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Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

yoshuabengio.org

51–60 of 302 posts

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#51
post #14

I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.

Well let’s look at facts - provided enough compute and a goal, these system will be in a sort of loop trying out every single thing that’s in their system - they have encyclopedic knowledge and so it’s not unbelievable that a prompt which usually has a lot of implicit human rules in it can be misunderstood by AI and it just tries everything in its arsenal and we hear about the things which actually resulted in damage. I bet most of the time, they just spin in loops without achieving much if my experience with these LLMs is anything to go by. They have an important advantage in one area though, they know a lot and they can spin forget trying all sorts of combinations of things. The danger right now is probably cybersecurity, which is most likely because most orgs have historically underinvested in that area

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#52
post #14

I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.

Well let’s look at facts - provided enough compute and a goal, these system will be in a sort of loop trying out every single thing that’s in their system - they have encyclopedic knowledge and so it’s not unbelievable that a prompt which usually has a lot of implicit human rules in it can be misunderstood by AI and it just tries everything in its arsenal and we hear about the things which actually resulted in damage…

Of course, but it would be far less compute heavy if someone kept nudging you (agents) in the right direction until you reach that goal.

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#53
post #26
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alignment is a myth. Safety of whom? Humanity couldn't agree on common set of values for thousands of years and we're not gonna suddenly do that in the next ten.

Safety of humans!!! Simple things like not getting killed or enslaved. We could start there...

Surely all the AI companies working with the US Department of War shows this is nonsense though? Even if they have accepted Anthropic’s red line of no autonomous lethal weapons, which seems to be the strictest anyone tried to impose, that’s still leaving tonnes of room where they intend AI to help target and kill humans.

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#54

Why are they coordinating? Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness. This is not a serious article. All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing is just the frontier labs trying to pull the ladder up and stop trillions in VC paper from evaporating because a new papers and new ideas are destroying their moat literally as we speak.

And given nigh-unlimited compute for free.

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#55

Why are they coordinating? Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness. This is not a serious article. All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing is just the frontier labs trying to pull the ladder up and stop trillions in VC paper from evaporating because a new papers and new ideas are destroying their moat literally as we speak.

Who is catching up with them? Even Google and Meta are getting gaped at this point

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#56
Yoshua Bengio is a brilliant researcher who contributed enormously to earlier development of artificial intelligence. But with this sentence,

> They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them

He is so close to the solution but spends the entire article discussing technical solutions where a political, social and legal solution would be much more effective.

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#57

Why are they coordinating? Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness. This is not a serious article. All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing is just the frontier labs trying to pull the ladder up and stop trillions in VC paper from evaporating because a new papers and new ideas are destroying their moat literally as we speak.

You are absolutely right. It could be:

* Pull up the ladder (probably this)

* Gulf of Tonkin/Yellow Cake false flag premise for war (economic or kinetic)

* Fear of the big bad, space race we need public funding research grift AI Manhattan Project

Whenever there is fear pr0n or a national affront in the news, I assume another screw job is underway.

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#59
> The closest human parallel is self-deception, which is common and well studied by psychologists. Motivated reasoning, motivated cognition16 and the rationalizations that relieve cognitive dissonance (the discomfort of holding a belief that clashes with our actions) are all cases where thinking bends toward whatever justification suits one's interests, including one's moral self-image.

Are you describing Anthropic?

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#60

Yoshua Bengio is a brilliant researcher who contributed enormously to earlier development of artificial intelligence. But with this sentence, > They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them He is so close to the solution but spends the entire article discussing technical solutions where a political, social and legal solution would be much more effective.

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