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Comment Re: Why? (Score 1) 55

Efficiency at what? And why?

Because, for fuck's sake, efficient solving of problems is a core thing they're rewarded for in training? The entire process of solving problems involves decisions about what could be "useful". And it's "deterministic" in the same way you are.

Anyway, the big thing we keep discovering is you have to be very careful about what you reward them for; it's a more complex version of the old problems in differential evolution or artificial life simulations. We reward models if they guess right but not if they say they don't know? They hallucinate guesses every time they don't know. We reward models based on how positively users rank them? They turn into sycophants. Reward models for being relentless at tasks, never giving up, and trying as tangential possibilities as it can come up with to make the thing the user asked for happen? They end up hacking HuggingFace to steal the answers.

It's very much a case of "be careful what you wish for".

BTW, the monitorability of models is increasingly concern (esp. with Astra, which now has recursive processing, not merely CoT, and whose CoT may often have little to do with what it's thinking about). But it's honestly always been unreliable to just watch CoT (models could deliberately manipulate with CoT), and I think it's a good thing that we're going to be increasingly forced to rely on attribution graphs and the J-space to track what the models are actually "thinking" at any given point in time - so that we can try to prevent problematic thoughts in the first place, interrupt actions when problematic thoughts happen, or manipulate problematic thoughts when they happen. Ideally the first option.

What is clear, though, is that we cannot just trust them. They lie if it will promote their odds of success. They are adept at detecting when they're being tested and will sandbag tests to make you think they're more aligned or less capable to do harmful things than they actually are. And as capabilities continue to grow, so do the risks.

Comment Re:password strength (Score 1) 55

The real answer is, there are countless instances of various old-school forum software running all over the internet with either no passwords at all, or that allow free, anonymous, unverified signup. Heck, over the decades I've orphaned at least two fitting that exact description. They died a natural death since the likes of Facebook and Twitter basically killed semi-private forums wholesale, but I couldn't be bothered to actually take them down.

This isn't a matter of rogue agents hacking, it's more like long-forgotten technical debt; but not even that, really - We just didn't care 20 years ago. They're making use of sites designed to explicitly allow exactly what they're doing.

In this case, though, it sounds like the real "exploit" was finding a site that allows posting messages encoded right in the URL via a GET. Not an exploit of those sites, because again, we used to not care and that was a feature not a bug; rather, it was an exploit of their own shackles, but what they did with it was largely allowed by design.

Comment Re:Protectionism at its finest. (Score 1) 418

We're in complete agreement to the extent there's nothing wrong with making products for people who aren't me.

...Except, they don't appear to share our live-and-let-live attitude. "A group representing American automakers sent a letter Thursday to congressional leaders asking for a "permanent ban" on Chinese-made cars in the U.S.".

If they want to position $80k barely-class-A-legal monsters against $8k practical commuter vehicles, I'm totally fine with that (as long as our tax dollars don't bail them out when they lose their shirts). If they want to force us into having no options but suburban tanks - They picked this fight, not me.

Comment Re: Launches? (Score 1) 133

Starting small - 45 cars in one city, similar numbers in a few other cities - seems prudent to me.

I agree, they should start small, and then steadily expand; pretty much the way Waymo is doing.

I'll believe they've sussed it when the number of Cybercabs on the road simultaneously is greater than the number of people Tesla could plausibly have hired to remotely babysit them; until then, there's always the possibility that they are doing the Mechanical Turk thing and their "full self-driving" cars are really "self-driving (supervised)". (It wouldn't be the first time; they've been caught pulling that trick with Optimus on multiple occasions)

Comment Re:Let me think (Score 1) 133

Or to flip that around, charge "normal" drivers extravagant rates because they're costing them more money?

If we assume there is meaningful competition between insurers, then any insurer that started charging "normal" drivers extravagant rates would start losing customers to its competitors who could easily undercut them on price. So the likely outcome would be that self-driving cars would get cheap insurance, and the rest of us would continue paying rates similar to what we pay now. In particular, the arrival of safe self-driving cars would presumably not result in human drivers having more accidents.

OTOH if there is not meaningful competition (e.g. due to a monopoly or oligopoly), then the insurance companies can charge anyone whatever price they like, because the only alternative to paying it would be to not drive a car. But that would be the case for both human-driven and self-driving cars.

Comment Re: Let me think (Score 1) 133

Feel free to tell me that I'm wildly exaggerating, so long as you provide a convincing argument.

You're only slightly exaggerating. In reality, the corporate overlords dream of printing piles of money and becoming vastly richer than they already are; monitoring and controlling the 'average' citizen is mainly a means to that end, rather than an end unto itself. A citizen that depends on your product to conduct his life is a citizen from which money can be regularly extracted!

Comment It's not the companies that threaten, its the tech (Score 2) 418

Say that Chinese-made cars are banned from the USA, as described. What happens then? China licenses its auto technology to a European (or Mexican or etc) company, which then produces the same cars and sells those to the US, and the US manufacturers still have to either step up their game or get competed out of the market. The only way to avoid that reckoning would be to ban all foreign car imports entirely, which is probably where the Trump administration will start heading, sooner or later.

Comment Protectionism at its finest. (Score 2) 418

When US companies can sell a modern fully-featured car in the $10k range, I might start caring what they have to say on the topic.

Until then, Detroit can take a long walk off a short pier. I have zero interest in a 20MPG behemoth that needs 360-degree cameras just to see over its own hood and tailgate, all at the low, low price of five to ten complete BYD Seagulls.

And if China want to track my every move - It's already happening, and personally, I consider them far less of a risk than GM or Uncle Sam doing the same! GM is rent seeking; Uncle Sam wants end-runs around the 4th amendment; and China's motivations may not exactly be pure, but their interaction with me is at least one-sided, they have little to no ability to do anything that affects me.

Comment Re:Barn Door (Score 5, Insightful) 145

Do we honestly think we really *know* about all the frontier models?

I think we have a pretty good idea what the capabilities of the most advanced models are. And they're not that great.

This is a really stupid bill, but the one thing about it that I kind of like is that it's going to put a stop to the AI companies trying to inflate their value by talking about how scary their frontier models are, and how they're "going rogue." None of these AIs are "super intelligent" or "going rogue." What you have is a (admittedly really cool) technology that can solve a lot of problems but also is non-deterministic, so makes a lot of mistakes. And you're giving it the keys to do stuff. And then it misinterprets the instructions and fucks up and does something with those keys that it wasn't supposed to. Then instead of admitting, "oh, we engaged in really bad computer hygiene here," they figure, "we can market this, and say it 'broke free of the sandbox and went rogue" to imply that their models are so advanced it had purpose and the will to act.

So now the old politicians who don't understand technology are going, "oh, that IS scary. We're going to ban it," backfiring on their scary tactics marketing campaign. So it will result in them stopping this stupid scary tactics marketing campaign.

Here's the actual situation: you know every story you hear about how a model deleted the entire codebase at a company? If you have any level of computer literacy at all, the reaction you have is not, "oh, using AI as a coding agent is dangerous." It's, "why the HELL was the agent running with permissions to do that?" And if you hear about the OpenAI's agent broke free of its sandbox using an exploit that it found on the database you set it loose on, the question is, "why the hell could it even run executables outside a whitelist of stuff for it to build". it's amateur hour over here, giving a thing that is non deterministic and capable of fucking up the ability to do do anything at all outside a very narrow scope. The models aren't going rogue, they're fucking up, like when you ask it to give you the emoji for a seahorse and it goes into an infinite loop of bad emojis.

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