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Anthropic and Apollo astounded to find that a chatbot will lie to you if you tell it to lie to you (pivot-to-ai.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (26 children)

AI developers need to generate criti-hype — “criticism” that says the AI is way too cool and powerful and will take over the world, so you should give them more funding to control it.

This isn’t quite accurate. The criticism is that if new AI abilities run ahead of the ability to make the AI behave sensibly, we will reach an inflection point where the AI will be in charge of the humans, not vice versa, before we make sure that it won’t do horrifying things.

AI chat bots that do bizarre and pointless things, but are clearly capable of some kind of sophistication, are exactly the warning sign that as it gains new capabilities this is a danger we need to be aware of. Of course, that’s a separate question from the question of whether funding any particular organization will lead to any increase in safety, or whether asking a chatbot about some imaginary scenario has anything to do with any of this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (6 children)

What new AI abilities, LLMs aren't pokemon.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Ah yes, if there’s one lesson to be gained from the last few years, it is that AI technology never changes, and people never connect it to anything in the real world. If only I’d used a Pokémon metaphor, I would have realized that earlier.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I mean, you could have answered by naming one fabled new ability LLM's suddenly 'gained' instead of being a smarmy tadpole, but you didn't.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I wasn’t limiting it to LLMs specifically. I don’t think it is up for debate that as years go by, new “AI” stuff periodically starts existing that didn’t exist before. That’s still true even though people tend to overhype the capabilities of LLMs specifically and conflate LLMs with “AI” just because they are good at appearing more capabale than they are.

If you wanted to limit to to LLM and get some specifics about capabilities that start to emerge as the model size grows and how, here’s a good intro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.04615