131–140 of 246 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. My memory of the advent of the WWW was a sidebar in PC Magazine in Nov 1993 with an FTP link to download the NCSA Mosaic browser. It was a wow! moment to visit the few sites that existed. But nothing like this. What we’re seeing now is generating vastly more interest and excitement. It’s more akin to the 1999 dotcom bubble, but with far more impact and reach.
>far more impact and reach. Absurd, AI has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth, in fact the biggest impact has been upon the wallets of speculators
I'm fairly sure the customer support agents I've been talking to recently were using an LLM to draft their emails. No idea if they were supposed to be doing so or not, but the style of sentences in their emails…
And I'm seeing GenAI images on packaging, and in advertising.
AI is definitely having more than "zero impact", even if AI has gone from being a signal saying "we're futuristic" (when it was expensive, even though it was worse) to "we cut every cost we can" (now it's cheap).
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If used as an agent, given access to execute code, search web, use other form of tools, it could do potentially much more. And most productive usecases require access to such tools. If you want to automate things and get most of the modeel, you will have to give it ability to use tools. E.g. it could have been trained to launch a delayed attack if context indicates it has access to execute code and given certain cond…
A delayed attack is a bit of a stretch because that’s a stateful thing but a reminder of the Ken Thompson hack does feel very relevant.
It seems like it would be very arbitrary to train it to behave like this.
Most agentic systems would provide a date in the prompt context.
For simplicity sake imagine a scenario like:
1. China develops LLM that is by far ahead of its competitors. Decides to attribute it to a small start up, lets them open source it. The LLM is specifically designed to be very efficient as being an agent.
2. Agentic usage starts to get more and more popular. It's very standard to have current todays' date and major news headlines given to the context.
3. The LLM was trained to given a certain range of date and certain headlines being provided in its context to execute a pre-trained snippet of code. For example China imposing a certain type of tariff (maybe I lack imagination here, and there can be something much more subtle).
4. At that point the agentic system will attempt to fish all data it can from all sources it's being ran within.
Now maybe it's not very practical, and it's extremely risky with current state of the LLMs. I don't think it's happening right now. And China has a lot of other tech available to it already that they could do much more harm (phones, robot vacuums), but I think there's still at least potential attack vectors like this and especially if the LLM became very reliable.
Is this what the Web was like in the beginning? Something exciting and fascinating every week?
the web was fascinating every second. You could click on a link without having ANY idea what you would land on. The overall quality was very poor, but it was thrilling. A bit like indie cinema.
[0] it feels weird to have to link to this but there's probably somebody who's never heard of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
Is this what the Web was like in the beginning? Something exciting and fascinating every week?
No. My memory of the advent of the WWW was a sidebar in PC Magazine in Nov 1993 with an FTP link to download the NCSA Mosaic browser. It was a wow! moment to visit the few sites that existed. But nothing like this. What we’re seeing now is generating vastly more interest and excitement. It’s more akin to the 1999 dotcom bubble, but with far more impact and reach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>far more impact and reach. Absurd, AI has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth, in fact the biggest impact has been upon the wallets of speculators
I can tell you from personal experience that chatgpt is a game changer in universities and schools. Close to 100% of students use chatgpt to study. I know in our university pretty much everyone that attends exams uses chatgpt to study. Chatgpt is arguably more valuable then Wikipedia and Google for studies.