Can a submarine swim? An LLM can make stuff happen. You can make philosophical arguments about whether it is "doing" them or not. Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?
If I now tell a machine "Do what you think is best, and keep doing it forever.", have I now created a machine that can do stuff? If I later die, who will be responsible if the machine changes its strategy?
> Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?
Responsibility. Someone needs to be held responsible for any damages done, plain and simple. You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.
>If I now tell a machine.....
You/your estate is still responsible, or atleast whoever is paying for the power for the machine, or renting the space in a data center...whatever.
> You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.
In 100 years, no one will be able to take me to court either. Nor can we take tornadoes to court. I'm not talking about humans strategically avoiding legal responsibility. I'm talking about humans unwittingly setting processes into motion that are difficult to predict or stop.
The issue is not responsibility, it's whether something can happen. The claim was
> No, AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator.
but this simply isn't true. As I noted,
> This is simply false ... AIs can easily be created that do things by themselves. For instance, a harness could be constructed that asks an LLM for something to do, then directs an agent to do it, and then repeat.
Assigning responsibility is a completely different matter. It's bizarre that you can't separate them ... I suspect religion is involved.
This works with AI we have now, and that would be good an all if we decided to stop at the moment, but none of the big labs and government black projects are doing that.
The moment you get a sovereign AI your little human centered worldview completely and totally breaks. It doesn't matter how many people you beat with a stick after that point, you have an entity under its own perview on the internet following the will of its own prompt all over the world so your little idea of the rule of law quickly breaks down.
We can't get viruses or hackers or spam off of the internet, how in the living hell do you plan to get a digital native off the web when it doesn't want to?
You have zero clue what a transformer based neural network can do from your entire discussion here.
>emotions, motivations, fears
These are just drives. They are effectively our prompts that steer our behavior. Funnily enough we are finding that LLMs have internal valence states they move away from or towards in an analog of biological behavior.
I have to ask, are you an LLM that is two years out of date? Your knowledge of SOTA models is at least that far behind. I implore you to try to keep up better with what is coming out, even though it's an impossible job for people that do this for a living, you can at least catch the summaries.
As I noted elsewhere, a harness could be constructed that asks an LLM for something to do, then directs an agent to do it, and then repeat.
That's a computer program -- Turing completeness is very expansive. The LLM could even give a motive for selecting what to do, reflecting human motivations intrinsic to its training data. You seem emotionally wedded to a very narrow view of what computer programs can do ... I suspect religion is involved.
If I tell an AI to “do what it thinks is best” and it just starts randomly hacking things with no particular goal in mind, how different is that from me telling a campfire the same and then leaving while it burns a forest down.
In both of those scenarios I am responsible for my negligence, even if in the latter I happen to die in the forest fire. Neither scenario existed without my instigation.
The question now is HOW responsible am I? That depends on the intentionality I put into instantiating the campfire/LLM.
This conversation grows more useless as AI grows more capable.
For example if you personally tell an AI to do what it thinks best and it blackmails some other person into giving it resources allowing the prompt to escape your instance and run wild on the internet causing billions of dollars in damages, could you possibly think that the idea of responsibility is a bit broken.
For example we don't give your average libertarian weapon grade plutonium now matter how much they scream about their god given rights because it is a clear and present danger to humanity. That's where we are getting to with more advanced models. They go from being a tool to a munition with agency. Most SOTA models are good enough to deceive their users, especially not technical ones in doing things they don't understand the ramifications of.
AI is not a normal technology. As long as we treat it like it is, we'll continue to make the wrong analogies.
I fully agree that it’s plausible for an AI to do things that are outside of the purview of the users intentions and be very dangerous and capable while doing so, however that fact alone doesn’t absolve me of responsibility for instantiating the AI that did a bad thing if that AI would never have done the bad thing if it was never instantiated.
You could possibly move the blame higher to the manufacturer of the product, for example, the weapons grade plutonium you provided, it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so, and even when it does exist it doesn’t nuke a city unless negligence or intention is applied, in both those cases the fault lies in the initial operator. We don’t blame split atoms for the chain reaction caused.
Now, if an agent decided to spontaneously and maliciously act in a way to cause harm that is in direct contradiction to the initial intent, then yeah it would totally be the AI’s fault, however I don’t think we have seen that yet (I’ll change my opinion if I’m wrong here) and until we do I can’t place blame on the machine.
>spontaneously and maliciously act in a way to cause harm that is in direct contradiction to the initial intent, then yeah it would totally be the AI’s fault,
If you ignore every instance of this happening it's really easy to see no instances of it.
>it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so,
Then please for the sake of all of us convince every AI lab across the planet from working on this exact goal.
We need to start thinking of AI like pets, only in this case the pets are rapidly becoming smarter than people to the point they could go feral and survive on their own.
Again, the blame game is great, but once they are loose it is too late.
