That's not even considering tool use!
And the safety testing actually makes this worse, because it leads people to trust that LLMs are less likely to give dangerous advice, when they could still do so.
Manipulation is a genuine concern!
...later someone higher-up decided that it's actually great at programming as well, and so now we all believe it's incredibly useful and necessary for us to be able to do our daily work
For this reason o3 is way better than most of the doctors I've had access to, to the point where my PCP just writes whatever I brought in because she can't follow 3/4 of it.
Yes, the answers are often wrong and incomplete, and it's up to you to guide the model to sort it out, but it's just like vibe coding: if you put in the steering effort, you can get a decent output.
Would it be better if you could hire an actual professional to do it? Of course. But most of us are priced out of that level of care.
Where do you get this data from?
The second is that many viral infections can, in rare scenarios, lead to bacterial infections. For instance a random flu can leave one more susceptible to developing pneumonia. Throwing antibiotics at everything is a defensive measure to help ward of malpractice lawsuits. Even if frivolous, it's something no doctor wants to deal with, but some absurd number - something like 1 in 15 per year, will.
In my experience it's not only correct, but so common that it's hard not to get a round of antibiotics to go.
The only caveat is that I'm in the EU, not the US.
People keep talking about this “marketing”, and I have yet to see a single example.
If you hook up a chat bot to a chat interface, or add tool use, it is probable that it will eventually output something that it should not and that output will cause a problem. Preventing that is an unsolved problem, just as preventing people from abusing computers is an unsolved problem.
(1) Execute yes (with or without arguments, whatever you desire).
(2) Let the program run as long as you desire.
(3) When you stop desiring the program to spit out your argument,
(4) Stop the program.
Between (3) and (4) some time must pass. During this time the program is behaving in an undesired way. Ergo, yes is not a counter example of the GP's claim.
That said, I suspect the other person was actually agreeing with me, and tried to state that software incorporating LLMs would eventually malfunction by stating that this is true for all software. The yes program was an obvious counter example. It is almost certain that all LLMs will eventually generate some output that is undesired given that it is determining the next token to output based on probabilities. I say almost only because I do not know how to prove the conjecture. There is also some ambiguity in what is a LLM, as the first L means large and nobody has made a precise definition of what is large. If you look at literature from several years ago, you will find people saying 100 million parameters is large, while some people these days will refuse to use the term LLM to describe a model of that size.
It's really not. Parent's examples are all out-of-the-box behavior.
Table saws sold all over the world are inspected and certified by trusted third parties to ensure they operate safely. They are illegal to sell without the approval seal.
Moreover, table saws sold in the United States & EU (at least) have at least 3 safety features (riving knife, blade guard, antikickback device) designed to prevent personal injury while operating the machine. They are illegal to sell without these features.
Then of course there are additional devices like sawstop, but it is not mandatory yet as far as I'm aware. Should be in a few years though.
LLMs have none of those board labels or safety features, so I'm not sure what your point was exactly?
An example is the first Microsoft bot that started to go extreme rightwing when people realized how to make it go that direction. Grok had a similar issue recently.
Google had racial issues with its image generation (and earlier with image detection). Again something that people don't forget.
Also an OpenAI 4o release was encouraging stupid things to people when they asked stupid questions and they just had to roll it back recently.
Of course I'm not saying that that's the real reason (somehow they never say that the problem is with performance for not releasing stuff), but safety matters with consumer products.
And then you proceed to give a number of examples of that not happening. Most people already forgot those.
You can perfectly use an LLM to attack someone. Your sentence is very weird as it comes off as a denial of things that have been happening for months and are ramping up. Examples abound: generate scam letters, find security flaws in a codebase, extract personal information from publicly-available-yet-not-previously-known locations, generate attack software customized for particular targets, generate untraceable hit offers and then post them on anonymized Internet services on your behalf, etc. etc.
The act of generating content is not the attack on someone.
That would be like saying if I write something with and paper but not expose anyone to it that I attacked someone.
This is an extraordinary claim.
I trust that the vast majority of people are good and would ignore such garbage.
Even assuming that an LLM can trivially build a compelling case to convince someone who is not already murderous to go on a killing spree to kill a large group of people, one killer has limited impact radius.
For contrast, many books and religious texts, have vastly more influence and convincing power over huge groups of people. And they have demonstrably caused widespread death or other harm. And yet we don’t censor or ban them.
What’s an example of such a medication that does not require a prescription?
What is an example liver medicine that does not require a prescription?
This drug comes with warnings: “Taking acetaminophen and drinking alcohol in large amounts can be risky. Large amounts of either of these substances can cause liver damage. Acetaminophen can also interact with warfarin, carbamazepine (Tegretol), and cholestyramine. It can also interact with antibiotics like isoniazid and rifampin.”
It is on the consumer to read it.
We typically don’t critique the requirements of users, at least not in functionality.
The marketing angle is that this measure is needed because LLMs are “so powerful it would be unethical not to!”
AI marketers are continually emphasizing how powerful their software is. “Safety” reinforces this.
“Safety” also brings up many of the debates “mis/disinformation” brings up. Misinformation concerns consistently overestimate the power of social media.
I’d feel much better if “safety” focused on preventing unexpected behavior, rather than evaluating the motives of users.
LM safety is just a marketing gimmick.
* the federal state of Bavaria
Bit worse than the baseline, I'd say. You judge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
2016 was also first Trump, Brexit, and roughly when the AfD (who are metaphorically wading ankle deep in the waters of legal trouble of this topic) made the transition from "joke party" to "political threat".
AI 'safety' is one of the most neurotic twitter-era nanny bullshit things in existence, blatantly obviously invented to regulate small competitors out of existence.
AI safety is about proactive safety. Such an example: if an AI model could be used to screen hiring applications, making sure it doesn’t have any weighted racial biases.
The difference here is that it’s not reactive. Reading a book with a racial bias would be the inverse; where you would be reacting to that information.
That’s the basis of proper AI safety in a nutshell
That should really be done for humans reviewing the resumes as well, but in practice that isn't done as much as it should be
Luckily, this is something that can be studied and has been. Sticking a stereotypically Black name on a resume on average substantially decreases the likelihood that the applicant will get past a resume screen, compared to the same resume with a generic or stereotypically White name:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...
Got a better suggestion?
without OpenAI, Anthropic and Google's fearmongering, AI 'safety' would exist only in the delusional minds of people who take sci-fi way too seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
for fuck's sake, how more obvious could they be? sama himself went on a world tour begging for laws and regulations, only to purge safetyists a year later. if you believe that he and the rest of his ilk are motivated by anything other than profit, smh tbh fam.
it's all deceit and delusion. China will crush them all, inshallah.