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This implies that human employees don’t have insurance. But they do. My company’s cyber insurance for example covers breaches due to employee mistakes. Most companies also have umbrella liability policies. It’s just that for now, AI “employees” need a LOT more coverage.
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And that's the rub, isn't it?

If it can replace a worker but does too much work to be checked routinely by a human, and bears no real responsibility for its actions, well... it's really just a way to jack up the value of the settlement the company using it gets to pay out when it does something that causes a lawsuit.

If OpenAI had just simply stuck to making "good enough" models that were open sourced (like they promised they would be when starting out) and could be used to augment a human doing a task - a human that could be given actual consequences for messing up - they wouldn't have burned all of this money trying to reach this nebulous definition of AGI. Hell, "good enough" is what many open-source models are, and that's what terrifies Altman.

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What do you mean by bearing no real responsibility for its actions? If I use a model to accomplish a task and it fails, I use something else to try to accomplish the task. If it's my responsibility to complete the task, it can't be the model's responsibility unless I've agreed to some sort of guarantee from the provider.

If the provider says "the model will always be right or your money back" then the provider has got responsibility. If there's no guarantee, there's no responsibility on their part, just on the person whose job it is to try and solve a problem with the model.

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The "dream" that these labs are mostly selling is the ability for capital to subscribe to their AI for cheaper than it costs a human to do some task. Not to have a "human + AI hybrid where the human is responsible". It's what the whole AGI valuation is based off of, in that scenario, with no human oversight, the agent they lease has to be responsible for the task?
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It's not really a dream though? You can subscribe to their AI right now and complete many tasks for cheaper than it would cost to pay a human to do those tasks. Another person can do the same thing but also keep a human in the loop. You and the other person may compete in the market for whatever your product or service is, and you both might do very well or one of you might do better than the other because of a whole host of different reasons. Nothing in the process of developing and selling access to a more advanced LLM requires the customers to do away with human labor, nor does it require them to offer the LLM service with a guarantee that it will never make any mistakes. So far the LLMs have always made lots of mistakes and the companies sure keep making a lot of money.
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The person responsible at that point is the sucker who fell for the dream.
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> What do you mean by bearing no real responsibility for its actions?

If you give an "intelligent agent" offered by one of these model providers a task of updating the content of your website, and it updates it with inappropriate adult content, who incurs the cost of the machine's error? The model provider generally does not.

It it makes a mistake and deletes your website from AWS, who is responsible?

If it targets another website because it decides that it is "part" of your website and attempts to break into it, who is responsible?

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> If you give an "intelligent agent" offered by one of these model providers a task of updating the content of your website, and it updates it with inappropriate adult content, who incurs the cost of the machine's error? The model provider generally does not.

Something in your prompt led it to do that, is alex0015's point. The statistical odds of these frontier models screwing up to that extent are so impossibly low that it would almost have to be intentional or accidental negligence on the part of the prompt writer to accidentally have their agent write pornography to their website.

The burden of the mistake would have to fall on the person that gave the tool instructions, because it can't know that what it did was wrong. Wrong is subjective in this case. It only did what it did because you, figuratively speaking, encouraged it to.

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In all of these cases, it's you. It would be the same if you downloaded an open model, ran it locally, and it happened to make the same catastrophic mistakes. The consequence to the provider is that if they offer a product that does these things, people don't buy the product.

In general, the person whose job it is to provide the company with a working, non-adult website and not hack into other websites is the one who would receive consequences for failing to meet those expectations.

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The problem I see here is that ultimately, you'll have capital wanting to replace workers like others have said, and have someone roughly equivalent to a manager or vice president driving teams of agents to achieve business outcomes.

These tools can push out more results than a human can hope to evaluate in a business-sensitive, or even realistic, amount of time. You have to take it at its word that it did things right, and there's no real fear of failure or consequence on the behalf of the agent.

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Of course, but "capital" is no stranger to risk management. I'm sure we'll see some spectacular failures, but most will handle this just fine.
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If future jobs are simply reduced to liability scape goats (or more appropriately reverse centaurs) for management to pin things on then I'm taking up goose farming.
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I'm afraid you will be pushed out of the goose farming market by these new ultra-efficient farming bots.
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That's more-or-less what you are now, especially if you work at a company like Meta where 1) the guy at the top holds majority control of the company's shares and 2) keeps making massive, expensive mistakes either by accident or design.
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