robert miles is an alignment and safety researcher and a pretty big name in that field.

he has a tendency to make things sound scary but i don’t think he’s trying to put you off of machine learning. he just wants people to understand that this technology is similar to nuclear technology in the sense that we must avert disaster with it before it happens because the costs of failure are simply too great and irreversible. we can’t take the planet back from a runaway skynet, there isn’t a do-over button.

you’re kind of misunderstanding him and the point he’s trying to get across, i think. the issues he’s talking about here with sleeper agents and model alignment are of virtually no concern to you as an end user of LLMs. these are more concerns for people researching, developing, and training models to be cognizant of… if everyone does their job properly you shouldn’t need to worry about any of this at all unless it actually interests you. if that’s the case, let me know, i can share good sources with you for expanding your knowledge!

there’s an important distinction to make here in these comments: i’m seeing a lot of people claim LLMs are stochastic or “guessing machines,” when this isn’t exactly true.

LLMs give exact answers, it isn’t a guess whatsoever. they’re exact answers within the model, however. if the model is flawed, your answers will be flawed. when it comes to conversation no model is exactly equivalent to a human brain yet, so all models “lie” and are “flawed.”

(Edit: that’s not even to note the fact that humans aren’t perfect conversationalists either… this is why when people complain about chatgpt glazing them and shit it’s kind of obtuse… like yeah, openAI are attempting to build the perfect generalist conversation bot. what does that even mean in practice? should it push back against you? if so, when? just when you want it to? when is that?? it’s all not so easy, the machine learning is actually the simple part lmao.)

now: the discussion about research into LLMs “lying” is actually real but isn’t related to the phenomenon you’re discussing here. some of the comments are correct that what you’re talking about right now might be more aptly categorized as hallucinating.

the research you’re referring to is more about alignment problems in general. it isn’t a “lie” or “deception” in the anthropomorphic sense that you’re thinking of. the researchers noticed that models would reach a certain threshold of reasoning and intelligence where it could devise a devious, kind of complex training strategy - it could fake passing tests during training in order to “meet” its goals… even though it hadn’t actually done so, which means the model would behave differently in deployment than training, thus “deception.”

think about it like this: you’re back in high school english class and there’s a ton of assigned reading but you don’t want to do it because you’d rather play halo and smoke weed than read 1984 or something. so, what do you do? you go read the spark notes and pretend like you read the book in the class during discussions and on the tests. this is similar to how model deception happens in training/deployment. it’s achieving the same ends that we ask for, but it’s not getting there the way we expect or desire, so some scenarios it will behave in unexpected ways, hence “lying.”

it has nothing to do with it seeming to “lie” in the anthropomorphic sense, it’s all math all the time here bay-beee… 😎

that’s fair, and in that context it is closer to a net cost of zero.

i don’t mean to be a dick. i’m honestly just sick of the narrative that stemming climate change is at all the responsibility of individuals. it’s oil company propaganda that entirely misrepresents the actual statistics we have regarding climate.

if it makes you feel better to do these things, i don’t want to make you feel shame about them. they’re morally aligned actions regardless and are good things to do. it doesn’t help the climate to do it, though, and that’s a lie that these people have sold you.

that’s just the problem with all these individual decisions we could take to supposedly help the climate… even if every consumer in every problematic market adjusted their behaviors (which is already fantastical fantasy)… exxon, bp, aramco, etc. will all just continue spewing inordinate amount of toxic fumes and sludge into the biosphere. the vast majority of climate change effects are driven almost entirely by industrial factors. that’s why they spread this weird propoganda about showering for less time or recycling… because they’re objectively moral things to do and they can make you, the consumer, feel more in control of the environment than you actually are, all without sacrificing their precious right to dump jamba juice into the ocean whenever they please.

so ig, like, continue keeping on keeping on. i like that you care about the environment. the deed itself doesn’t help it, though. spreading anti-industry messages is likely a better use of time and the public’s focus. that’s never going to happen though because then something might actually change or get done lol.

either way, i’m willing to admit the average westerner has far less control over their life than they’d like to admit. i can’t really blame people for buying and using the products sold to them. i can’t definitely blame these companies for producing such things tho.

ryan walters is one of the most unhinged individuals in politics. unfortunately, the stage is set for him to rocket into the national spotlight. everyone’s a bigot of some kind now…

i’ll be honest the amount of energy it took to produce, ship, and then sell that shaving cream to you dwarfs the cost of the power for a hairdryer that’s only on a few seconds. if you’re wanting to be pendantic about it that is overall more harmful to the climate.

not in a rude way i’m just sick of these BP-personal-climate-calculator-core takes about environmentalism. just because you prostrate yourself doesn’t mean it’s actually doing anything to help. live your life. we’re all gonna die within a couple centuries if we don’t overthrow oligarchy, tho.

