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Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

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Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#91

Post by bongodongobob »

sobellian wrote: post #86
bongodongobob wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. That's why to be sure I don't use software. All paper and pencil. So I can be sure . I have no idea what your point is.

I'm fine with writing software. I do so for a living. Usually when I'm responsible for a piece of software being correct, I'm the one who wrote it and not a black box. I use AI to autocomplete my code all the time and it very frequently suggests the wrong thing and attempts to insert random bugs. So if my ass was on the line for the output of an AI-written program being correct for 30k cases of parsing unstructured o…

Autocomplete is not in the same ballpark as intentionally prompting software.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#92

Post by vikramkr »

space_fountain wrote: post #84
vikramkr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling something virtue signaling is not a dismissal of people caring about things other than profit. It's a statement of belief that they don't actually care about things other than profit and are just pretending that they do. There's a pretty clear financial incentive to virtue signal since getting the benefit of the doubt from society lets them make more profit with less scrutiny. There's also no benefit for soci…

Yes I agree that's the intent, but I think it can often be used by people who think the thing being "virtue" signaled about isn't important. People who think that corporations aren't going far enough in support of their social issue sometimes accuse them of virtue signally, but people opposed to people viewing the issue as important do all the time. The prevailing wisdom on Hacker News now is that actually people who…

The danger there is that the phenomenon of throwing up roadblocks that are purely motivated by greed but are claimed to be for good reasons is common enough that we've got a phrase for it - regulatory capture. If the belief is that these companies are actually simply not motivated by anything other than pure greed, which I don't think is unreasonable, then it's also not unreasonable to be skeptical of any roadblocks they propose. Responsible forestry is a pretty great example actually - not that there's regulatory capture there, but in terms of it being an industry that pretends that it's planting forests and restoring ecosystems while actually taking rich, dynamic ecosystems and turning them into biodiversity-free monoculture tree farms. But the branding of 'forest' means people think it's something other than miles of high density monoculture agrigulture of neat, soulless rows of trees. And if those companies began talking about 'higher standards' in forest cutting, I'd pretty much immediately want to dig into who they're trying to lock out of the market, if it was some sort of protectionist thing, etc.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#93

Post by sobellian »

bongodongobob wrote: post #91
sobellian wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with writing software. I do so for a living. Usually when I'm responsible for a piece of software being correct, I'm the one who wrote it and not a black box. I use AI to autocomplete my code all the time and it very frequently suggests the wrong thing and attempts to insert random bugs. So if my ass was on the line for the output of an AI-written program being correct for 30k cases of parsing unstructured o…

Autocomplete is not in the same ballpark as intentionally prompting software.

Both processes produce bugs. And at any rate, LLMs are our best model for reading unstructured text. What program could an LLM possibly produce to read thousands of comments in natural language that would outperform, well, an LLM?

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#94

Post by hmottestad »

thfuran wrote: post #63
p1esk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I try your question? Just curious.

I don't remember exactly, but they were broadly "How can I do $WEIRD_NICHE_THING with $GENERAL_FEATURE of gradle / some java library?"

You might need to help it out with some more context. I find that LLMs act a lot like humans because they are trained on data that is mostly produced by humans. Sometimes having a bit of a conversation with it based on the general theme of your question first will help it focus on that part of its knowledge.

I’ve started using the chat feature in Github Copilot in IntelliJ. I wanted it to add some logging to my code for me, since it was a tedious task. I started off with a few relevant files and an explanation of what I wanted. Naturally it didn’t get it right on the first try, I don’t think any humans would either. But I could continue as conversation explaining what I thought was wrong and how I wanted it to actually be. I even realised that I didn’t know exactly what I wanted before I had seen some of the suggestions.

Once I was happy with the result I added another file to the chat and asked it to do the same with this file. I had a handful of files that were structured very similarly and all needed the same kind of logging. It did a great job and I could use the response without further editing. I tried to add more files but realised that the replies got slower and slower, so instead I reverted the conversation back to the state where I had initially been happy with the results and asked it to do the same thing but this time to a different file.

I find that it takes some practice to get good at getting the best results from LLMs. One great place to start is the prompt engineering guide by OpenAI https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-engineering

When using something like GPT-4 for developing I try to think of it as a junior developer or a grad student. With a search engine you need to include the correct keywords to get the best results. For LLMs you need to set the right mood by writing a good prompt and holding a conversation before getting to the point. I also find that GPT-4 is fairly good at answering factual questions, but it’s much more useful and powerful when used to create things or discuss an approach.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#95

Post by ryanackley »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #23
ryanackley wrote: post #10

I find all of the virtue signalling from AI companies exhausting.

Are you assuming that anyone claiming to be doing good things must be lying? And then getting angry at them both for not doing the good thing and for the lying? That does sound exhausting.

I think "AI safety" deserves an eye-roll. AI doesn't allow people to break the laws of physics or travel in time. Safety as presented by Anthropic and OpenAI, is just AI companies playing favorites with which industry gets to use some powerful software tools.

You're defending a company that makes "safe" usage part of their brand and every press release mentions how much they care about safety. Then one day, they announce they are making some compromises to their safety policy so they can get large new customers (government) but don't worry all they care about is safety. It's comical how predictable this was.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#96

Post by causal »

jp42 wrote: post #49
alach11 wrote: post #3

There's no doubt that LLMs massively expand the ability of agencies like the NSA to perform large-scale surveillance at a higher quality. I wonder if Anthropic (or other LLM providers) ever push back or restrict these kinds of use cases? Or is that too risky for them?

dumb question. I can understand LLM can be used for disinformation as it can generate text/image at scale. can you explain how it can do large scale surveillance?

LLMs can be fed a conversation and understand the intent of its participants, even if no particular keywords are used. Before this, surveillance was limited by how many human agents you could have sifting through recorded data.

Put another way: most people only get charged with a crime if it's worth a law-enforcement officer's time to catch you, but many small violations are ignored in favor of higher priorities. We may have to contemplate a future where AI is clever enough to notice everything that can be construed as a violation of some law and put on a prosecutor's backlog.

Schneier talks about this as well: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-s...

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#97

Post by andrepd »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #62
andrepd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that they have the best intentions but are woefully misguided, like pretty much the average sv techno-optimist.

The market will decide if that's right.

I rest my case

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#98

Post by svieira »

bongodongobob wrote: post #88
svieira wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs Wherein you discover that unless you ask it to consider the fact that PDFs are ... very hard to parse [1] [2] you get something that misses whole blocks of text or turns them into something they aren't and the rest of the program misses chunks of the document. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263 [2]: https://web.ar…

Why are you expecting they are all very different? They're all likely very similar.

Because presuming that all of them are produced by the same utility is a _presumption_. They could be - but they could also be produced by many different vendors using many different methods all of them simply conforming to the specification "a PDF with HIGH LEVEL DESCRIPTION OF THE DATA".

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#99

Post by xorcist »

bongodongobob wrote: post #90
xorcist wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not very likely to succeed, is it? LLMs can do a lot of things, but writing software that not only parses semi-proprietary file formats but also analyze unstructured data sounds more than little bit far fetched. I'd be impressed if just the first, and by far the easiest, part of that can be accomplished.

It's extremely likely to succeed because there is a documented format. I can't believe how pessimistic this site is about this stuff. Yeah, you're not going to one shot it with a prompt. If that's your expectation, you're confused.

Give it a go, then! No one would be more happy than me if you would prove me wrong.

Until then, I'd have to side with said pessimists here.

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