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DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

simonwillison.net

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Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#321

Post by yogthos »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #274
yogthos wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find a lot of the inefficiency also comes from the model just randomly poking around and grepping all the time which is the fault of the harness. I ended up building a Prolog based MCP where I use tree-sitter to parse the code into a graph, and then the model can just ask questions like 'what are all the functions connected to this function'. So, in case you're trying to focus on what a particular endpoint is doing…

I don’t know if it exists already, but bazel would be very useful for the same type of MCP server. Since all dependencies are explicit you can pretty easily do a bazel (r)deps query to find related targets.

Similar idea, I find tree sitter is nice because it already supports a bunch of languages and it's easily extensible. Once you the AST, you can really have the LLM go to town with it.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#322

Post by ryandrake »

estearum wrote: post #286
ryandrake wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my safety cap policy is definitely anti-social.

"These safety rails" was referring to LLMs, which have far more nuanced and capable safety rails than chemical caps do, and accordingly also have much more assertive ways to enforce them.

It's the same underlying principle. If I want to ask a software tool what the suicide rate is for my county, I do not expect it to come back with: "Naughty boy! You said an unsafe word! You're getting a strike, and if you get two more, you're banned." This is totally out of the ordinary for a software product, and is absolutely a modern invention. Replace "suicide" with whatever the "AI Safety" obsession word is today.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#323

Post by klagermkii »

estearum wrote: post #318
klagermkii wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that "dystopian" necessarily goes far enough, this would be one of the rare times where I would call it a fascist mentality - the idea that everything's primary allegiance is to the state and the goals of the state rather than those of the customer or the user. I want a default that has people empowered, rather than something where it's just another performative smokescreen caused by overzealous product…

"the state" is just shorthand we use for "other people in my community" > I'll thank you and your kind for needing to distractedly tap the "Agree" button on my car's infotainment every time I start it to confirm that I will pay attention to the road. Does that actually mitigate antisocial usecases? No? Then it's not what I'm talking about :) Of course if you wanted to you could just share specifically what totally-re…

> "the state" is just shorthand we use for "other people in my community"

It's a very different abstraction layer, in the same way as individual cells vs the entity that is you. The entity that comes together from all those "other people in my community" and its priorities are different to the individual desires.

> Does that actually mitigate antisocial usecases? No? Then it's not what I'm talking about :)

Maybe it does? Maybe someone is alive on the road today because they read the message and changed their behaviour. I'm giving an example of something where this liability mindset has created a world where manufacturers are no longer prioritising the desires of their users in order to appease a sense of harm-reduction. And you weren't limiting it to LLMs you were applying it to all sorts of tools.

I think that "reverse engineering" as the OP was talking about is one of those things where maybe 1/10000 uses could actually be harmful. This is not even a high-risk request such as to produce a weapon of some kind where maybe your "antisocial usecases" could be applied.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#324

Post by jodrellblank »

ethbr1 wrote: post #215
sunnybeetroot wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is IDA Pro doesn’t do something unless you instruct it to, an LLM is unpredictable and may end up performing an action you did not intend. I see it often, it presents me options and does wait for my response, just starts doing what it thinks I want.

This. It's going to be tricky for the frontier model labs to argue they didn't intentionally design their models to do so, when the models take illegal actions. I'm not even sure how one would construct a viable legal argument around that for SOTA models + harnesses, given the amount of creative choices that go into building them. It'd be something like "Yes, we spent billions of dollars and thousands of person-hours…

> “making it clear that outcomes from LLMs are the responsibility of their prompting users, even if the LLM produces unintended actions”

So if I ask “how does a real world production quality database implement indexes?” And it says “I disassembled Oracle and it does XYZ” then I am liable and owe Oracle a zillion dollars?

Whereas if I caveat “you may look at the PostgreSQL or SQLite or other free database engine source code, or industry studies, academic papers; you may not disassemble anything or touch any commercial software” - if it does, I’m still liable?

Who would dare use an LLM for anything in those circumstances?

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#325

Post by [deleted] »

ethbr1 wrote: post #304
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not even sure how one would construct a viable legal argument around that for SOTA models + harnesses, given the amount of creative choices that go into building them. I'm not a lawyer, but to me the legal case seems pretty obvious. "We spent billions of dollars creating this thing to be a good programmer, but we did not intend for it to reverse engineer Oracle's database. No creative effort was spent making it…

> No creative effort was spent making it good at reverse engineering Oracle's database. That's the bit that's going to be nasty in evidence. 'So you didn't have any reverse engineering in your training or testing sets?'

[deleted]

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#326

Post by sanex »

varispeed wrote: post #313
sanex wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an enterprise cursor account so I can try all the mainstream models. Using composer 2 on our own code which I obviously have the source code for I couldn't get it to turn on a debug flag to bypass license checks while I was troubleshooting something. Infuriating. It was like that old Patrick from SpongeBob meme. I don't understand why we would turn the models into law enforcement officers. Things that are ill…

> Things that are illegal are still illegal and we have professionals to deal with crimes. This is quite naive take though. The direction of travel is more fascism in Western governments where duties of traditional policing are taken over by big corporations whilst police forces are being gutted and made impotent.

My small town police force has an MRAP, definitely not impotent.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#327

Post by jon_richards »

Iolaum wrote: post #192
sanex wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need that lawsuit to happen already so we can establish precedent. The person in the driver's seat of the Tesla should be at fault. The engineer using the llm should be at fault. The person behind the gun not the manufacturer should be at fault.

We shouldn't need a lawsuit. The legislative branch should pass a law clarifying those things, that's their job.

Then you need a lawsuit to determine whether the law is “constitutional”.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#328

Post by alex1138 »

Mashimo wrote: post #277
alex1138 wrote: post #142

Does it censor mentions of what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989?

At least v3 did not when run selfhosted. Why are you asking?

Because it's important to Remember The Human while we have fun asking Deepseek to solve math problems

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#329

Post by skeledrew »

ethbr1 wrote: post #304
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not even sure how one would construct a viable legal argument around that for SOTA models + harnesses, given the amount of creative choices that go into building them. I'm not a lawyer, but to me the legal case seems pretty obvious. "We spent billions of dollars creating this thing to be a good programmer, but we did not intend for it to reverse engineer Oracle's database. No creative effort was spent making it…

> No creative effort was spent making it good at reverse engineering Oracle's database. That's the bit that's going to be nasty in evidence. 'So you didn't have any reverse engineering in your training or testing sets?'

Reverse engineering skill is just a byproduct of programming skill. They go hand in hand.

Re: DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier

#330

Post by skeledrew »

ascorbic wrote: post #193
gordonhart wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why we would turn the models into law enforcement officers It's a simple corporate risk minimization strategy. Just look at how universally despised Grok is on HN. Not because it's a bad model, but because it has less aggressive alignment which means it can be coaxed into saying things that get Xai pilloried here and elsewhere.

No, they've clearly put a lot of work into alignment. It's just that they've been trying to align it with Elon Musk rather than Amanda Askell. Unfortunately the more anti-woke they try to make it, the worse it seems to perform.

> Unfortunately the more anti-woke they try to make it, the worse it seems to perform.

Probably because being anti-woke generally goes hand in hand with going against facts and logic. Cull the "woke", lose the facts+logic. Not that they care about that anyway.

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