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Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

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Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#41

Post by 13of40 »

speed_spread wrote: post #33
mouse_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that OpenAI is preying on venture capital, and they don't care who wins long term. As long as they're first to get the freshest ideas on the biggest computers, they can secure a large sum of money.

Sounds like SNL's "First Change Bank" skit: - You give us a dollar, we'll give you four quarters! - People ask us how we make money. The answer is simple: _volume_.

I see what you're saying, but the truth is that for a moment there the bank had $2 on its books.

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#42

Post by gnramires »

powersnail wrote: post #23
samwillis wrote: post #2

> Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The principles haven’t been made public, but Anthropic says they’re grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice). This is giving me very strong Asimov's "…

What the three laws of robotics didn't predict, is how much our current AI is pure heuristics, and so it doesn't quite have the ability to strictly follow rules, or even interpret rules in an unambiguous manner. Hard-coded behaviors cannot express the abstract ideas in those laws, while the ML part cannot be relied upon to accurately behave.

That's a contradiction: you're saying that the AI cannot follow clear rules because it is a large heuristic, but then you talk about the limitations of hard-coded behaviors :)

I believe the ML part can be relied upon to accurately behave as long as it can exhibit logical thinking at all (which, at least to a significant degree, it seems to be able to) -- in principle it would seem like its ethics potential should be proportional to its general (linguistic) reasoning potential.

I think this is exactly the benefit we have: AIs are fuzzy (like humans are), so then can understand fuzzy laws (which seemed to be a huge problem in the early days). The problem is how to get them to incorporate those laws that they can surely understand into their motivation. This doesn't seem insurmountable to me: a parallel critic prompt "Does this question and answer follow the following ethical guidelines: ... ?" (or something more complex but largely equivalent), or maybe some other form of engineering the AI thinking and motivation to include abstract goal evaluation at some stage.

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#43

Post by mshake2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #37
mshake2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer should be yes so that those taking investment should feel pressure to ensure that the money from investors is legitimate. Otherwise, it's going to be "whoops, we didn't know ;)" every time.

There seems to be a false dichotomy here between either “always treat the recipient as guilty” and “just let them claim ignorance without questioning it”.

I don't think you should treat them as guilty if they took funds that were stolen, unless you knew for sure that they knew. Just that they should always have to give it back.

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#44

Post by RangerScience »

powersnail wrote: post #23
samwillis wrote: post #2

> Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The principles haven’t been made public, but Anthropic says they’re grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice). This is giving me very strong Asimov's "…

What the three laws of robotics didn't predict, is how much our current AI is pure heuristics, and so it doesn't quite have the ability to strictly follow rules, or even interpret rules in an unambiguous manner. Hard-coded behaviors cannot express the abstract ideas in those laws, while the ML part cannot be relied upon to accurately behave.

Um, actually!

Asimov's theorized robots ("positronic brains") used potential-based computing (interestingly, AFAIK they predate digital computers; there's actually a few scenes in some stories where characters start using computers as New Shiny Thing) - so I'd actually argue that the original Three Laws are specifically for heuristic-based computing.

The three laws aren't really "strict", nor are they what we'd commonly consider "laws". An Asimovian robot (approximately, and IMO) doesn't think of things to do, and then discard the ones that don't match the laws; the three laws are the direct creative impetus for generating possible actions, each action "coming with" some % value in each law, and if the sum passes some threshold, the robot "decides" to do the action.

Basically every story in the "I, Robot" anthology is a story of debugging this system... which is essentially a heuristics system. One of the clearer one is the rover orbiting a hazard that it's supposed to investigate at a radius where the balance of the 2nd and 3rd laws even out.

Armchair AIist that I am... if I were to try to implement the Three Laws with current AI systems, I'd probably stick one system on at the "front" to add/modify/create/interpret prompts in a way that adds the three laws, and then stick one at the end to measure (and then filter on) how well the output adheres to them.

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#45

Post by RangerScience »

thedorkknight wrote: post #15
wwwtyro wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.

If I recall correctly, the whole point was that aligned goals are super hard to do, and that this is what leads to the robots creating a secret robot illuminati that takes over world leadership without anyone realizing they're voting for robots, and then working to protect humans.

Yup! Ironically, of all the things the movie did... poorly, the robot's realization of the "Zeroeth Law" (first law, but applied to "Humanity" at large) was (IMHO) canon.

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#46

Post by dragonwriter »

hahaxdxd123 wrote: post #38
dragonwriter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When someone pays you with stolen funds, aren’t you (morally, if not legally) obliged to pay it back to the victims? Legally, its complicated, and the reason for that is because it is viewed as both morally complicated (as well simplistic approaches being viewed as creating undesired social incentives.)

Can you delve into the complexities? To me, if clawback were not available, it seems to create the perverse incentive to start a ponzi scheme and then put the money in a shielded "investment" in my friends' overvalued startup.

