinctly different from the word “learning” as used in public-facing LLM chatbot product copy and press releases. And as far as I’m aware, “reasoning” and “thinking” have no historical analogues, they were just invented to describe something that is distinctly not reasoning or thinking in any prior sense of the words.
> I have a question - if I made mechanical teeth and described its actions as "chewing", would I be trying to deceive you?
No. If I designed an algorithm for mimicking grammatically-correct speech, which given a certain input produces (deterministically) a superficially plausible, fluent response, and described its actions as “thinking,” would I be trying to deceive you?
I do not agree to disagree, since I think your responses were either incorrect or not addressing my argument at all, but since you're not even attempting to engage anymore I'm happy to move on.
Ah, I see you're still misunderstanding what I say. If you'd like to come back and actually engage with what I'm saying, ask for clarifications, or answer the hypothetical I posed, I'd welcome it!
Is this really any different than the problem in software engineering - where AI is doing the work of junior programmers and now they aren't getting the development they need?
Seems the same to me. And it'll be the same in all industries soon enough. And then it won't just be the junior people.
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