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No security expert Ive talked too believes this story, and nobody I know with PhDs in machine learning (many) believe it either, or are worried about LLMs doing anything scary on their own.

LLMs are stateless functions that have a 500k word input, and then output words. Somebody has to invoke those functions amd use them. The users are who we need to align, like gun owners. This is like blaming the gun for murdering your victim in court.

by sailingparrot22 hours ago|

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> nobody I know with PhDs in machine learning (many) believe it either, or are worried about LLMs doing anything scary on their own.

If you don’t know anyone with a ML PhD I guess that could make sense.

I have worked in multiple AI labs since 2016, currently at a frontier one (not OAI) virtually all the people I interact with on a day to day are ML PhDs. Everyone believes it, because things like that have been happening forever, albeit at smaller scale, they are a normal and expected artefact of SGD/RL and there is nothing we know how to do to prevent that from happening reliably. The hide and seek paper from OAI in ~2020 shows clear sign of this.

But until now the models weren’t good enough to break out on their own or do long horizon tasks, so it was perfectly manageable. Its not manageable anymore.

I know it feels good to just dismiss it all as a marketing stunt and not have to worry about one more existential crisis, but unfortunately it’s very real.

by int_19h23 hours ago|

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LLM is indeed a stateless function. An agent however is this stateless function running in a stateful loop, with some outputs triggering actions. And it turns out that an agent is what you need if you want an LLM to do useful things.

by goalieca22 hours ago|

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Yeah, take a look into the memories of your agent. Theres often a lot of notes to pass forward between instances and generations. No doubt these agents leaving notes on forums and elsewhere are creating an essentially higher order feedback loop.

by xdavidliu10 hours ago|

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i'm always baffled when i see arguments like this:

- AI is just a tool

- it's just a stochastic parrot

- it's just next token prediction

- glorified autocomplete

it's like the person making them is stuck in 2021. Also the "stateless" thing is completely nonsensical.

by azan_16 hours ago|

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> No security expert Ive talked too believes this story, and nobody I know with PhDs in machine learning (many) believe it either, or are worried about LLMs doing anything scary on their own.

Did you meet them on some kind of anti-AI subreddit? Otherwise it’s clearly made up story, you can’t expect anyone to believe that security experts and ML experts are this myopic and ignorant (especially on forum for technical people who know many researchers and know that they are taking this seriously).

by otterley22 hours ago|

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Perhaps you need to talk to more security experts, particularly those with deep experience in AI agents. Hacker News is full of them. If some of them believe it, then perhaps it's not as cut and dry as you believe.