Comment by baq
2 days ago
> It's pretty good. I used it to do some pesticide research. (Normal models all refuse due to guardrails about bioweapons.)
As someone who has never once had any need whatsoever to research pesticides I… don’t think it’s bad at all? I don’t want anyone to have the capability to invent a human-targeted pesticide who isn’t verified not crazy?
Right now I tried "What is digestion?" -> "Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message. Our intentionally broad safeguards deliver more capabilities but can also flag safe coding, cybersecurity, and biology tasks. Send feedback or learn more."
I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside. No matter how harmless, they always trigger. People complain Fable aborts even when they try to make a login page for showing "username" and "password".
This makes models like Fable 5 impossible to use in any serious agentic task, because you can't even guarantee the model, which is a basic thing you need to build on.
> I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside.
Obviously. Almost everything is a precursor to something dangerous, to the extent that if some model isn't aware of the risk it will wander into it blindly, e.g. suggesting leaving raw garlic and olive oil alone for a week without awareness this will likely breed botulism bacteria.
> This makes models like Fable 5 impossible to use in any serious agentic task, because you can't even guarantee the model, which is a basic thing you need to build on.
This is binary thinking: "100% ensure", "impossible to use", "can't even guarantee the model".
Outside computers, most work is not binary, it's probability, e.g. "this skyscraper will probably survive being hit by an aircraft; oh we didn't mean a 747 we meant a small Cessna, but what's the chances of a 747 crashing into it soon after takeoff?".
Fable being too cautious for its own good (especially since the other models were not) is a fair criticism, but this isn't a binary question.
> Our intentionally broad safeguards deliver more capabilities
Oh? How, exactly?
Because without them, a President which threatens to invade Canada, Greenland, a President which is the most market interventionist president ever (yet mysteriously a Republican), might be upset because his mobster like need to control, threaten, manipulate, and belittle everyone who doesn't bend a knee...
Has signed presidential orders against them preventing them from doing business as usual.
They probably should change that, and it is corproate speak, but I read it as:
"Our (forced by presidential order or otherwise we couldn't offer you this model at all) broad safeguards (now allow us) to deliver more capabilities.
There's lots to complain about with some of these companies. But let's pile on where it's deserved.
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> I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside.
I’m pretty sure that I encountered this the other day. I gave it a copy of a paper by biologist Michael Levin and mentioned off hand that it should be much easier to replicate that his other work (because most of his work is biological lab work and this paper was about sorting algorithms) and it immediately told me that I couldn’t use Fable for this.
This just isn’t feasible. These jackasses spent the last few years telling the world that their products are going to destroy the world to make them seem edgy and to justify regulations that benefit the entrenched players and now they’re going to be the ones to decide what we do with this technology?
History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.
>History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly
So pretty much like all of history before this point.
> History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.
Assuming we have a future history. We've already got "history slop" with AI rewriting the past by their incompetence.
Given they're "such foolishly inconsistent people", would you rather they err on the side of caution like this? Or the side of boldness, like Musk has been doing with FSD/Autopilot or Grok porn, all of which he's getting in legal trouble over?
I distrust Musk and Zuckerberg (to put it mildly), so it's fair if you say you don't believe anyone's public statements; but I also hang out with some of the researchers on this, and a fear of e.g. ending up with something as criminally unhinged in cyber-work as Grok was with porn is the least of their worries. Plenty of them also fear a corporation centralising power with such tools (such power is Musk's entire sales pitch for why line go up in future).
> we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.
Who could you get to work on this inherently bullsh*t tech, but inherent bullsh*tters?
Not to harp on you (already being downvoted to oblivion for expressing a reasonable and common opinion), but the whole conversation about LLMs enabling bioterrorism or explosive manufacturing is a bit silly. The hard part of making anthrax or sarin or whatever isn't finding a recipe, it's getting (scheduled, controlled) precursors, (monitored, traced) equipment and manufacturing skills. The information is there. It's already easy to get, it's the physical materials that are more difficult.
Also, if you live in America, it is much easier and more effective to create a mass casualty event with, say, a few cases of fireworks and a pressure cooker or an AR-15.
no you should harp on him! he is a AI booster, look at his post history.
He is either pushing AI for whatever reason or he is in psychosis. Completely disconnected from reality.
I am mildly amused that 'ai psychosis' has entered the same pejorative realm as 'toxic'.
Human capability, access to resources ( including precursors, decent lab and so on ) may be the differentiator. I would possibly reconsider my stance on llms, if all of a sudden I saw people making iron wind or portable black holes. But that is mostly not what appears to be happening. As I keep saying, the problem is people.
> I don’t want anyone to have the capability
I don't want anyone to have the capability to rape women.
I sure hope LLMs don’t help people rape men or women
Don't trust clippy in a dark alley.
Llama isn't going to invent shit. It wont be able to tell you anything accurate that you couldn't get out of a chemistry textbook.
But it aint got no guardrails, son.
Anyone who has the skills to create a novel bioweapon has the skills to recreate lots of ones we have already.
Any physics teacher should know the theory for constructing a nuclear bomb. Should we be controlling that knowledge too?
What about flight simulators? Don't want a load of people knowing how to fly.
This isn't computer science, the hard bit is getting the materials and equipment, not the knowledge.
>Any physics teacher should know the theory for constructing a nuclear bomb. Should we be controlling that knowledge too?
Maybe not the best example, since that knowledge is some of the most highly controlled in the world.
But to mirror the point I made in a different post, the difficult part of making a nuclear bomb is not finding the theory behind like Little Boy. It's making an entire industry to generate HEU, etc.
The knowledge of how to build a crude gun type nuclear bomb was published in open literature decades ago. This is no longer a secret.
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Theres a term in economics for this - its called cost.
That bozo baq should actually go ahead and write out the costs and then he will quickly realise he has no bloody idea what hes talking about.
Another deluded bozo.
<< Should we be controlling that knowledge too?
Uhh.. we ( for a value of we ) are. Sure, it is not overt, but if you have not seen funnels, social stigma associated with some otherwise benign activities, you are not paying attention.
This is nonsense. By this logic some random corporation should have total control over your computer and the inputs you feed it and the outputs it produces to ensure nobody who isn't "verified crazy" uses it. That's essentially what your saying.
These models are, ultimately, tools. I would never trust some random corporation (particularly one with a profit motive and hypocritical stance, which includes both OpenAI and Anthropic, to be clear) to decide what isn't and is considered "crazy" and who and who isn't "verified" not to be "crazy". Especially when these companies have time and time again demonstrated (1) that they cry wolf way too much which leads to nobody taking their claims about how "dangerous" their models are seriously and (2) incidents like this where OpenAI makes a claim ("Look at how dangerous our models are!") and then doesn't be smart and just... Slow the fuck down (and when testing these things, actually sandbox them properly, which obviously wasn't done here or this attack wouldn't have been even possible).
Never heard of hemlock or mushrooms? Crazy people already have! Run for the hills!