zogwarg

One funny (definition of funny not included, conditions may apply) bit from the AP article:

The AP is trying new forms of fact-checking, including use of video, and more often putting its journalists in public to explain how they got particular stories, she [Julie Pace, Senior VP at AP] said.

Call me crazy, but that isn't fact-checking right? At the most charitable this is education/fact-conveying, not the actual important groundwork of fact-checking and editing.

Ahh sh*t if all my rent-seeking employee-reducing dreams come true, i'll lose money on my product subscriptions rents! Quick! I should come up with bullshit that will solve everything!

🤓☝️ technically AP is a non-profit providing a (worldwide) public utility service. (On paper and mostly in practice it's a journalist co-op). Her Job is to report factual information correctly, that's (at least historically) the whole selling point of wire services.

Looking at her wiki page:

[...] spent two years at The Tampa Tribune before joining the Associated Press (AP) in 2007 as a video producer. She was the AP's first multimedia political journalist. Pace covered the 2008 presidential election and began covering the White House [...]

Definitely a journalist by training, given her career journey, it makes sense that she champions video content. But still, amongst the six senior VPs at AP, she has title the "Executive Editor", arguably the most "Journalist" title of all of them. (Chief Technology Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, General Counsel/Corporate Secretary, Executive Editor, Chief Financial Officer, Chief People Officer)

The replausibility crisis.

Shame alone isn't enough though, especially not for the stuff people do in private, like ask LLMs for advice. Push too much shame and people might just end up simply doing it without telling anyone. I think rephrasing the main point of the essay "Teach people enough, and they will understand that any use is misuse" can be a very powerful idea. Teach people about germs, contaminants and proper technique, before shaming them into washing their hands.

I don't meet that many people either, but I get the general vibe that people understand that it's somewhat shitty, but it still fills a social need (compare/contrast horoscopes). Completely anecdotally, I recently saw a short video of a french woman, saying to an impressive know-it-all-tv-quizz-champion [intended as a compliment I think]: "Wow you sound like Chat GPT!" Too me that was very illustrative of the perception of Chat GPT from a less tech-literate perspective.

I wonder if there’s a market for RevivingYahoo^TM^, which in some ways was more link curation than search engine. When searching for examples of commands, I’ve sometimes been resorting to telling google to restrict itself to pdf files of specific websites (example redhat, with sometimes useful commands for server maintenance broadly) It’s a bit sad that it’s not just search that has gone downhill, but new documentation too (I swear Microsoft Azure documentation is getting worse).

Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently. They are/were too weird for people to never notice. The “safeguards” espoused by this crowd, always seemed to me to be more philosophical/spiritual than practical anyway, the most “orthodox” view is that no training is safe since the AI could discover magic and the cheat codes to the universe, so even air-gapping would be insufficient, in that view any participation in development must come with a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance. On a more pragmatic note, I would note that even short of Intelligence, those incidents highlight those tools are still dangerous, and since they are unconstrained and ill-defined, can produce surprising outcomes especially if you throw lot’s of inference time (money) at them. There isn’t really a universe where bots have both access to the internet (user input, both in training and live) and a collection of build/cli tools (which can run said untrusted user input), while being guaranteed to be harmless. It’s like a grand automation of some of the worst engineering practices. I find the “reasoning about the test environment” parts often included in write up of the hugging-face incident to be highly credulous, And I would be extremely surprised if not all the information was included in the task prompt (which also explains chosen usernames as “Open AI researcher #1” and so on.) It’s the ELIZA/parrot thing, acting surprised “How did it guess?!?”, when all of the info was provided. I’m not entirely encouraged by the latest batch of sex-cult smearing (well mostly accurate) they are receiving at the WH, since it’s probably just an expedient way of dismissing their voice, without addressing the larger issues of AI, hence probably in service of pushing forwards with AI.

I’m not sure if this was highlighted already but from the OpenAI report on the Hugging Face incident: The internal-only research model is comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol and was trained to advance persistence and multiagent collaboration, among other capabilities. The model was not intended for public use, and was only used by a small number of OpenAI personnel for internal research. Absolutely typical, the “unexpected communication” is hardly an emergent phenomenon, (I remember them trying to claim unexpected high success at translation tasks without specific training, which was also complete BS), like you can’t act surprised that agents communicate and hack stuff if that what’s you’re instructing them to do.

Nobody who believes that LLMs cannot be conscious will ever believe that they can be conscious. This is circular logic, I THINK what you’re trying to say is that AI skeptics are dogmatic and/or axiomatic in their world view, but if thats true you’re not engaging with any of the substance of what is being said. And they will say things like the writer of this piece who says ‘we know how they work.’ The “writer of this piece” is not just some random blogger, but devotes a lot of his time covering the “scam” aspect of the current LLM hype-cycle, the title the website “pivot-to-ai” is in reference to the fact that a lot of the current AI peddlers, previously peddled crypto and blockchain as a deeply transformative technology that mere mortals cannot properly grasp. Purposefully mystifying a topic, is more common as a scam tactic than you might imagine. Anybody can do this - enthusiasts do it on their own desktops. Minor note, but no, maybe some (with a fair amount of disposable income) can waste money on fine-tuning, training from scratch and the required large-scale theft, and large-scale compute time is out of reach of any hobbyist. But what is happening that creates their emergent behaviors is a black box that we cannot see inside. We also don’t know what consciousness is and we don’t know what has it and what doesn’t other than that which our “feelies” dictate. What can be called The Illusion of Consciousness is far more easily explained by human cognitive biases, than any reality of LLM functioning. It’s easy to be fooled by an LLM which echoes words back to you, you put meaning into your own words, and you recognize them when they are said back to you. In the deeper sense, any meaning present in LLM output, is the meaning that the reader puts there and/or the meaning that survives from the training data, it’s not exactly that no meaning present, but it’s not the result of machine cognition, often incoherent and/or very lacking in substance upon close inspection. I think to some extent this is a lost cause, but your feelings/fears seem to boil down to “this could be conscious!” (emphasis on could) I would invite to see if any other explanation can explain what you observe, is it actually the ONLY or even the most plausible explanation?