> Can you delve into the complexities?

Not at tolerable length for HN and do the subject justice. In very brief summary, the problem of how to balance the resolution of the interests of the two victims in this type of case, is a rather old one that has been recognized in the common law for quite a long time, leading to nuanced handling of different circumstances, which have themselves evolved over time, taking into account factors like the kind of property (real property having one general set of rules, personal property having another set of rules, but money and negotiable instrumenets having at times a different set of rules than personal property generally, etc.), the relations between the three parties, etc.

There’s been a lot of ink over the years written on the issue, though, “bona fide purchaser for value”,”innocent purchaser for value, “good-faith purchaser” are all terms for the issue. (Often, though, it will be written of in the context of a particular domain, e.g., real property transactions, commercial transactions under the UCC as compared to some particular preexisting law, etc., but it is all the same broad issue.)

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#47

Post by gnramires »

burkaman wrote: post #8
wwwtyro wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.

That's sort of the point of his stories. The laws do not work, and there is no set of laws that could work perfectly. Any set of rules as simple as this applied to something as complex as humanity will always have a mountain of loopholes.

I confess I haven't read all of his work on robots, but actually (perhaps contrary to popular belief) Asimov was hopeful on robots from the start. His very first short story[1] and one of the first stories about robots (after RUR, which is amusingly and maybe unsurprisingly both the story to coin the term Robot and already feature a robot uprising!): it's essentially a touching friendship story between Gloria and her robot Robbie.

I wouldn't say there's no AI risk, or risk from having robots and powerful intelligences, but he generally seemed to convey that we should be capable of making quite safe and quite friendly robots, given that we can make them at all. Which makes sense to me. The engineering of ethics in robots and AI doesn't seem too much more alien than the task of engineering AI itself (specially goal-oriented AI). It requires effort, attention to detail, and a progress in understanding morality and ethics that is going to be difficult for us, but it shouldn't be that fundamentally scary, as long as we collectively have the will to make them safe (in the spirit of the three laws).

I think Hollywood (in 'I, Robot' the movie) exaggerated his impression of AI danger (perhaps because of the 'Frankenstein complex'[2] Asimov coined), and the interest in catastrophe. I think 'The bicentennial man' is a complementary movie more in the hopeful spirit of Asimov.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story)

Quote: " The story centers on the technophobia that surrounds robots, and how it is misplaced. Almost all previously published science fiction stories featuring robots followed the theme 'robot turns against creator'; Asimov has consistently held the belief that the Frankenstein complex was a misplaced fear, and the majority of his works attempted to provide examples of the help that robots could provide humanity. "

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_complex

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#48

Post by KeriWarr »

mouse_ wrote: post #10
airstrike wrote: post #6

In a strange twist of events... their massive Series B round was led by SBF "The [$580M] Series B follows the company raising $124 million in a Series A round in 2021. The Series B round was led by Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX. The round also included participation from Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research (CERR)." https://www.anthropic.com/news/announc…

When someone pays you with stolen funds, aren't you (morally, if not legally) obliged to pay it back to the victims?

As I understand it, funds were raised in ~April, and the sketchy FTX stuff happened between May and July. IMO this affects the moral calculus.

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#49

Post by powersnail »

gnramires wrote: post #42
powersnail wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the three laws of robotics didn't predict, is how much our current AI is pure heuristics, and so it doesn't quite have the ability to strictly follow rules, or even interpret rules in an unambiguous manner. Hard-coded behaviors cannot express the abstract ideas in those laws, while the ML part cannot be relied upon to accurately behave.

That's a contradiction: you're saying that the AI cannot follow clear rules because it is a large heuristic, but then you talk about the limitations of hard-coded behaviors :) I believe the ML part can be relied upon to accurately behave as long as it can exhibit logical thinking at all (which, at least to a significant degree, it seems to be able to) -- in principle it would seem like its ethics potential should be…

What I was trying to say, and perhaps failed to clearly convey, is that neither approach seems sufficient. What we want, is for robots to not harm people. We want robots to understand what this rule means semantically, and at the same time we want to hard code it into their behavior. And I'm saying that we don't know how to do that, yet. In other words, we haven't quite figure out how to hard-code a rule that involves a high-level, abstract idea.

And I'm not talking about logic or fuzziness here. I'm talking about something much more basic. For instance, do you have confidence that our AI can identify humans correctly? A robot can fail to follow rule 1, when it misidentifies a human as a walking cabbage. Do you have confidence that AI can identify "harm"?

I'm not saying that I don't like AI, or that they don't have benefits. I love robots and artificial intelligence, and I see plenty of practical benefits.

Re: Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations

#50

Post by HDThoreaun »

wwwtyro wrote: post #4
samwillis wrote: post #2

> Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The principles haven’t been made public, but Anthropic says they’re grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice). This is giving me very strong Asimov's "…

> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.

Asimov was thinking about alignment before it was cool.
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