Yes, LLMs can and do take actions in the world, because things like MCP allow them to translate speech into action, without a human in the loop.
Many companies are already pushing LLMs into roles where they make decisions. It’s only going to get worse. The surface area for attacks against LLM agents is absolutely colossal, and I’m not confident that the problems can be fixed.
Is the layoff-based business model really the best use case for AI systems?
> The surface area for attacks against LLM agents is absolutely colossal, and I’m not confident that the problems can be fixed.
The flaws are baked into the training data.
"Trust but verify" applies, as do Murphy's law and the law of unintended consequences.
It's certainly not enough to build a cheap, un-flight-worthy airplane and then say "but if this crashes, that's on the airline dumb enough to fly it".
And it's very certainly not enough to put cars on the road with no working brakes, while saying "the duty of safety is on whoever chose to turn the key and push the gas pedal".
For most of us, we do actually have to do better than that.
But apparently not AI engineers?
Maybe even the makers of the model, but that’s not quite clear. If you produced a bolt that wasn’t to spec and failed, that would probably be on you.
If you thought bureaucracy was dumb before, wait until the humans are replaced with LLMs that can be tricked into telling you how to make meth by asking them to role play as Dr House.
No more so than correctly pointing out that writing code for ffmpeg doesn't mean that you're enabling streaming services to try to redefine the meaning of the phrase "ad-free" because you're allowing them to continue existing.
The problem is not the existence of the library that enables streaming services (AI "safety"), it's that you're not ensuring that the companies misusing technology are prevented from doing so.
"A company is trying to misuse technology so we should cripple the tech instead of fixing the underlying social problem of the company's behavior" is, quite frankly, an absolutely insane mindset, and is the reason for a lot of the evil we see in the world today.
You cannot and should not try to fix social or governmental problems with technology.
The semantics of whether it’s the LLM or the human setting up the system that “take an action” are irrelevant.
It’s perfectly clear to anyone that cares to look that we are in the process of constructing these systems. The safety of these systems will depend a lot on the configuration of the black box labeled “LLM”.
If people were in the process of wiring up CD trays to guns on every street corner you’d I hope be interested in CDGun safety and the algorithms being used.
“Don’t build it if it’s unsafe” is also obviously not viable, the theoretical economic value of agentic AI is so big that everyone is chasing it. (Again, it’s irrelevant whether you think they are wrong; they are doing it, and so AI safety, steerability, hackability, corrigibility, etc are very important.)