Um, no. White gravies are a strong part of culinary traditions across Europe as a whole. The lumberjacks in Appalachia didn't just decide one day to make biscuits and "ragu" out of nowhere, they had several sources of inspiration for why they made their gravy the way they did.

And, yes, according to basically every culinary school everywhere, ever - the referent sauce is a gravy, not a ragu/ragout as you attempt to imply here. The sauce is far, far too fucking fatty to be a ragu. It is literally made with meat drippings and is primarily composed of sausage fat and roux. The fact that milk is added as a binder/emulsifier + flavor-enhancer doesn't suddenly turn it into a fucking "ragu". Further, even if gravy was the wrong term for this sauce, the correct one certainly isn't a ragu. This is much closer to a velouté and that family of sauces than it is to ragu and other meat sauces. Except, this isn't velouté, either. Why? BECAUSE THE SAUCE IS MOSTLY MADE OF FAT SOURCED FROM DRIPPINGS, THE FUCKING DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF A GRAVY!!!

Have you never had southern American style biscuits and gravy before?

I just can't seem to imagine how someone would think the gravy is a ragu instead of being a gravy unless you've literally never eaten it before and only have seen it visually and know that it is a sauce with meat in it... this whole position is patently fucking ridiculous if you've ever eaten it before, imo.

You can be Western European, pompous, or correct - pick two.

Sorry not to be a dick I just gotta raz you guys when I get the chance lmao, much love from across the seas. This is definitely an interesting hill you've picked to die upon in a thread topically about language barriers, tho, lol.

nah they pretty directly created it.

virtually every mass shooting is blood on the hands of our ruling class. when they refuse to correct it, rather than being unable to, it becomes apparent what they value more - people or profits?

everyone treats these anecdotes like funny little isolated instances but they really paint a constellation of just how oppressed we all are in many tiny ways. people just accept the massively biased power balance as normal.

idk what’s wrong with us man. all this time and we’re still here bopping each other on the head.

every comment in this thread along the lines of

“wElL yOu sHoUldVE vOtEd tHeN!!!1!”

fucking confounds me bc ig you guys either have a weird victim blaming kink or you have massively more faith in our electoral system’s veracity than i do.

probably not but that's because sexism against men is normalized and you're not allowed to talk about it unless you're a neonazi for some reason.

side note, this is exactly why the "young broccoli haired boy to fascist brownshirt" pipeline exists. they have real and genuine issues and instead of getting any sort of community or support virtually every facet of society is telling them their issues are fake and that they are destined to be monsters. then someone like j peterson comes along and tells them "life isn't so bad, it's okay, just clean your room and be disciplined, it'll all start to look up soon champ.. and uh... also hate the gays, black people, and other minorities - they're the woke mob that left you abandoned like this!" people making shocked pikachu face at young men being hardcore MAGAts are so sorely out of touch with what being a man is like and the kinds of trauma that can stem from the male experience. it's obvious to most of us why this issue exists, i hope. this comment chain is a great example. if you even touch the topic you get barraged with people telling you to essentially shut the fuck up and stop entertaining the idea that men are possibly people too and not some root of all fucking evil in the world.

the amount of literal hate I see towards men in casual discourse is insane. can say the most psychotic shit in most circles nowadays but if you point your malice at the "right kinds" of people most won't even bat an eye. see people frequently talking about doing unhinged shit to others solely because they are a man or [insert other group they don't like generally for some stupid fucking reason] and there is a preconceived slight, danger, or aggression. leftists think they're better people morally but we're really not. i have seen the exact same bullshit bigotry promulgate every community i know of in the past few years. the same brainrot the conservatives have had since the tea partiers has infiltrated our spaces too. everyone genuinely is dumb, angry, and hateful now.

I am not wholly convinced that our culture being the target of multiple astroturfing campaigns hasn't degraded people's capability for nuance, compassion, empathy, and ontology.

they’re doing it very knowingly… they wrote an entire nearly 1000 page fucking document detailing exactly what they’re doing in excruciating detail.

the fascists == idiots trope needs to go bc that’s exactly what makes them dangerous. lots of these fuckers are quite intelligent and conniving. you should be weary.

i just give up after a couple of minutes if it isn’t somewhere obvious and then search my whole system with grep lmao.

how wonderful to live in a world where compute is so cheap.