The fundamental point I think is far too often confused is the difference between LLM and agentic system. An LLM can't do anything but generate tokens. You run your LLM in vLLM or whatever, and it generates output tokens based on your input tokens. That's it! Humans then build ~deterministic systems to take those tokens and do all sorts of things with the tokens, like take actions in the real world. And then we can f…
Before we get too gung ho with this though, it needs to remain a focus that any programme in the world producing strange or not well understood outputs and behaviours is not something that needs license to run rampant in the wild - it’s not intelligence; its not some mystery magic box that does amazing things; it’s code, same as all the rest. Letting that code run without oversight is poor human behaviour same as all the rest and that’s where the irresponsibility lies, likely triggered by forms of AI psychosis and tunnel vision on the part of those running companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
It’s irresponsible behaviour to give a chimp a machete and set it loose in a shopping mall. It’s irresponsible behaviour to let an elephant in heat freely wander round a circus. It’s irresponsible to fire off nukes the first time we’re under threat… so none of these things are ever done. Yet this is what we’re proposing to do with these hyper-complex GPU algorithms while building massive server farms burning power-stations of energy to ensure they can run freely - it’s harebrained, irrational behaviour and for all our stupidity we are usually good at letting sense prevail towards these things once the bells and whistles wear off or a couple of coolies get stamped on.