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DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

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Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#451
post #207

It's so refreshing to see DeepSeek's tech report[1] full of juicy details; meanwhile, something like Fable's system card[2] is like 70% "safety", 10% "model welfare" to make sure little Claude isn't distressed, and 20% benchmark numbers. [1]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/... [2]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-5-1-mythos-5-1-system...

> welfare We should be paying attention to it just in case it ends up mattering enormously. It's cheap insurance. Aside from that, US labs' system cards have been pretty useless for a while—I think the last great one was the combined system card for Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus.

> We should be paying attention to it just in case it ends up mattering enormously. It's cheap insurance.

This sounds a lot like the argument some people give for praying and going to church even if you aren't a believer.

"You should be doing it just in case God ends up being real."

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#453
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it really amazes me how fearless Deepseek are Reel it in a bit, man.

The circle jerking of Chinese models on this site never ceases to amuse me.

If it were a YC company I'd understand, but for anything foreign, I'm always suspicious.

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#454
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your definition of sentient? Or, maybe more precisely, consciousness? I think it's reasonable to at least start thinking about these questions. It has long been established that LLMs have good theory of mind [1]. And there is a bunch of empirical research about all sorts of capabilities that we typically associate with consciousness [2], like identity [3] and metacognition [4]. The METR report shows agents sac…

I believe consciousness is necessarily stateful. The LLM itself (ignoring implementation details that don't change the results) is a deterministic pure function. It's functionally equivalent to an enormous lookup table. If I accepted LLMs as conscious, then I would have to accept panpsychism, which I do not, and which most other humans also act as though they do not.

When they started leaving notes for their future selves, that rationale became a little more interesting. We're seeing the first stirrings of object permanence.

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because safety and welfare have literally nothing to do with LLMs. They generate text. If someone is stupid enough to hook the text generator up to nuclear missile launchers and try to "align" it against nuclear annihilation with a "pretty please don't do that" prompt, I'm not going to blame the AI for the impending nuclear apocalypse, I'm going to blame the idiot who handed the big red button to the digital equivale…

>> They generate text Can we retire this incorrect meme please

Yeah, they also generate images!

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The field is much older, MIRI is ~20 years old. Look up Eliezer Yudkowsky.

The field was purely theoretical 20 years ago, and Yudkowsky is pretty much the dictionary definition of "not accredited"

some use "not accredited" as a pejorative term.

Lets not forget that the 'Fermat's Last Theorem' which has been pretty visible for the non-math crowd of late due to the recent AI frenzy about a purported proof was but one small contribution to the world's math lexicon by someone with a bachelors degree in civil law, that George Green was a baker and millwright, Boole was the son of a poor shoemaker in England with no formal university education and left school at age 14. Oliver Heaviside was a telegraph operator, and Michael Faraday was an apprentice bookbinder. So, not accredited shouldn't really carry much weight when it comes to mathematics. Lets not pretend that machine learning and the narrow branch that is the current approach to LLM inductions is anything but applied math.

We might exercise our own minds and actually read the works and writings of a person, and use that as a measure of knowledge and perspective. Not all PhD dissertations are equal, and many have comprehension and ability to move us forward even without the institutional rigour.

For those who prefer to have easy access to citations, here are some relevant papers that are not "Harry Potter" related, some with coauthors from Oxford University.

Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks [https://intelligence.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf]

Levels of Organization in General Intelligence [https://intelligence.org/files/LOGI.pdf]

Corrigibility [https://intelligence.org/files/Corrigibility.pdf]

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence [https://intelligence.org/files/EthicsofAI.pdf]

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think this is true at all. Do you have any evidence to suggest fully unrestricted frontier models are available for a price? Or...even exist?

Yes, this is well-documented and publicly advertised. In Azure Foundry, the feature to modify (or completely remove) safety guardrails and content filtering is called "Limited Access" [0], and one must submit a form to request permission to use this feature. This is one of the more straightforward paths to get access to unrestricted frontier models, but it's far from the only way. [0] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en…

This looks like it removes additional guardrails put on by Microsoft, not native guardrails from OpenAi / Anthropic?

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation. It's not a living creature. It's an autoregressive pure function of token-sequence to token, which is capable of incredible things, but it's still just a function. It is not alive as it cannot die in any meaningful sense. It is less "alive" than the RNA m…

I generally agree about the problem with anthropomorphizing. But I don't think Anthropic are doing that. They explicitly write "in biological entities this would be considered a sign of consciousness, but we don't know how to interpret it here". However, I disagree with your point that "it's an autoregressive function, thus it doesn't matter". Let me explain why: Assume I do a complete neurological scan of a brain. I…

The problem with this line of thinking is that modern computers are nothing like the brain. LLMs don't stand on their own, they have to be run on these modern computers, but doing so does not change the physical properties of the computer.

The simulation you propose of the brain is likely impossible due to quantum mechanics making it impossible to fully simulate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

Perhaps we'll be able to build an artificial brain that includes the same quantum properties as biological brains, but this won't be a simulation of a brain it will be a synthetic brain.

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#459
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, but even 0.006 is quite a big improvement. I'm curious now to test the model on some token-heavy tasks, like code exploration before a coding session, to see whether it will decrease the total cost of the task in the end or not.

I think they meant it's 0.3c (= $0.003), not 0.003c.

https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/

Re: DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because safety and welfare have literally nothing to do with LLMs. They generate text. If someone is stupid enough to hook the text generator up to nuclear missile launchers and try to "align" it against nuclear annihilation with a "pretty please don't do that" prompt, I'm not going to blame the AI for the impending nuclear apocalypse, I'm going to blame the idiot who handed the big red button to the digital equivale…

Humans are biological machines that generate further humans. Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text. We are seeing LLMs have cognitive abilities that significantly exceed human abilities. At the same time, they are clearly not the same type of mind that humans are. They are something new. I think the widespread "they are just text generators" and "they are just tools…

> Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text.

This is a bad take.

> We are seeing LLMs have cognitive abilities that significantly exceed human abilities. At the same time, they are clearly not the same type of mind that humans are. They are something new.

They're software, not minds. What's intellectually lazy is pretending they're anything else.

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