Coding is like insanely well suited to LLMs by nature tho, that’s why it can actually do that.

Code is a language with stricter definitions and less verbosity than a spoken human language. Things only have one definition in code, one spelling, one syntax, etc.

There’s an element of artistry to human coding, but it’s more of a science than an art (compared to spoken human language anyhow). It’s easier to predict.

There are other promising “ai” technologies, like radiological image recognition, aren’t the same technology as LLMs, but the companies who make the LLMs constantly conflate their technology with that of more useful technologies in order to obfuscate their relative uselessness.

Even the coding models are being localized. There’s absolutely no reason to have a massive AI datacenter unless you’re making a shit LLM, and even then, the only reason to have that is to commit financial fraud essentially.

EDIT - I learned a bit more about “agentic” AI since you had mentioned it earlier, and what’s actually going on behind the scenes is wild.

So basically, an “agent” is a computer program that you give a task to. The agent then attempts to accomplish the task by engaging in a loop until the task is accomplished.

The structure of the loop is 3 steps. 1) Prompt an LLM - The agent asks an LLM what the first step in the task you asked it to accomplish would be. 2) The LLM provides a plausible answer, and the agent then attempts to carry out these instructions. 3) If the given instructions don’t work, the LLM appends the prompt to say “I tried step #1, it didn’t work, what should I try next?”. If the instructions work, the agent appends the prompt to say “I took this step and it worked, what’s the next step?”. Then the loop repeats.

So, this would work exceptionally well for code because the computer can Test and verify the code before continuing… but that’s just about the only use case for the technology

A good way to visualize this is to imagine yourself as an agent. Let’s say you need to do your laundry, that’s your task. So you ask the LLM what the first step is, and you do what it says no matter what. Then you go back, append the prompt, and prompt the AI again. This cycle repeats until either 1) you finish the laundry, or 2) you destroy the laundry, or burn down the house, or injure yourself blindly following the LLMs directions (this second outcome is the statistically probable one).

Would you do that? No, probably not. You can think, so you would know which instructions to attempt, and which to ignore. The Agent cannot think. The LLM cannot think. The agent strictly follows directions like any other computer program. The LLM is attempting to construct an answer that appears plausible, token by token. It doesn’t matter if it is plausible, or possible even, the LLM isn’t trying to give you the correct answer, it’s trying to give you an answer that appears correct.

Well your main assertion was a wildly incorrect definition of sentience.

You go on to say that (and I’m paraphrasing) “sentience is in the eye of the beholder”, which is also wrong.

There’s also the implication that you do think computers are sentient, but you haven’t typed that specifically; I know you said you didn’t want assumptions, but this is a fair inference. Someone who wasn’t emotionally invested I the idea of chatbot sentience wouldn’t push back so hard with basically 0 facts to back them up.

Your final assertion is that the Wikipedia article doesn’t immediately contradict you, which again, it does in the first sentence. You can see my previous comment for that information tho, I’m not retyping it.

First of all, thank you for the compliment. I try not to be insulting or condescending if the other party remains civil, so I’m glad to know that my effort is not going unnoticed.

I would have to look into who’s funding AISI to take a guess at that (which I’m open to doing, but I think you may have misinterpreted my meaning, so I will start by addressing that).

While I don’t think that most media is being truthful about AI, but I do think that they might not know they’re lying? They seem to just parrot whatever the tech oligarchs tell them to say without question; I don’t think they actually have the requisite knowledge to determine if what they’re being told is true or not.

AISI presents itself as a sort of regulatory/research entity. I don’t currently have good reason to disbelieve them, and based on the article you shared it doesn’t sound to me like they’re one of the people lying for money.

They do mention early in the article that for this research they didn’t put these models into sandboxes, they were intentionally allowed access to the internet. They also mention that they’ve turned off all of the safety features of the models before prompting them. With those given parameters, this isn’t a scenario that would organically occur in real life.

So, that’s the 1st half of the misinterpretation. The 2nd half has more to do with how LLMs (and all software) function.

When you prompt an AI, you aren’t dictating every step of the process to it, you’re asking it to complete a task, essentially. So, any time you prompt any LLM at all, with any objective, things are happening inside of the computer that you aren’t necessarily aware of, and that you definitely didn’t ask it to do explicitly. A good analogy for LLMs specifically is d20 dice. Essentially, the LLM has a separate 20 sided die for every single token (a token is basically a fraction of a word). So if the first token is “the” the computer picks up the die labeled “the” and rolls it. This die has the 20 most statistically likely tokens to follow “the” on it, one on each side. So, for this example let’s say that the “the” die lands on “re”. The AI now has the text “there” ready to print. It sets down the “the” die, and instead picks up the “re” die, and rolls that to determine the next token. This process repeats over and over again until the LLM is ‘confident’ that it’s assembled a plausible looking answer, and then it prints that answer to your screen. That is the extent of the thinking that an LLM does.

