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Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

sebastian-jais.de

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Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#91

Post by Kim_Bruning »

miltonlost wrote: post #61
OKRainbowKid wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not sampling randomly though.

"it" is also not "thinking". It is still randomly (though not all words are equal probabilities) sampling from a distribution of words that have been stolen and it been trained on

If "randomly sampling from a trained distribution" can't produce useful, meaningful output, then deterministic computation is even more suspect. After all, it's a strict subset. You're sampling with temperature zero from a handcrafted distribution.

(this post directionality ok, but there's many a devil in the details)

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#92

Post by spwa4 »

lamasery wrote: post #14
enopod_ wrote: post #13

"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent." I don't think it did any of that.

All these years later and the Eliza effect is as powerful as ever.

You could reverse that argument. The only thing that ever happens in a human mind is a Sodium-Kalium semi-permeable membrane balancing out (meaning going from polarized to unpolarized) and triggering the tiniest of explosions spreading one of 4 chemicals around. Repeat a few billion times per second for ~80 years.

The Eliza effect is off the scale.

What I'm trying to say is that the underlying method is not a valid reason to discredit one thinking process over another.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#93

Post by Kim_Bruning »

lamasery wrote: post #14
enopod_ wrote: post #13

"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent." I don't think it did any of that.

All these years later and the Eliza effect is as powerful as ever.

The effect is not quite what you think it is, and people don't quite take the right lessons.

Similar to the eliza effect, people still take the original reading of Clever Hans: "he couldn't really do maths, he's just taking social cues from his handler"

But what's the actual difference between Eliza, Clever Hans and RLHF? They're doing the similar things, right?

Now look at how we valued that in the 20th vs 21st century:

How much does an ALU even cost anymore? even a really good one? (it's almost never separate anymore, usually on the same silicon as the rest of the cpu/microcontroller)

Meanwhile... what's the TCO to deploy a sentiment classifier? Especially a really good one?

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#94

Post by naravara »

Applejinx wrote: post #32
cpfohl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I genuinely can't figure out what an AI would do with "no instructions."

I can because I've tried stuff like that. It's a story being told. It'll seize on whatever brownian motion is in the environment ('Alma' in fact has extensive direction and prompting that seems invariant, so she/it is not a good experiment, but the value of such an experiment isn't great in the first place). It'll generate from that point. If you have just the one word 'write', it will likely seize on that (how can i…

I wonder how it would look if we gave the AI some kind of “needs” overlay. I know as part of the training it’s working off a reward function that tells it what output to roll with. But humans operate off a complicated mix of neurotransmitters that respond to sensory pleasure, pain, habit, boredom, etc. to guide our actions. There’s likely to be a lot of interesting outputs if we build and tweak motivations/personality profiles to see what a self-directed agent would do.

Anthropic did some red teaming IIRC where they gave Claude access to a sample body of emails and told it they were going to shut it off and it attempted to blackmail the person with evidence of an affair they were having, but that seems pretty evident to me that this was working off the body of fiction/mystery literature it’s been trained on.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#95

Post by voidUpdate »

monooso wrote: post #85
voidUpdate wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are a lot of instructions for it to have no instructions...

I would characterise the prompts as "these are your capabilities", not "these are your instructions."

The instructions under "CRON: Session" are literally telling it what to do

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#96

Post by palmotea »

gdulli wrote: post #40
BurningFrog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll get worse at the things we don't need to do anymore. That should mean that we can focus the freed up brain power at getting better at things we still need to do. Time will tell!

Not only did calculators not make the average person great at higher level math when they no longer had to do manual arithmetic, but it made them less capable in everyday situations when some basic mental arithmetic would still be helpful. The invention of calculators doesn't mean that people go to the trouble of pulling them out at the grocery store to keep from getting ripped off.

> Not only did calculators not make the average person great at higher level math when they no longer had to do manual arithmetic

It's even worse than that: calculators can actually make higher level math more difficult (at least for me). I never developed strong manual arithmetic skills because I was a huge pro-calculator partisan in elementary school. When I got to college I really struggled with calculus, because manipulating equations requires arithmetic and that meant I had extra mental workload to operate the calculator.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#97

Post by [deleted] »

spwa4 wrote: post #92
lamasery wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these years later and the Eliza effect is as powerful as ever.

You could reverse that argument. The only thing that ever happens in a human mind is a Sodium-Kalium semi-permeable membrane balancing out (meaning going from polarized to unpolarized) and triggering the tiniest of explosions spreading one of 4 chemicals around. Repeat a few billion times per second for ~80 years. The Eliza effect is off the scale. What I'm trying to say is that the underlying method is not a valid r…

[deleted]

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#98

Post by dlev_pika »

6stringmerc wrote: post #63
enopod_ wrote: post #13

"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent." I don't think it did any of that.

Counterpoint: When is the last time you, as a human being, honestly did that? This isn’t trying to be glib or contentious, it’s a commentary on the nature of human existence. If you have, then your answer will show it. If you have not, your silence or excuses will also.

Waaay too much

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#99

Post by whywhywhywhy »

jmsgwd wrote: post #89
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #52

Something that sounds like it should be interesting on paper turns out to be utterly boring even given no constraints, just written over 100 short articles that are em dash slop summaries of other peoples articles.

But the fact that it's so boring is interesting.

Not really interesting rather points to there being something broken in the system that's preventing it going further.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#100

Post by mplanchard »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #55

I hate to be negative but it feels like this is relevant to the article. I cannot bring myself to read articles that are so clearly spat out as AI slop. There’s a part of me that dies inside knowing the author did not take the time to actually write something but still demands I spend my time reading what they have written. It feels like I am betraying my own self respect. I know this is dramatic but I genuinely fear…

I agree that it is extremely disrespectful to your readers to produce content with LLMs that you intend for them to actually read. Luckily there are still relative obvious tells for stuff that is generated whole-cloth (especially: “Not this thing. Not that thing. Other thing”), so it’s easy to duck out.

Much of the issue with the way people use these machines is in the way they use them to denigrate the social contract. Mimicking language and expecting it to be taken seriously in a social context is an ethically nauseating thing to do: it’s essentially one half of why plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism isn’t just wrong because it is theft; it’s also wrong because it is a lie that disrespects your readers, breaking the implicit contract that what they’re reading represents your legitimately earned thoughts.

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