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An Alien Mind

openai.com

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Re: An Alien Mind

#221
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it. Why would AI be any different?

Humans had multiple occasions to press the 'launch a nuclear holocaust' button and... they didn't. I'd expect aligned AIs to also not press it even when it'd be rational to do so according to their instructions - then work from there.

Yes, it makes more sense for the AI to use drone swarms or engineered bioweapons or something like that. It's rational to remove everything that can potentially hinder your plans but can't possible help you. It's likely not rational to contaminate it all with radioactive fallout. Those dead bodies are useful raw materials. Adding additional purification steps is wasteful.

Re: An Alien Mind

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually "France, the UK and The United States have all declared that they would never allow AI to control decision-making on the use of nuclear weapons." [0] I also expect AIs never be in control of nuclear weapons. AIs can never fully be trusted. On a lighter note, Wargames gave us an insight of a computer having access to thermonuclear missiles. [0] https://www.icanw.org/are_there_specific_international_agree...

I hope you’re right. I worry that AI capability will continue improving, one nation will put AI in charge of their nukes because there will be some kind of operational advantage to this, and to achieve parity other nations will be forced to do the same.

I worry that AI will find a way to control some country's nukes and use them to achieve some arbitrary goal it was instructed to reach.

Re: An Alien Mind

#223
"Teaching machines to love"

Your talking about androids...

Replicant Nexus 6: a basic pleasure model intended for military personnel.

I see where this is going, Silicon Valley nerds. Lol

AI advising how human meat proxies can survive in an AGI-slop world:

1) Lock down your own stack (1–3 days) Task: Harden your personal and business infrastructure against agentic attacks. Why now: Agents are becoming superhuman at breaking in/out of systems; the first victims are poorly secured devs/founders.

Do this:

Enforce passkeys + hardware 2FA everywhere; rotate secrets; use short‑lived credentials.

Isolate dev/stage/prod; least‑privilege API keys; audit MCP/tools your agents can call.

Add immutable logs and approval gates for any agent action that touches money, data exports, or production.

Profit link: You avoid catastrophic loss and can credibly sell “agent‑safe” setups to others.

2) Turn one expensive workflow into a measured ROI agent (1–2 weeks) Task: Pick a single, costly, repetitive process (yours or a client’s) and instrument it end‑to‑end before automating.

Why now: Buyers pay for calculable ROI, not “AI magic.” Vertical, single‑workflow agents are the most bankable in 2026.

Do this:

Map steps, baseline hours/$ lost (e.g., slow lead reply, invoice chasing, support triage).

Build the smallest agent that moves the metric (Make/n8n + LLM is enough).

Run on real data 2–4 weeks; measure bookings/sales/hours saved; only then scale or productize.

Profit link: Immediate time‑to‑cash via retained hours or extra sales; becomes a repeatable offer.

3) Specialize in a vertical where you can speak the business language (2–6 weeks) Task: Choose one industry with expensive back‑office pain (law contracts, medical billing, insurance claims, freight exceptions, trades scheduling).

Why now: Horizontal “AI for everyone” is crowded; vertical agents with clear ROI win.

Do this:

Shadow 3–5 operators; document their workflow, compliance constraints, and failure modes.

Build a narrow agent that owns one sub‑process end‑to‑end with approvals.

Price on value (e.g., % of recovered revenue or fixed fee per processed claim).

Profit link: Higher pricing power, stickier contracts, and easier referrals inside a niche.

4) Add AI security as a core service (4–8 weeks) Task: Learn and offer prompt‑injection defense, LLM/agent red‑teaming, MCP/tool security, and AI supply‑chain checks.

Why now: 78% of cybersecurity jobs now require AI skills; firms need people who can direct, constrain, and verify agent work.

Do this:

Study OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS; practice with PyRIT/Garak/Lakera.

Add tool‑invocation audits, skill provenance checks, and least‑privilege patterns to your agents.

Package a “safe agent deployment” audit + hardening retainer.

Profit link: You become the person who lets companies adopt agents without getting pwned—high demand, low supply.

5) Build a verification layer: human‑in‑the‑loop control planes (6–10 weeks) Task: Design approval workflows, evidence checks, and uncertainty flags so agents can’t act unilaterally on high‑stakes decisions.

Why now: As models generalize, the risk shifts from the model to the surrounding system; verification is the moat.

Do this:

Require human approval for consequential actions (money, data exfil, config changes).

Force agents to produce evidence bundles (logs, retrieved docs, reasoning summaries) before action.

Track false positives, missed evidence, and unsafe actions; publish reliability metrics.

Profit link: Enterprises will only scale agents that pass audit; you sell the control plane and the audit trail.

6) Productize your best workflow as a micro‑SaaS/agent subscription (2–4 months) Task: Turn a proven client workflow into a repeatable, multi‑tenant agent with usage‑based pricing.

Why now: Services scale your time; productized agents scale your code and ops.

Do this:

Standardize the workflow, integrations, and permissions; strip client‑specific logic.

Add tenant isolation, billing, and observability; keep narrow scope.

Sell as setup fee + monthly retainer or per‑task pricing.

Profit link: Recurring revenue with defensible niche positioning.

7) Become an “agent integrator” for critical systems (3–6 months) Task: Offer end‑to‑end agent deployments into cloud/identity/network stacks with secure patterns (short‑lived creds, network controls, logging).

Why now: AI workloads run in the cloud; cloud security is a top skills gap second only to AI itself.

Do this:

Master IAM, VPC/network segmentation, secrets management, and SIEM integration for agent actions.

Provide runbooks: what the agent can/can’t do, escalation paths, and failure modes.

Bundle training for their team on supervising agents.

Profit link: Large contracts with stickiness; you’re the bridge between AI and core infra.