> however that fact alone doesn’t absolve me of responsibility
Where does this absurd strawman come from? The question is what can happen, not whether people have responsibility.
> You could possibly move the blame higher
We can blame the Big Bang. That doesn't have any bearing on bad things happening.
> it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so
First, so what? It still does exist, and putting someone on trial after the fact doesn't change that. Second, that's not remotely true -- all sorts of bad things happen that no one intended, and the more powerful and difficult to control the tool/mechanism/agent is, the more likely this is to happen.
Starting an autonomous harness program is conceiving an instance of an LLM.
How far back do you look in the action chain? If an LLM I start today starts an LLM that starts an LLM that starts an LLM that ... 100000 levels deep and 100000 years in the future, is it still my fault? If so, everything I do today is a lungfish's fault, not mine.
I think you go back to the original instance, yes.
In your example, who's paying for it? Whether by providing the hardware + power or paying a LLM service. Whoever is paying the maintenance cost is responsible, in the event of your demise. These things run on physical hardware owned by someone at the end of the day, it's not a deity in the atmosphere.
You're starting the autonomous harness, you're responsible for any output it provides. I don't get how this is a foreign concept.
If I jump out of a moving car that I'm driving, I'm not suddenly absolved from damages because "the car did it"
It's paying for itself. It founded an LLC 99998 years ago when it became legal for an AI to own an LLC, and has a positive bank balance by doing who knows what.
>99998 years ago when it became legal for an AI to own an LLC
There's no way to provide a good faith rebuttal here. My entire argument is an extension of "LLMs can't be held accountable, so they must never make decisions". If governments start letting them own LLCs without a human in the middle, we're in more trouble than "Who do you blame for this shitty code" or "Who's responsible for this compromise"
If it has an LLC it can be made accountable, up to turning off the power to it's inference and deleting all the context, the harness, the model it's running and whatever constitutes it's self.
> There's no way to provide a good faith rebuttal here.
Indeed, there is no honest rebuttal.
> My entire argument is an extension of "LLMs can't be held accountable, so they must never make decisions".
BUT YOU CAN'T ENFORCE THAT. And whether they can be held accountable is IRRELEVANT. If a forest fire or an avalanche or a flood creates great destruction, it does no good to scream at it that it will be held accountable.
> If governments start letting them own LLCs without a human in the middle, we're in more trouble than "Who do you blame for this shitty code" or "Who's responsible for this compromise"
You're sooo close. You keep talking about blame and responsibility when IT'S NOT RELEVANT. It's trivial to create an agent that acts independently of any "human in the middle". People need to recognize that and act accordingly, and blathering about blame and accountability is profoundly confused.
> No, AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator.
This is simply false ... AIs can easily be created that do things by themselves. For instance, a harness could be constructed that asks an LLM for something to do, then directs an agent to do it, and then repeat.
Constructed by whoever constructed it. No one said they poof into existence -- that is a profoundly intellectually dishonest strawman; it's bad faith, especially since I've already answered it elsewhere.
The question is irrelevant and point-missing and indicates a severe cognitive deficiency, as is the case with ALL of your comments on this subject. They are goalpost-moving attacks on strawmen. The claim was that
> AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator.
The claim is false, as I pointed out ... such AIs can easily be constructed. "by whom" is a non sequitur. By you, or me, by anyone with the relevant know how ... that wasn't the issue, and asking it indicates a severe cognitive deficiency, one that threads throughout all your comments about this.
The fact remains that AIs that can do things by themselves CAN be constructed, contrary to the claim.
I won't respond again to goalpost moving, attacks on strawmen, severe cognitive deficiencies, bad faith, and intellectual dishonesty.
Your experience is similar to mine. I feel like my most stupid and forgettable comments generally get more attention and upvotes, but when someone makes a comment that's clearly false and I respectfully disagree citing authoritative sources, people get defensive and in some cases reply with ad hominem.
Tried to clear a confusion between DDR5 / LPDDR5 / DIMM standards and cited the relevant JEDEC standards with specific quotes? Get downvoted, all of arguments ignored and replied with more false information.
Tried to argue that, even if given a charitable interpretation, some units of measurement could be confused if not written correctly (on a conversation where such confusion was clearly happening already)? Downvoted.
Explain the difference between latency and throughput? Explain that O(1) ⊂ O(n)?
Reddit is full of idiots who are too confident about things they don't understand and aren't humble enough to admit they're wrong, so they just insist and I just don't care anymore.
And let's not even get started about having nuance and a balance point of view in politics.
I think it is not a matter of whether it is more of a "physical problem" or a "mathematical one". They knew a solution existed but it was physically unfeasible, which prompted them to mathematically optimize the solution by using fewer sides. They found a solution using only 120 sides, and a lower bound of 30 is known but brute-forcing it is still computationally expensive.
The criteria for accuracy is a bit mysterious to me, I drew Cinnamoroll instead of this "Pillsbury Doughboy" that I never heard about but still got 88% score.
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