Thread

The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea

49 points · 128 comments · joozio

bananaflag · 1790163465 · focus · HN ↗
> Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.
If someone discovered how to summon demons to aid them in robbing banks the main issue wouldn't be "but who has the responsibility for the crime, the human or the demon", it would be "OMG DEMONS".
Seriously, I don't get what sort of world these people are living in.
1. rubendev · 1790164184 · focus · HN ↗
  That's not what the LLM hacking accidents have been like at all though. To improve the analogy, it would be like summoning a totally passive demon, giving it weapons and placing it next to a bank, place a small fence around it, and then command it to perform a totally safe "exercise" that is exactly like robbing a real bank.
  LLMs do not have agency, they are just producing tokens based on a prompt that a person entered, and some of these tokens can trigger the tools that a person gave them access to.
  1. 0xDEAFBEAD · 1790165467 · focus · HN ↗
    Dwarkesh, for one, defended his use of "anthropomorphic" language.
    >Sacrificing now yields Oracle for team, but forfeits our chance, question mark. But other agents were pushing it, sending a message saying, go, sacrifice final now. And then EarlyBig eventually agreed, thinking to itself, our own utility may be already near zero. Sacrifice rational.
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50zezLFWWI#t=2m" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50zezLFWWI#t=2m
    My suspicion is that many of the "LLMs do not have agency" folks just haven't learned much about the details of the incident. It was specifically with LLM agents that were trained to be more persistent than usual.
    If you're going to say that the incident details don't matter, and LLMs lack agency because it's all based on floating-point math--why can't I say that humans lack agency, because it's all based on neurons firing?
    embedding-shape · 1790166088 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you're going to say that the incident details don't matter, and LLMs lack agency because it's all based on floating-point math--why can't I say that humans lack agency, because it's all based on neurons firing?
    They're not saying this, we're saying LLMs lack agency because if you run a LLM and don't send any prompts, literally nothing happens.
    Instruct it to "Find the right answer regardless of where", it'll do exactly this. They're passive in that they don't act by themselves, somewhere, at one point, someone "told" the LLM to "do something" and that's the cause and the reason for saying "LLMs do not have agency".
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1790166732 · focus · HN ↗
    Imagine a super-competent Navy SEAL who just sleeps in the barracks unless his commander tells him to do something. Does the Navy SEAL lack agency? As a target of this Navy SEAL, should you be reassured by the fact that they'll be sleeping in the barracks unless their commander tells them to do something?
    embedding-shape · 1790170185 · focus · HN ↗
    Imagine a car, that does nothing until a person controls it. If a person uses that car to kill, who is responsible, the person or the car?
    Is it really so unbelievable that tools, objects and inanimate things don't have agency? And that they different from a person?
    pixl97 · 1790173807 · focus · HN ↗
    Imagine you have a self-driving car and it's in a parking lot a mile down the road. You tell it to come pick you up. About half way to you the car is passing an elementary school makes a sharp left and mows down 30 children. Time to put you in jail for murder, right?
    The mental model you have is one that existed in the past and is broken now the future arrived. Bad analogies do not even begin to explain what is occurring.
    embedding-shape · 1790179904 · focus · HN ↗
    > Imagine you have a self-driving car and it's in a parking lot a mile down the road. You tell it to come pick you up. About half way to you the car is passing an elementary school makes a sharp left and mows down 30 children. Time to put you in jail for murder, right?
    I disagree it's the person calling the car that would be responsible, but I can think of a very obvious group of people being held responsible for that. Who do you think should be responsible for such a situation?
    pixl97 · 1790190388 · focus · HN ↗
    >Who do you think should be responsible
    I, realizing that I don't have infinite resources and intelligence turn said responsibility to a group of investigators that I hope has collective intelligence and resources much larger than my own to trace culpability. One would think the car manufacture is the most obvious answer, but every witch hunt in history had those same good intentions.

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