You didn’t ask the LLM to do any of that, you just asked it how to get cheese to stay on a pizza, and it told you “glue”. You didn’t observe any of the things it did without your explicit direction to get to “glue”, but they happened.

That’s not exactly how all programs work (most programs are deterministic, which is what you want a computer to be. That’s why most programs don’t hallucinate like AI does).

A more palatable example might be a computer game. When I fire up my emulator, and load up a Sonic the Hedgehog ROM, the CPU takes that ROM file and copies it into my system’s RAM. I did not tell the emulator to do this, it did it on its own, because it is programmed to do so… there’s a bunch of other steps in that process that I also didn’t explicitly request, but you get the point. (Hopefully anyway, let me know if I’ve done a poor job explaining this and I’ll try again).

EDIT - i’m listening to the most recent episode of the podcast “Better Offline” right now. Serendipitously, the topic of discussion is directly addressing exactly what you’re asking me about. I’ve only listened to the first third of the podcast so far, but I’m fairly confident that it will explain what I am currently trying to explain to you, but much more effectively.

Fair point

I think the reason that my focus is on LLMs is because they keep showing up in annoying ways in my life, and I know I’m not the only one.

All of the evil actions you’re referencing were undertaken to prop up chat bots who cannot do any of the jobs (outside of some coding) that they are advertised as being able to perform.

To me the strength of the argument I’m trying to make is that they’re doing all of this damage in order to have something that’s effectively worthless. Perhaps I’m not doing a good job communicating what I’m attempting to communicate.

… also, I probably need to stop responding to all of these dumbasses and/or trolls who are constantly contradicting themselves in the first sentence of their assertions, lol

China has 500 data centers, America has 5,000, there is no AI race.

I understand that you’re impresssed that it can sometimes slop together functional code. That does not make it intelligent or dangerous.

The don’t do anything without being prompted, you are just regurgitating oligarchic propaganda.

They put an AI in a flawed sandbox, it’s not really that impressive

I’m an American unfortunately.

I just want to have healthcare and strong regulations, I don’t give a fuck about being a super power.

The world will be better off once we’re not in charge, it can’t happen soon enough.

So you prompt the AI to do a task, and then it does the task, and somehow you see this as an unprompted action?

That actually completely proves my point, they don’t act unprompted.

AI is dangerous in many contexts, especially the surveillance state they’re building with all the IR cameras and shit. It’s dangerous when evil people use it to evil ends, but that’s true of most anything.

AI is not at all dangerous in the way you might imagine after watching Terminator 2.

In this scenario, why would companies start attempting to make big expensive chatbots again after they caused the worst financial fallout of all time? That would be likely the least advisable business move ever.

Similar to you, I would concede that my information sphere is influenced by my contempt for the technology (as well as by my love for computers in general)… thank you for being open to have a real conversation with me about this by the way. Most of the time I just end up getting attacked because pro-AI people don’t like what I have to say.

I would note tho, that there’s only a profit motive involved in one of these competing narratives, and that would be the narrative being pushed by the oligarchic techbro fascists.

Not only did you ask it to do something, you left a path for it to escape the sandbox and encouraged it to do so.

Are you suggesting that because they instructed the computer to do something, without specifying how it should be done, and the computer followed its instructions , that’s somehow “going rogue?”, it was literally following instructions, that’s what computers do.

Yes, I understand that they are “good” (enough) at coding to sometimes put together something functional, that is literally what LLMs are designed to do. Coding languages are languages, ones without the subjectivity of human communications. They are easier to recognize patterns in, there are more rules. That’s literally the one task LLMs are good at, and they’re still not as good as an actual quality human programer.

Local AI models might never go away for coding, but they certainly won’t be shoehorned into everything without a good use case the way they are now.

AI is not a matter of national security, that is a lie being perpetrated by the captured media and politicians for the purpose of propping up their non-viable business models for long enough to squeeze all of the Juice they can out of investors (who are nearly dry at this point). That’s just additional techbro fear mongering. To distract you while they’re digging in our pockets.

Oh, have we reached the stage of the debate where you project your insecurities onto me in a desperate bid to avoid conceding your palpably untenable position? How dignified.

If you wish to gain more knowledge and understanding, I would suggest you stop outsourcing your cognition to a chatbot.

I mean “without human intervention or input”

There’s some fear mongering going around (pushed by AI companies to build hype) about AIs “going rogue” or “breaking containment” or other anthropomorphic language suggesting that AIs are capable of acting on their own.

These stories are all verifiably false though, the computer does not do things without being asked to by someone.

To be clear, I’m fully against AI. I just don’t like when I see people giving it credit for shit it cannot and did not do, or ascribe sentience to it, or some dumb shit like that.