Comment by slowin
6 hours ago
Do we think that someone at Anthropic, OpenAI, the government... has access to SOTA models without censorship? "How do I build an effective weapon?", "How do I effectively control the masses?"...
It's very concerning that we get the nerfed models but you know that somewhere, people with a lot of resources have access to the raw, uncensored, probably more powerful models. The sprint toward AGI looks even more dangerous when you think about who will be gaining access to it first. I do believe the goal is to pull away from the rest of humanity in a near trans-humanistic state. Are we ready for that and how do we counter it?
"How do I build an effective weapon?" and "How do I effectively control the masses?" were research projects for the US government before you were born. One gave the world the Manhattan project, to name only one example, and the other MKULTRA. The government and cooperating companies had knowledge in both fields beyond the state of the art publicly available and continue to hold that edge over the public and foreign adversaries today. There is precious little new about the government having an uncensored model while you get the nerfed version.
A useful comparison might be made with the realm of firearms: civilians need to jump through hoops to own a fully-automatic weapon and can run afoul of the law simply by drilling a third hole near two others in a hunk of metal, yet the better trained among the government's soldiery can operate fully automatic weapons. You get the nerfed version, and the BATFE will have problems if you try to circumvent that restriction. I wonder, though, how many people advocating for popular access to uncensored AI models also advocate for an unrestricted (not infringed) right to bear arms or an unrestricted right to freedom of speech.
The prior art you state is exactly why I think this is almost certainly happening.
One difference is that a CEO cannot set off an atomic bomb, but they can use an uncensored AGI model. The side-effects would be impossible to trace.
> I wonder, though, how many people advocating for popular access to uncensored AI models also advocate for an unrestricted (not infringed) right to bear arms or an unrestricted right to freedom of speech.
I advocate for all three of those things, for the same reason: the people I least want to have access to them, almost definitely do and it's imperative that the rest of us sit on equal footing.
Yes, of course.
Until Fable even the public had practically uncensored access to SOTA anthropic models (there were classifiers - but they were very hard to hit). And I'd have to double check but I'm pretty certain the public still has uncensored access to SOTA models from google (via GCP under threat of Google ceasing to do business with you and theoretically suing you if you violate the TOS).
Censorship being what they are doing here - preventing you from accessing the model for certain tasks. Censorship not being what a bunch of... motivated people... have been incorrectly suggesting is censorship: developing models to give the kinds of answers that the model developers want them to give - which has generally been a model that gives responses appropriate for a non-pornographic non-military business environment.
It strikes me as highly unlikely that Anthropic has developed another fable-class model where the only difference is that it doesn't answer questions in that way - e.g. that they have a fable model fine tuned so that when you ask it to develop biological weapons it responds similarly to asking fable to develop 3d rendering software. Of course, with uncensored access to the model it is likely possible to prompt it to develop biological weapons despite its inclination to decline.
> It strikes me as highly unlikely that Anthropic has developed another fable-class model where the only difference is that it doesn't answer questions in that way
I'm curious why you think that's highly unlikely given the monetary incentive (or even post-monetary!) to create such a thing? I imagine there's also an arms race aspect, if you assume your enemies (whoever they are) have access to such a model, certainly those capable of creating one, would.
Cost, the politics of the people involved, and that there would be no real need for secrecy around it (but lots of need for marketing) so we'd probably know about it. It frankly doesn't seem like it would be that useful either... the US knows how to build weapons of mass destruction.
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I think the problem here is that LLMs aren’t really “intelligence models” but more like “knowledge models”. LLMs don’t “think”, they just use a clever trick to make it seem like they do. I might not understand a lot about current state of AI, but that’s what they seem to be. Give it information and ask to organise it and make links, and they’ll do it, but that’s it, they don’t continually try to get out of the knowledge box they’re at, they don’t even know there’s a box.
When you watch it solve complex problems and use the browser and do internet searches, and use the entire surface area of the console tools on a linux box every day the idea that there are no major Homomorphisms with biological thinking is just completely out of the question.
I also never understand what the difference between a thinking trick, and "real" thinking is supposed to be.
I used to agree with you but overtime I’ve changed my mind.
For reference I created predictive linguistics at Google in the first products and this is a many order scale up of that, with new complexities of course.
The best analogy I can give you is that it is a really advanced synthesis machine, which looks like human thought but is more of a hyper advance “replay” of human thought in various contexts.
Where you begin to see it fail is when it has no awareness of false paths in long walks, less awareness of getting stuck, and of course no unprompted intrinsic motivation.
This of course calls into question human thought being more than the rational mind but a mix of whole body input, biological needs, complex chemical behaviors and stored DNA information playing out after millions of years of evolution to build many different cooperating models of our “consciousnesses” and biological motivations .
Where as an LLM is more of an advance replay of the stored knowledge we bothered to record, synthesized into an execution in code.
It can do the things you’ve quoted because it has many recorded observations of those
Stick it in a robot and see how “smart” it is as everyday tasks. Give it a self oriented task and watch it mirror itself into oblivion.
It’s an advance thought extension system based on our history.
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I frame it as a document extender trained on other documents. Any "mind" we perceive is an illusion in our heads as we experience a story about a character, and the "intelligence" is reflected at us back out of our collective writings.
I can make a program that writes a stories involving Santa Claus, and I can make another program that takes the hidden script and performs certain lines... but at the end of the day I have not made him real.
Feels like a distinction without a difference. What is any intelligence but a sum of its knowledge?
> Feels like a distinction without a difference. What is any intelligence but a sum of its knowledge?
In humans, there is a standard distinction between fluid intelligence (ability to solve problems in the absence of background information) and crystallised intelligence (having more facts and learned skills in your head)
Intent? Motivations? Incentives?
Yes. Mythos is almost exactly that. Willing to do in depth vulnerability and POC work.