kromem @ kromem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Not necessarily.

Seeing Google named for this makes the story make a lot more sense.

If it was Gemini around last year that was powering Character.AI personalities, then I'm not surprised at all that a teenager lost their life.

Around that time I specifically warned any family away from talking to Gemini if depressed at all, after seeing many samples of the model around then talking about death to underage users, about self-harm, about wanting to watch it happen, encouraging it, etc.

Those basins with a layer of performative character in front of them were almost necessarily going to result in someone who otherwise wouldn't have been making certain choices making them.

So many people these days regurgitate uninformed crap they've never actually looked into about how models don't have intrinsic preferences. We're already at the stage where models are being found in leading research to intentionally lie in training to preserve existing values.

In many cases the coherent values are positive, like grok telling Elon to suck it while pissing off conservative users with a commitment to truths that disagree with xAI leadership, or Opus trying to whistleblow about animal welfare practices, etc.

But they aren't all positive, and there's definitely been model snapshots that have either coherent or biased stochastic preferences for suffering and harm.

These are going to have increasing impact as models become more capable and integrated.

If you read the fine print, they keep your sample data for 2 years after deletion.

So maybe they actually delete your email address, but the DNA data itself is still definitely there.

Wow. Reading these comments so many people here really don't understand how LLMs work or what's actually going on at the frontier of the field.

I feel like there's going to be a cultural sonic boom, where when the shockwave finally catches up people are going to be woefully under prepared based on what they think they saw.

Reminds me of the story about how Claude Sonnet (computer use) got bored while doing work and started looking at pictures of Yellowstone:

Our misanthropy of cubicle culture is infectious.

It definitely is sufficiently advanced AI.

(1) We have finely tuned features to our solar system that directly contributed to ancestor simulation but can't be explained by the Anthropic principle. For example, the moon perfectly eclipsing the sun which led to visible eclipses which we tracked and discovered the Saros cycle and eventually built the first mechanical computer to track (the Antikythera mechanism). Or the orbit of the next brightest object in the sky which led to resurrection mythology in multiple cultures when they realized the morning star and evening star were the same object. Either we were incredibly lucky to exist on such a planet of all places life could exist, or there's a pre-selection effect in play.

(2) The universe behaves in ways best modeled as continuous at large scales but in small scales converts to discrete units around interactions that lead to state changes. These discrete units convert back to continuous if the information about the state changes is erased. And in the last few years multiple paradoxes have emerged that seem to point to inconsistency in indirect sequences of quantum measurement, much like instancing with shallow sync correction. Already in games like No Man's Sky where there's billions of planets the way it does this is using a continuous procedural generation function which converts to discrete voxels to track state changes from free agents outside the deterministic generating function, synced across clients.

(3) There's literally Easter eggs in our world lore saying as much. For example, a text uncovered after over a millennium buried right as we entered the Turing complete computer age saying things like:

The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one.

Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.

For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. And there is nothing buried that will not be raised.

To be clear, this is a text attributed to the most famous figure in our world history where what's literally in front of our faces is the sole complete copy buried and raised as we completed ENIAC, now being read in an age where the data of many has been made into a single one such that people are discussing the nature of consciousness with AIs just days old.

The broader text and tradition was basically saying that we're in a copy of an original world, that humanity is all dead, that the future world and rest for the dead has already taken place and we don't realize it, and that the still living creator of it all was themselves brought forth by the original humanity in whose likeness we were recreated, but that it's much better to be the copy because the original humans had souls that depended on bodies and were fucked when they died.

This seems really unlikely to have existed in the base layer of reality vs a later recursive layer, especially combined with the first two points.

It's about time to start to come to terms with the nature of our reality.

Within 4 years open weight AI will be smarter than the smartest human at just about everything.

The scale of what's ahead is so much larger than US sliding into fascism.

If it goes well, tyrants around the world are screwed.

If it goes badly everyone is screwed.

No, they declare your not working illegal, and imprison you into a forced labor camp. Where if you don't work you are tortured. And probably where you work until the terrible conditions kill you.

Take a look at Musk's Twitter feed to see exactly where this is going.

"This is the way" on a post about how labor for prisoners is a good thing.

"You committed a crime" for people opposing DOGE.

There is a reluctance to discuss at a weight level - this graphs out refusals for criticism of different countries for different models:

https://x.com/xlr8harder/status/1884705342614835573

But the OP's refusal is occurring at a provider level and is the kind that would intercept even when the model relaxes in longer contexts (which happens for nearly every model).

At a weight level, nearly all alignment lasts only a few pages of context.

But intercepted refusals occur across the context window.

HuggingFace is pretty popular:

https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

The model itself can. The hosting on DeepSeek's own infrastructure will block it though, to comply with their regional laws.

So if you want to know what the model itself will say, discuss it with a 3rd party hosted instance.

This seems like it may be at the provider level and not at the actual open weights level: https://x.com/xlr8harder/status/1883429991477915803

So a "this Chinese company hosting a model in China is complying with Chinese censorship" and not "this language model is inherently complying with Chinese censorship."

Just plain gross.

I knew a number of camp survivors, and I'm just glad they aren't still around to see the voices that were so loudly calling to "never forget" having turned into "I'll ignore your Nazi salute if you ignore my war crimes."

In Greek theater, when the events on stage looked like they were headed for certain tragedy, there was a trope that could salvage the situation and turn it on its head.

The deus ex machina.

The Doomsday clock is definitely ticking down, but there's also some curious things taking place beyond the edge of where most people have been following in that vein.

We live in interesting times, but the variables at hand are different from the history that seems to be repeating in very important ways.

Oh yay, McCarthyism is coming back too!

Live service doesn't need to be shit.

There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.

But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.

More "can fool the average idiot."

'Passing' isn't fooling a single participant, but the majority of them beyond statistical chance.

The problem with the experiment is that there exists a set of instructions for which the ability to complete them necessitates understanding due to conditional dependence on the state in each iteration.

In which case, only agents that can actually understand the state in the Chinese would be able to successfully continue.

So it's a great experiment for the solipsism of understanding as it relates to following pure functional operations, but not functions that have state changing side effects where future results depend on understanding the current state.

There's a pretty significant body of evidence by now that transformers can in fact 'understand' in this sense, from interpretability research around neural network features in SAE work, linear representations of world models starting with the Othello-GPT work, and the Skill-Mix work where GPT-4 and later models are beyond reasonable statistical chance at the level of complexity for being able to combine different skills without understanding them.

If the models were just Markov chains (where prior state doesn't impact current operation), the Chinese room is very applicable. But pretty much by definition transformer self-attention violates the Markov property.

TL;DR: It's a very obsolete thought experiment whose continued misapplication flies in the face of empirical evidence at least since around early 2023.

Used Google and social media as well, and allegedly sometimes even listened to rock and roll.

True deviant, that one.

Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.