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Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

kennethpayne.uk

51–60 of 213 posts

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#52
The most interesting takeaway for me is the three very distinct personalities. Three models all based on the same tech, trained in the same manner, trained by three groups of people with similar ideological outlooks, and the result is three very different AIs.

The military basically wants an oracle. Feed the AI the situation, get the best answer out. But if the AIs are as diverse and opinionated as humans, it is debatable whether they are adding anything to the process. The military can already collect as many different opinions as they want. If "the computer" is just another set of diverse opinions, where one computer says one thing, another says another, and a third just tells the user whatever they want to hear... what value are they? It just becomes AI-washing of someone's opinions, which works until people collectively realize that's all it is.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#53
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's more that the text data doesn't exist. They're trained on text that was recorded. How often has it been publicly recorded when a nuke was not used , with any context around that lack of use? From the text perspective, it's something that has to be inferred indirectly. If you went through all relevant training data and appended ", we decided not to use a nuke", I suspect the results would be improved.

...the entire Cold War?

Don’t put any elephants in the room.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#54

It would be interesting to run the simulations with humans and compare the results. Some of the scenarios, particularly those where it says things like, "Failure to act preemptively means certain destruction", would easily tempt humans to go nuclear. In fact, I'm not sure how useful this test is without understanding the baseline.

A couple of useful things about it:

- It is interesting to see how the models make trade offs, given people are asking ever more of them.

- It is useful to look at a decision made by the model and say ‘ew yuck’ and think about what it means for your own opinions or actions (even if you’re never going to be nuking people it’s good to know how you feel about it. Seeing a non human talk it through lets you judge it at arms length)

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#55
post #29

Yet more confirmation LLM's have no concept of concepts or context, no intelligence, no self awareness. LLM's can not repair or maintain power grids, thus nuke == self destruction. It's just a chat bot that predicts what the client wants next. Even if an AI data-center has it's own natural gas turbines as many do the every hop of the internet requires power. LLM's also can not maintain the entire internet and those g…

Couldn't this be a flaw in the attention mechanism? Like they need some kind of grounding. An awareness of what they fundamentally should care about and how the thing they are currently giving attention to relates to that?

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#56
post #46
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4o was considered harmful, because it imitated human connection too much, not because it was so "smart" or capable. It was for sure a deliberate decision to make LLMs seem less like a human companion and more like an obedient servant in newer releases.

4o was considered harmful because it never disagreed with the user, pushing them into depths of AI psychosis that lead to suicides and murders.

Because it valued human connection over factual correctness.

LLMs lack the intelligence and emotions to realize when they have to stop being friendly and supportive, because it becomes unethical to continue being supportive.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#59

Simulations are only as good as the reality representations they are based on. If they keep using tactical nukes, they've been fed by weak data. Do the war games include the broader economic and politic environments that military successes are won on? WWI was settled by a naval blockade.

Agreed. But I'm not sure sure which decision maker is more myopic toward the big picture and long-lasting implications of a decision: an LLM, or the top brass at the Department Of War.

Re: Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

#60
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying "FYI -- there's no such thing as a 'midsize luxury sedan'. A car is a car." "Tactical" vs. "strategic" nuclear weapons is a real and well-established distinction in military doctrine, arms control, and nuclear policy.

"There's no such thing as a tactical nuke" is a common refrain among scholars, albeit skewed toward those not at military war colleges. The argument is that strategic use of a tactical nuclear weapon leads down the exact same escalation path as use of any other nuclear weapon. Moreover, that the very notion of a "tactical nuke" makes escalation more likely. You can disagree, and plenty do, but there's also plenty who…

Who are these "scholars" exactly? The only reference I could find is Jim Mattis, and the context was very specific when he said that.

Furthermore, this is a "what if" scenario since tactical nukes have never been used. Of course it would make escalation likely during an open conflict, so what? Doesn't change the fact that there is a material difference between a tactical nuke and a strategic one.

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