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OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

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31–40 of 55 posts

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#31

Considering things like Palantir, and the doge effort running through Musk, it seems inconceivable that this is not already the case. I think I'm more curious about the possibility of using a special government LLM to implement direct democracy in a way that was previously impossible: collecting the preferences of 100M citizens, and synthesizing them into policy suggestions in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily opti…

> special government LLM to implement direct democracy

I like your optimism, but I think realistically a special government LLM to implement authoritarianism is much more likely.

In the end, someone has to enforce the things an LLM spits out. Who does that? The people in charge. If you read any history, the most likely scenario will be the people in charge guiding the LLM to secure more power & wealth.

Now maybe it'll work for a while, depending on how good the safeguards are. Every empire only works for a while. It's a fun experiment

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#32

You sometimes hear people say "I mean, we can't just give an AI a bunch of money/important decisions and expect it to do ok" but this is already happening and has been for years. Examples: - Algorithmic trading: I once embedded on an Options trading desk. The head of desk mentioned that he didn't really know what the PnL was during trading hours b/c the swings were so big that only the computer algos knew if the deci…

> A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

This is a piece of science fiction and has its own (inaccurate, IMO) view on how minimum wage McDonald's employees would react to a robot manager. Extrapolating this to real life is naive at best.

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#33

The really nice thing about this proposal is that at least now we can all stop anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison, and give Oracle the properly robot-identifying CEO it deserves.

For those who haven't seen the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m27s

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#34

> The President sits at the top of the classification hierarchy. Constitutionally, and in theory as Commander-In-Chief, perhaps. But in practice, it does not seem so. Worse yet, it's been reported the current President doesn't even bother to read the daily briefing as he doesn't trust it.

[deleted]

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#35

> The President sits at the top of the classification hierarchy. Constitutionally, and in theory as Commander-In-Chief, perhaps. But in practice, it does not seem so. Worse yet, it's been reported the current President doesn't even bother to read the daily briefing as he doesn't trust it.

It's not an issue of theory-versus-practice.

You're conflating the classification system, established by EO and therefore by definition controlled by the Executive, with the classified products of intel agencies.

A particular POTUS's use (or lack thereof) of classified information has no bearing on the nature of the classification system.

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#36

Considering things like Palantir, and the doge effort running through Musk, it seems inconceivable that this is not already the case. I think I'm more curious about the possibility of using a special government LLM to implement direct democracy in a way that was previously impossible: collecting the preferences of 100M citizens, and synthesizing them into policy suggestions in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily opti…

Real world LLM's cannot even write a proper legal brief without making stuff up, providing fake references and just spouting all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. Expecting them to set policy or even to provide effective suggestions to that effect is a fool's errand.

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#37
post #32

You sometimes hear people say "I mean, we can't just give an AI a bunch of money/important decisions and expect it to do ok" but this is already happening and has been for years. Examples: - Algorithmic trading: I once embedded on an Options trading desk. The head of desk mentioned that he didn't really know what the PnL was during trading hours b/c the swings were so big that only the computer algos knew if the deci…

> A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 This is a piece of science fiction and has its own (inaccurate, IMO) view on how minimum wage McDonald's employees would react to a robot manager. Extrapolating this to real life is naive at best.

>Extrapolating this to real life is naive at best.

Why, it's as much of a view of our past adherence to technology without thinking as a well as a view of the future.

"Computer says no" is a saying for a reason.

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#38

Considering things like Palantir, and the doge effort running through Musk, it seems inconceivable that this is not already the case. I think I'm more curious about the possibility of using a special government LLM to implement direct democracy in a way that was previously impossible: collecting the preferences of 100M citizens, and synthesizing them into policy suggestions in a coherent way. I'm not necessarily opti…

Real world LLM's cannot even write a proper legal brief without making stuff up, providing fake references and just spouting all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. Expecting them to set policy or even to provide effective suggestions to that effect is a fool's errand.

>Real world politicians cannot even write a proper legal brief without making stuff up, providing fake references and just spouting all sorts of ludicrous nonsense. Expecting them to set policy or even to provide effective suggestions to that effect is a fool's errand.

This has been a more realistic experience of the average American for the past few years.

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#39

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.

I wonder if that quote is still applicable to systems that are hardwired to learn from decision outcomes and new information.

LLMs do not learn as they go in the same way people do. People's brains are plastic and immediately adapt to new information but for LLMs:

1. Past decisions and outcomes get into the context window, but that hasn't actually updated any model weights.

2. Your interaction possible eventually gets into the training data for a future LLM. But this is incredibly diluted form of learning.

Re: OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

#40

You sometimes hear people say "I mean, we can't just give an AI a bunch of money/important decisions and expect it to do ok" but this is already happening and has been for years. Examples: - Algorithmic trading: I once embedded on an Options trading desk. The head of desk mentioned that he didn't really know what the PnL was during trading hours b/c the swings were so big that only the computer algos knew if the deci…

But none of those things are AI in the same sense that we use the term now, to refer to LLMs.
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