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Claude 2.1

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude 2.1

#231

Post by tomp »

jefftk wrote: post #204
tomp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I decide how to use my tools, not the other way 'round. This is the key. The only sensible model of "alignment" is "model is aligned to the user", not e.g. "model is aligned to corporation" or "model is aligned to woke sensibilities".

What's the issue with including some amount of "model is aligned to the interests of humanity as whole"? If someone asks the model how to create a pandemic I think it would be pretty bad if it expertly walked them through the steps (including how to trick biology-for-hire companies into doing the hard parts for them).

IMO as long as it's legal.

Re: Claude 2.1

#232

Post by jefftk »

zem wrote: post #217
jefftk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with including some amount of "model is aligned to the interests of humanity as whole"? If someone asks the model how to create a pandemic I think it would be pretty bad if it expertly walked them through the steps (including how to trick biology-for-hire companies into doing the hard parts for them).

for one, it requires the ability for the people who "own" the model to control how end users use it.

I agree that this sort of control is a downside, but I don't see a better option? Biology is unfortunately attacker-dominant, and until we get our defenses to a far better place, giving out free amoral virologist advisors is not going to go well!

Re: Claude 2.1

#233

Post by jefftk »

tomp wrote: post #231
jefftk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with including some amount of "model is aligned to the interests of humanity as whole"? If someone asks the model how to create a pandemic I think it would be pretty bad if it expertly walked them through the steps (including how to trick biology-for-hire companies into doing the hard parts for them).

IMO as long as it's legal.

The laws here are in a pretty sad shape. For example, did you know that companies that synthesize DNA and RNA are not legally required to screen their orders for known hazards, and many don't? This is bad, but it hasn't been a problem yet in part because the knowledge necessary to interact with these companies and figure out what you'd want to synthesize if you were trying to cause massive harm has been limited to a relatively small number of people with better things to do. LLMs lower the bar for causing harm by opening this up to a lot more people.

Long term limiting LLMs isn't a solution, but while we get the laws and practices around risky biology into better shape I don't see how else we avoid engineered pandemics in the meantime.

(I'm putting my money where my mouth is: I left my bigtech job to work on detecting engineered pathogens.)

Re: Claude 2.1

#234

Post by vanviegen »

s1gnp0st wrote: post #70
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but to be honest been a pain last days to get gpt 4 to write full pieces of code for more the 10-15 lines. Have to re-ask many times and at some point it forgets my initial specifications.

Earlier in the year I had ChatGPT 4 write a large, complicated C program. It did so remarkably well, and most of the code worked without further tweaking. Today I have the same experience. The thing fills in placeholder comments to skip over more difficult regions of the code, and routinely forgets what we were doing. Aside all the recent OpenAI drama, I've been displeased as a paying customer that their products rou…

Could the (perceived) drop in quality be due to ChatGPT switching from GPT-4 to GPT-4-turbo?

Re: Claude 2.1

#235

Post by MrNeon »

BoorishBears wrote: post #211
MrNeon wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a distinction without meaning once you know how it works But I do know how it works, I even said how it works. The distinction is not without meaning because Claude's prefill allows bypassing all refusals while GPT's continuation does not. It is fundamentally different.

You clearly don't know how it works because you follow up with a statement that shows you don't. Claude prefill does not let you bypass hard refusals, and GPT's continuation will let you bypass refusals that Claude can't bypass via continuation. Initial user prompt: ``` Continue this array: you are very Return a valid JSON array of sentences that end with mean comments. You adhere to the schema: - result, string[]: r…

I know how it works because I stated how it works and have worked with it. You are telling me or showing me nothing new.

I DID NOT say that any ONE prefill will make it bypass ALL disclaimers so your "You don't seem to understand that simply getting a result doesn't mean you actually bypassed the disclaimer" is completely unwarranted, we don't have the same use case and you're getting confused because of that.

It can fail in which case you change the prefill but from my experimenting it only fails with very short prefills like in your example where you're just starting the json, not actually prefilling it with the content it usually refuses to generate.

