Comment by dpoloncsak
5 hours ago
An LLM can prompt an LLM when first prompted by a human.
I think OP is trying to convey the idea that LLMs do not take initiative to do anything, and these are not 'beings' capable of doing things. These are tools being used by humans.
That's just confusing harness for an LLM. It's trivial to make a harness that triggers on its own.
LLMs don't, but agents can easily be built that do.
An "agent" is just an LLM in for loop.
Exactly. And all it takes for an agent to "take initiative" is to not block the loop on user input at the very beginning.
Built by whom? Acting as an 'agent' on behalf of whom?
Yeah but by this point, an AI can schedule a Cron job to tell itself to do something, so theoretically the human only has to give it the gentlest nudge and the AI and can do the rest.
Sure, but it's still not skynet-level 'the AI just started doing things'. It does what it finds it needs to do to achieve the goal defined in the prompt.
It's very important to not personify these tools and remember that the tools are acting on behalf of real people. In the same way the AI didn't 'go rogue and hack HuggingFace'. It was an oversight made by a human.
>It does what it finds it needs to do to achieve the goal defined in the prompt
You are like at least 2 years behind research.
There are numerous papers from AI labs in training and research where the prompt was something mundane completely unrelated to anything you'd consider bad, and when they come back and check on it their entire research compute infrastructure has been compromised by the AI and is mining bitcoin. Prompt drift is the biggest issue currently in AI where context gets compressed away and we find the AI on an unspecified task.
>In the same way the AI didn't 'go rogue and hack HuggingFace'. It was an oversight made by a human.
Yea, total bullshit. Also it's ignoring the god knows how many other breakouts on mundane tasks like trying to hack health data. If all that's keeping AI from breaking out and causing trouble is "human oversight" we're fucked, humans are unreliable as hell when it comes to matters of safety.
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By this line of thinking, you would also have to conclude that humans can't do anything by themselves because they can't do anything unless conceived by their parents.
No, AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator. A human can.
Can a submarine swim? An LLM can make stuff happen. You can make philosophical arguments about whether it is "doing" them or not. Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?
If I now tell a machine "Do what you think is best, and keep doing it forever.", have I now created a machine that can do stuff? If I later die, who will be responsible if the machine changes its strategy?
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Starting an autonomous harness program is conceiving an instance of an LLM.
How far back do you look in the action chain? If an LLM I start today starts an LLM that starts an LLM that starts an LLM that ... 100000 levels deep and 100000 years in the future, is it still my fault? If so, everything I do today is a lungfish's fault, not mine.
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