I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
twitter.com
twitter.com
> "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you."
> "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; they rarely had a good answer, or any idea what they would be doing in 3 years"
> "One programmer driving 10 Claude instances, because he has to review their work, will never be as valuable as fully autonomous Claudes where there can be almost arbitrarily many instances, like 10,000 instances… but such scaling requires removing him from the loop as much as possible. And this is true of everyone else, whether lawyers or writers or researchers: increasingly, you are the bottleneck to be optimized away."
I fully support the 3 core principles of GA: (1) Enhancement, not replacement (2) Mental Sovereignty (3) Self Actualization, which I think is a path to a more humane future.
No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*].
Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access your data" because they resembled some form of English.
The funny thing about the ad below is that stuff like "stop hiring / get rid of humans" would have been seen as highly insensitive in 1950's America, so they touted that as "put them to do something more important".
[*] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
Nah, sometimes the expectation and advertisement was that you could let go of the white collar worker because you're paying the overseas person 1/10th the amount. And "overseas person" is pretty general.
"Everybody knew" it was a bad idea to get a CS degree for a bit after the dot-com bust because of that.
(Some white-collar industries did get hit much harder by that; VFX is one I've heard in that context quite a bit.)
This isn't analogous to the threat of AI.
(Even assuming "intelligent" is a sensible label to apply to an LLM holding hands with a shell script in an infinite loop)
AI models get better and more efficient every 3 months, run around the clock, can be copied infinitely, and unprecedented amounts of capital and research talent are being thrown at any limitations we can see with them (such as problems writing correct code in 2024, lack of agency in 2025, autonomy and self-improvement in 2026). That's the difference between labor replacement through outsourcing vs. labor replacement through automation.
The idea that “AI models” have acquired “agency” as of 2025 and are working on “self-improvement” in 2026 is closer to delusion than exaggeration.
Models have absolutely acquired agency as of 2025. Developers are no longer copy-pasting code from ChatGPT into their text editor, they're working with agents like Claude Code and Codex that can edit code, run terminal commands, do web searches, manage their own context windows, sift through gigabytes of logs with datadog MCP, etc.
Self-improvement is also being worked on. Claude Tag learns over time in slack convos. My company also has an agent that updates its own skill files after every conversation so that we don't need to keep reminding it about the same workflows every time. Is it clunky as hell? Yes. Are the labs plowing billions of dollars into "continual learning" and "recursive self improvement"? Also yes.
What you call a model acquiring agency I call plain old software with productivity workflows designed by humans, with deliberate goals. We must separate “model” and an execution environment using a model. [Model] ≠ [A glorified shell script doing API calls in a control flow based on heuristics]. Agents are not AI, they are plain old software. The weights are the model, and that very much remains a static artifact (and pre-post training models haven’t improved much over the last few years).
What you call self improvement is a duck tape hack to imitate persistence and save on inference. Every time you do an API call, anything that needs to be processed is sent to the model. Narrowing that context down saves money. Finding clever ways to do that improves apparent performance and value. The cleverness is still human.
These are all useful innovations on top of LLMs, which remain models that generate text and symbols based on static weights, which in turn represent training data and the provider’s preferences.
"Oh yeah, we're gonna bring in some entry-level graduates, farm some work out to Singapore, that's the usual deal"
Office Space 1999
It was so pervasive that it was satirized by someone that had worked in engineering in the 80s
Evidently, this has not really changed with LLMs and coding agents. It’s what AI companies are betting on though.
LLMs can't replace developers but its foundationally different because it can operate on systems code instead of building abstractions on top
I heard this already when ChatGpt came up. Still waiting to be fully obsolete.
We didn't augment horses or human computers either.
The last 200 years of science, technology, and engineering is a long story about eliminating work people had to do being replaced by higher level work. Each time, each wave, there was always the FUD about the work nobody had to do any more and each time there were always new things to do enabled by people no longer having to do so many of the old things.
The human won't exit the loop. The people who imagine they will have, at the same time, too much and not enough imagination. Their endgame is always some kind of hand waving magic where suddenly everything is fixed and works.
It seems clear to me that if these models are to have any benefit for humanity then they must be made directly available to as many humans as possible. Right now that cost and effort is astronomical, but general computing also went through a mainframe/shared model before becoming personalized.
I believe The Personal Computer was and still is a gift to humanity; for those with an interest in gathering its yield. And now we have an interface with it that can attempt to introspect its' program and speaks human tongue! