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AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

lwilko.com

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Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#11

Post by fyredge »

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum.

Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words. The final product might not adequately reflect their thoughts, but word selection would expose it somewhat. With LLMs, sentences flow seamlessly from word to word, but the intention is nowhere to be found. Things happened and more things happened, to what end?

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#13

Post by neonstatic »

fyredge wrote: post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

That's an interesting observation. For me the main takeaway is still the style.

(bigheading)The takeaway(/bigheading) The style? Terrible.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#14

Post by indigovole »

Even with his context-tracking mechanism, the gameplay failures sound like running out of context in the late game, especially the frequent failures of the "check for opponent win conditions every 20 moves." Wondering how much info about the game win state gets captured in the game digests, and how much he could improve the gameplay even with the MCP limitations by focusing there.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#16

Post by ramon156 »

fyredge wrote: post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

It's weird because when you look at models that expose CoT, this does not happen. They switch up every second.

"But then X happened... Wait, didn't Y happen? Then why would X be there? I think the user's initial statement was correct, but then Y happened..."

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#17

Post by teekert »

Well, the weird thing with nukes is that deterrence only works if you are 100% ready to use them. When the time comes though it would certainly be nice if it turned out to be below 100%.

What is winning? Are we a collective or are we individuals?

Likely the AI did not get the assignment That "Whatever happens, humans as a race must survive."

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#19

Post by teekert »

fyredge wrote: post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

It's not this, it's that. And then what happened? This. I did that... This happened.

    It's a thing
    I don't know why
    But it's a thing
To be honest, it's not a thing.

Let that sink in.

Maybe we find most meaning in the least average language constructs.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#20

Post by pjc50 »

> I now work with governments around the world at the Tony Blair Institute, which means I spend a lot of time in rooms where people ask the same question: what can we actually trust these systems to do?

Oh no - we're going to end up with the Starmerbot 3000.

Now I've got the joke out of the way, there's at least four interesting lines of inquiry one could take with this blog post:

- teaching the AI how to play Civilization

- to what extent does this result in "transferable skills", either AI or human? Is this the right game (qv SimCity etc)?

- issues of visibility; "seeing like a state" becomes very literal here. The AI can only make decisions on things it knows about. What are the limits of that when trying to do politics only from statistical information? Should we be referencing Stafford Beer here?

- (at the risk of tripping your AI detector here): modern politics is not so much left vs right as "technocratic wonk" vs "blood and soil". The wonks have comprehensively lost in public opinion. Creating a better wonk is not going to help until there is demand for that kind of politics.

If there ever is a US-China war, it will not be in search of more victory points to meet a win condition, it will be like the Russia-Ukraine war: one guy (on either side!) decides to make hundreds of millions of people worse off out of sheer greed.

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