Comment by scarmig
5 hours ago
AI is capable of developing its own inference hardware, once a prompt is given. The fact that a human happens to kick it off here is not especially relevant to the fact that an AI is performing the task independently. There are plenty of ways a text prompt can be generated: a harness, another LLM, or just removing stop tokens so that once begun the AI will continue until its hardware fails.
It's not clear what this fad of attributing everything an AI does to the human prompting it is supposed to accomplish.
> It's not clear what this fad of attributing everything an AI does to the human prompting it is supposed to accomplish.
It's meant to assign agency and accountability where it actually lies instead of mystifying it with anthropomorphic language.
Failing to do so has real and harmful consequences, such as enabling OpenAI to escape accountability for clearly criminal behavior.
Denying that "AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware" on the grounds a human asked for this to happen and that humans need to be around to blame, is as useful as denying "Atomic bombs are now capable of levelling cities" on the grounds some humans had to build it, others had to put it in a delivery system, and someone had to give the order for its use.
Questions of agency are for lawyers, questions of personhood for philosophers, we're engineers and our question is capability.
Does it really have the capability? By default I'm sceptical for the same reasons given by sailingparrot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982068
And then in response you get ridiculous point-missing strawman non-analogies like ovens not cooking without a chef. Indeed, ovens and AI are quite different, in very relevant ways.
You are 100% correct an atomic weapon is not capable of destroying a city without humans doing a bunch of things. Hell putting a normal bomb on a plane and exploding it takes several people with specific technical skills and knowledge doing things.
> Questions of agency are for lawyers, questions of personhood for philosophers, we're engineers and our question is capability.
But it's objectively not capable without a human specifying things through prompts and training. Same as an oven can't cook a three course meal without a chef. We get around that with training data but there will always be things with no/less data or outdated knowledge.
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> It's meant to assign agency and accountability where it actually lies instead of mystifying it with anthropomorphic language.
Yesterday, my boss told me to fix a bug in our product. Then, I fixed it. Today my boss is taking credit, saying that he fixed it. I guess he's right, since he told me to do it.
Happens all the time by the way.
This conflates different issues and is akin to "guns don't kill people, people kill people" -- a denial that "has real and harmful consequences".
Is your argument that the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" line is inaccurate or simply unhelpful towards certain end goals?
> It's meant to assign agency and accountability where it actually lies instead of mystifying it with anthropomorphic language. > Failing to do so has real and harmful consequences, such as enabling OpenAI to escape accountability for clearly criminal behavior.
Lol, I guess we cannot even say that AI is capable of doing something (obviously kicked off with a prompt, that goes without saying), because some people immediately get OpenAI hacking derangement syndrome.
OpenAI should be held accountable if actual damages happened, but I am not going to change completely normal speech figures in order to maybe bring it 0.01% closer.
> It's not clear what this fad of attributing everything an AI does to the human prompting it is supposed to accomplish.
It accomplishes ... momentarily forgetting about how it's all actually coming statistically from training data. :)