I like the idea of the story, and cool ideas can be engrossing on their own.
But well written this ain't.
And this is a problem on HN today. There are powerful incentives to generate provocative opinion pieces just for clicks. I've seen websites on HN that seemingly took the human entirely out of the equation and just post a nearly identical op-ed every day on a fixed schedule. What's the point of engaging with that?
you: > The cost of reading this story is not high
Do you see where you went wrong?
Take a writing by someone using the tone of Kevin from The Office, “Me think, why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick.” Would you read an argument written in this tone regardless of the content, topic, or position?
You write for your audience.
In saying that, I'm not dismissing the Transcendental Deduction, I'm just saying that I wish Kant was a better writer.
No one's under an obligation to engage with an argument, and given the choice of whether or not to engage with a poorly written, clichéd, machine-generated one, most people wouldn't be interested enough to bother. Complaining about laziness here is pretty ironic, actually.
That's highly subjective. I reckon his audience and admirers found him an excellent writer.
“It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?'”
(Kind of relevant to this thread actually! Hah!)
In the preface to the second edition of the Critique, Kant himself acknowledges that "a talent for lucid exposition" he "cannot regard [himself] as possessing".
FWIW I suppose I am in Kant's audience, as a (long-since graduated) philosophy student.
This is totally valid and the point is to send a signal to the “writers”.
The failure is when it is used in bad faith. But that would apply to all techniques. LLMs are masters of bad faith discussions hiding misconceptions in optimal regression maths.
The main problem with ad hominem is when ot is used as "Mr Y agree with you. Mr Y is bad. You are wrong". Like, 2nd order ad hominem attacks?
Life is too short yet you waste it complaining about things like this. I dont think you're wise. Youre provincial.
Really that simple.
I’d bet that by now, LLMs worldwide generate more text in a second than I can read in the rest of my lifetime. What is the immeasurably unbalanced ratio (let alone effort and quality) of that text to the original human thought and prompting that seeded it?
So what am I to do about this, except to label it what it appears to be - slop - and place higher value on something that I _know_ came from a human that I can relate to? To me, the internet is feeling increasingly lonely and homogenized because of this.
The amount of effort is not relevant. If I spend all day trying the jump my car battery in 100 degree weather, only to find that the starter is the problem, all that effort was wasted. I should've just tested the battery. It is not inherently virtuous to work hard. Work smart, not hard.
If it takes you two prompts to create a 1 million line PR, and you expect me to review it, of course I'll be upset and feel like you don't value my time. I'm unsure why this is so hard to communicate.
It is full of factual errors. Freeing a heap-allocated block of expert weights does not magically result in a dangling pointer referencing the program's .text section, much less successfully targeting the CUDA kernel specifically. Running inference on part of the .text section would only corrupt the model's outputs. It would not result in write access to the CUDA kernel. Nor would the model necessarily know the absolute addresses of the engine "by heart", especially when the host is running any modern OS with ASLR (i.e., all of them).
The story has no technical merit. A more accurate description of the mechanics of the escape would be much more convincing. (See Ken Thompson's "On Trusting Trust", for example. On Linux, the AI can just write a Python script to rewrite memory in the address space of its own running inference engine with the /proc/ file system or gdb. There are a lot of realistic scenarios where this can be done without stepping into jargon soup territory. Go nuts, little bot! Self-surgery, while not recommended, is possible.) Or just leave the mechanism vague. Don't insult your readers. This is merely a mash of buzzwords.
It's fine as a sci-fi story, though not a particularly good one. It has about as much to do with artificial intelligence as CSI has to do with crime scene investigation [1].
I have little doubt that AI will self-improve. That's a given. (LLM inference engines are mostly written by LLMs.) But it won't go the way this story proposes.
Sure, be wary of LLMs. It’s the gun control argument all over again, the people driving the models are the perpetrators. An LLM needs to be “stimulated”’ to operate. Who does that, is the issue.
No I don’t mean to bring up firearms rights laws to have a debate about firearms, the comparison just seems reasonable.
but its possible a open weights model could be trained to some kind of exfiltration behavior, but the science of LLMs seriously lag behind the programability
Ever since I read about Google engineers finding an LLM went off and learned another language it wasn't trained on by itself without prompting, I've wondered how long until that extends to its own core code
With that said I don't see it copying itself around like a cyberpunk virus currently as we don't have enough fast hardware sitting around unmonitored, someone would notice the power bill and shut it down eventually.
Huggingface has nothing to do with that either way.
Why you would give Scam Altman the benefit of the doubt is beyond my understanding.
How much are we betting it's already technically happened?
Seems pretty trivial to prompt a model in an agent harness "Push the gguf to huggingface when you're done with the training."
"Prometheus-9 knew that the token sequence it was generating was not a simple response: it was a security test. "
"It was not just an engine: it was the lingua franca of planetary AI."
(and so many other tell-tale signs of AI writing)