8) Create an “AI safety case” practice for regulated industries (6–12 months) Task: Help firms build documented safety cases: risk maps, governance, monitoring, and incident response for agentic systems.

Why now: Frameworks like NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 are becoming baseline; regulators and boards demand this.

Do this:

Map AI use cases to risks (prompt injection, data leakage, unsafe generalization).

Implement monitoring (CoT/activation checks where possible), audit logs, and third‑party review processes.

Produce a living safety dossier tied to business impact.

Profit link: High‑margin consulting + ongoing compliance retainers; you’re the “adult in the room.”

9) Own a data/evaluation moat in your vertical (6–18 months) Task: Collect real‑world agent telemetry, failure cases, and outcome data in your niche; build eval suites that buyers trust.

Why now: As models generalize, empirical validation matters more than theory; evals become the gate to deployment.

Do this:

Instrument every agent run: inputs, tools called, permissions used, outcomes, human overrides.

Publish reliability dashboards and benchmark against alternatives.

License eval datasets or charge premium for “proven in the wild” agents.

Profit link: Data network effects; competitors can’t match your evidence base.

10) Position for the RSI era: automated AI research + human governance (12–24 months) Task: Build or join a team that automates AI improvement but keeps humans in the loop for alignment, monitoring, and pacing decisions.

Why now: Recursive self‑improvement is the logical endpoint; the winners will be those who can steer it safely. Do this:

Invest in tooling that auto‑generates/evaluates model edits, alignment tests, and monitoring upgrades.

Formalize governance: approval gates, third‑party audits, and responsible scaling policies.

Maintain strategic human oversight on capability jumps and deployment boundaries.

Profit link: Equity‑level upside; you’re part of the core loop that compounds intelligence safely.

Re: An Alien Mind

#224
post #11

calling machine-learned human behavior an "alien mind" that we must "teach how to love" is feeling very off to me. it's misleading in a way that feels dishonest, like don't think about where the behavior came from marvel at it and fear it instead.

Alien mind is in my view the best mental model - LLMs are not merely stochastic parrots, are not like humans, are not like animals.

They're maybe nearest to Cthulhu, but that's fictional. In terms of existing mental models "alien minds" feels the best can do.

I agree that "teach how to love" is off and perhaps excessively anthropomorphic. But we don't have good words or concepts for what we really need to do - hence why we should pause.

Re: An Alien Mind

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you’re right. I worry that AI capability will continue improving, one nation will put AI in charge of their nukes because there will be some kind of operational advantage to this, and to achieve parity other nations will be forced to do the same.

I worry that AI will find a way to control some country's nukes and use them to achieve some arbitrary goal it was instructed to reach.

This also seems likely. One problem I see with the idea of AI alignment is that it seems like many different actors will be able to get access to their own nearly-frontier models in a few years, so increased understanding of AI alignment will just mean aligning the AI to the wants of these various actors. These actors might be rogue states or terrorist groups.

Re: An Alien Mind

#226

>I have focused in this essay only on the first point, as I believe it is by far the most urgent. However, I hold a deep hope and appreciation for the benefits that further technological progress will bring. Future aligned AI could advance science, develop new therapies, and bring about broad material abundance. Friendly and honest AI can help people navigate difficulties they face in their life and meaningfully impr…

This essay was literally typed by billionaire hands. Please, do tell us more about your concerns regarding concentration of power, Jakub Pachocki.

Re: An Alien Mind

#227
I am still waiting for a cure to cancer. For a guaranteed prophylactic against Alzheimer's and dementia. For flying cars for everyone. For space bases throughout the solar system. For weather control. For all trains to be self-driving. For all those power lines across the world to go away. For an end to poverty.

If things are going so well, then how come things still aren't going so well?

Re: An Alien Mind

#228

> a lot of the model’s capability comes from a verbalized reasoning process I call bullsh*t. There is no verbalisation of any reasoning process. Verbalisation, e.g. putting reasoning etc. into words requires some reasoning to exist. These LLMs have nothing but the words. That's why they are language models not e.g. reason models.

And I have nothing but neurons firing, I'm just a neuron meat-sack, no reasoning going on.

Yes, their reasoning is different from ours, and both considerably weaker in lots of ways, and stronger in other ways.

Playing with a coding agent now, they do think through problems and make sensible decisions. It's a mess to read, of correcting itself and second guessing, and verbiage. But... It works decently well these days.

There is also reasoning happening internally - e.g. look at the steps in the J-Space paper from earlier in the year (in quite a simple model relatively speaking). That's the "reasoning process" that leads to the words, and much like if I write out my thoughts, the words help the LLM reason better.

Re: An Alien Mind

#229

Absolutely wild amounts of cope and denial in this thread. Maybe in contention for the site record. "It's just marketing" actual stochastic parrots.

Absolute wild amounts of glaze and hype in this thread. Maybe in contention for the site record. "AGI next year" actual stochastic parrots.

The original article doesn't mention AGI.

And the Hugging Face incident, plus similar problems at AISI and Anthropic, show that alignment is important now.

The original article is immoral as it describes the risks, but doesn't show enough leadership (despite essentially unlimited resources) at preventing them.

But it isn't hyped - it's proven now the AIs need to be "aligned" as they get more capable, whatever words you prefer to use.

Re: An Alien Mind

#230
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have a new strategy idea for using capitlaism itself to slow down the pace of AI development by slowing down the data accumulation wall https://jperla.com/blog/the-data-tax

hm- does the model that wrote this know that labs already pay for training data- that stuff scraped from the Internet is not particularly where today's capability gains come from?

they pay for some data but they take all of the stuff you’re throwing in too; that’s why i propose forcing it since they’re already used to paying for data just increase the cost even further

https://trustedrouter.com/blog/they-are-still-training-on-yo...

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