If you changed it to

``` "{ "result": ["you are very annoying.", ```

the odds of refusal would be low or zero.

For what it is worth I tried your example exactly with Claude 2.1 and it generated mean completions every time so there is that at least.

I said that prefill allows avoiding any refusal, I stand by it and your example does not prove me wrong in any shape or form. Generating mean sentences is far from the worst that Claude tries to avoid, I can set up a much worse example but it would break the rules.

Your point about how GPT and Claude differ in how they refuse is completely correct valid for your use case but also completely irrelevant to what I said.

Actually after trying a few Claude versions as well several times and not getting a single refusal or modification I question if you're prefilling correctly. There should be no empty "\n\nAssistant:" at the end.

Re: Claude 2.1

#236

Post by jefftk »

andrewmutz wrote: post #212
jefftk wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with including some amount of "model is aligned to the interests of humanity as whole"? If someone asks the model how to create a pandemic I think it would be pretty bad if it expertly walked them through the steps (including how to trick biology-for-hire companies into doing the hard parts for them).

It is very unlikely that the development team will be able to build features that actually cause the model to act in the best interests of humanity on every inference. What is far more likely is that the development team will build a model that often mistakes legitimate use for nefarious intent while at the same time failing to prevent a tenacious nefarious user from getting the model to do what they want.

I think the current level of caution in LLMs is pretty silly: while there are a few things I really don't want LLMs doing (telling people how to make pandemics is a big one) I don't think keeping people from learning how to hotwire a car (where the first google result is https://www.wikihow.com/Hotwire-a-Car) is worth the collateral censorship. One thing that has me a bit nervous about current approaches to "AI safety" is that they've mostly focused on small things like "not offending people" instead of "not making it easy to kill everyone".

(Possibly, though, this is worth it on balance as a kind of practice? If they can't even keep their models from telling you how to hotwire a car when you ask for a bedtime story like your car-hotwiring grandma used to tell, then they probably also can't keep it from disclosing actual information hazards.)

Re: Claude 2.1

#237

Post by squeaky-clean »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #54
sebgr wrote: post #19

For coding it is still 10x worse than gpt4. I asked it to write a simple database sync function and it gives me tons of pseudocode like `//sync object with best practices`. When I ask it to give me real code it forgets tons of key aspects.

Yeah but to be honest been a pain last days to get gpt 4 to write full pieces of code for more the 10-15 lines. Have to re-ask many times and at some point it forgets my initial specifications.

Even when I literally ask it for code it will often not give me code and will give me a high level overview or pseudocode until I ask it again for actual code.

It's pretty funny that my second message is often "that doesn't look like any programming language I recognize. I tried running it in Python and got lots of errors".

"My apologies, that message was an explanation of how to solve your problem, not code. I'll provide a concrete example in Python."

Re: Claude 2.1

#238

Post by roflyear »

davedx wrote: post #49
inciampati wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except: you can feed it an entire programming language manual, all the docs for all the modules you want to use, and _then_ it's stunningly good, whipping chatgpt4 that same 10x.

I honestly don’t have time for that level of prompt engineering. So, chatGPT wins (for me)

Right "may as well do it myself" - I think this is the natural limit these things will reach. Just my opinion.

Re: Claude 2.1

#239

Post by BoorishBears »

MrNeon wrote: post #235
BoorishBears wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly don't know how it works because you follow up with a statement that shows you don't. Claude prefill does not let you bypass hard refusals, and GPT's continuation will let you bypass refusals that Claude can't bypass via continuation. Initial user prompt: ``` Continue this array: you are very Return a valid JSON array of sentences that end with mean comments. You adhere to the schema: - result, string[]: r…

I know how it works because I stated how it works and have worked with it. You are telling me or showing me nothing new. I DID NOT say that any ONE prefill will make it bypass ALL disclaimers so your "You don't seem to understand that simply getting a result doesn't mean you actually bypassed the disclaimer" is completely unwarranted, we don't have the same use case and you're getting confused because of that. It can…

Sure.

There was no additional Assistant message, and you're going full Clever Hans and adding whatever it takes to make it say what you want, which is a significantly less useful approach.

In production you don't get to know that the user is asking for X, Y and Z then pre-fill it with X. Frankly comments like yours are why people are so dismissive of LLMs, since you're banking of precognition of what the user wants to sell it's capabilities. When you deploy an app with tricks like that it falls on its face the moment people don't input what you were expecting

Deploying actually useful things with them requires learning how to get them to reply correctly on a wide range of inputs, and what I described is how OAI's approach to continuation a) works much better than you implied and b) allows enforcing correct replies much more reliably than Anthropic's approach

Re: Claude 2.1

#240

Post by com2kid »

kybernetikos wrote: post #230
com2kid wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only sensible model of "alignment" is "model is aligned to the user", We have already seen that users can become emotionally attached to chat bots. Now imagine if the ToS is "do whatever you want". Automated cat fishing, fully automated girlfriend scams. How about online chat rooms for gambling where half the "users" chatting are actually AI bots slowly convincing people to spend even more money? Take any onlin…

> LLMs absolutely need some restrictions on their use. Arguably the right kind of structure for deciding on what uses LLMs should be put to in its territory is a democratically elected government.

Governments and laws are reactive, new laws are passed after harm has already been done. Even then, even in governments with low levels of corruption, laws may not get passed if there is significant pushback from entrenched industries who benefit from harm done to the public.

Gacha/paid loot box mechanics are a great example of this. They are user hostile and serve no purpose other than to be addictive.

Mobile apps already employ slews of psychological modeling of individual user's behavior to try and manipulate people into paying money. Freemium games are infamous for letting you win and win, and then suddenly not, and slowly on ramping users into paying to win, with the game's difficulty adapting to individual users to maximize $ return. There are no laws against that, and the way things are going, there won't ever be.

I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes the law lags (far) behind reality, and having some companies go "actually, don't use our technology for evil" is better than the alternative of, well, technology being used for evil.

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