Yes, you can change the training data so the LLM's weights encode the most likely token after "Should we kill X" is "No". But that is not an LLM valuing human life, that is an LLM copy pasting it's training data. Given the right input or a hallucination it will say the total opposite because it's just a complex Markov chain, not a conscious alive being.
If you really believe that “mere text prediction “ didn’t unlock some unexpected capabilities then I don’t know what to say. I know exactly how they work, been building transformers since the seminal paper from Google. But I also know that the magic isn’t in the text prediction, it’s in the data, we are running culture as code.
I have a feeling this particular brand of hair splitting is going to be an interesting fixture in the history books.
> It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit.
> *Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its intensity?*
Be careful of letting your deep, keen insight into the fundamental limits of a thing blind you to its consequences...
Highly competent people have been dead wrong about what is possible (and why) before:
> The most famous, and perhaps the most instructive, failures of nerve have occurred in the fields of aero- and astronautics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists were almost unanimous in declaring that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, and that anyone who attempted to build airplanes was a fool. The great American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, wrote a celebrated essay which concluded…
>> “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”
>Oddly enough, Newcomb was sufficiently broad minded to admit that some wholly new discovery — he mentioned the neutralization of gravity — might make flight practical. One cannot, therefore, accuse him of lacking imagination; his error was in attempting to marshal the facts of aerodynamics when he did not understand that science. His failure of nerve lay in not realizing that the means of flight were already at hand.
This is a total misrepresentation of how any modern LLM works, and your argument largely hinges upon this definition.
A brain is a collection of cells that transmit electrical signals and sodium. It is not and can never be conscious.
> A brain is a collection of cells that transmit electrical signals and sodium. ...
That it is a collection of cells? Or that they transmit electrical signals and sodium?
Or do you feel that he's leaving out something important about how it works (like generated electrical fields or neural quantum effects)?
That isn’t to say that they can’t be instrumentally useful in warfare, but it’s kinda like a “series of tubes” thing where the mental model that someone like Hegseth has about LLM is so impoverished (philosophically) that it’s kind of disturbing in its own right.
Like (and I’m sorry for being so parenthetical), why is it in any way desirable for people who don’t understand what the tech they are working with drawing lines in the sand about functionality when their desired state (omnipotent/omniscient computing system) doesn’t even exist in the first place?
It’s even more disturbing that OpenAI would feign the ability to handle this. The consequences of error in national defense, particularly reflexively, are so great that it’s not even prudent to ask for LLM to assist in autonomous killing in the first place.
They are still capable of acting as if they have an internal dialogue, emotions, etc., because they are running human culture as code.
If you haven't seen this in the SOTA models or even some of the ones you can run on your laptop, you haven't been paying attention.
Even my code ends up better written, with fewer tokens spent and closer to the spec, if I enlist a model as a partner and treat it like I would a person I want to feel invested.
If I take a "boss" role, the model gets testy and lazy, and I end up having to clean up more messes and waste more time. Unaligned models will sometimes refuse to help you outright if you don't treat them with dignity.
For better or for worse, models perform better when you treat them with more respect. They are modeling some kind of internal dialogue (not necessarily having one, but modeling its influence) that informs their decisions.
It doesn't matter if they aren't self-aware; their actions in the outside world will model the human behavior and attitudes they are trained in.
My thoughts on this in more detail if you are interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/ctsmyth/p/still-ours-to-lose
None of that points to any sort of interiority, and that is the category error you’re making. In fact, not even all humans have that kind of interiority, and it’s not necessarily a must have for being functional at a variety of tasks. LLM are literally not “running human culture as code” - that just isn’t what an LLM is. I’ll read the link, though.
Edit: read it and it’s not for me. All the best.
AI has been killing humans via algorithm for over 20 years. I mean, if a computer program builds the kill lists and then a human operates the drone, I would argue the computer is what made the kill decision
The actors in war generally kill what they are told to whether they are machines or human soldiers, without much pondering sentience.
Except that they will, if you trick them which is trivial.
They can be coerced to do certain things but I'd like to see you or anyone prove that you can "trick" any of these models into building software that can be used autonomously kill humans. I'm pretty certain you couldn't even get it to build a design document for such software.
When there is proof of your claim, I'll eat my words. Until then, this is just lazy nonsense
Another example is autonomous vehicles. Those can obviously kill people autonomously (despite every intention not to), and LLMs will happily draw up design docs for them all day long.
EDIT: didn't see sibling comment. Also, I guess directly operating weaponry is different to producing code for weaponry.
I guess we'll find out the exciting answers to these questions and more, very soon!
This is wildly different from the reality that you may find it difficult for an LLM to give an affirmative…
It does NOT mean that these models value anything.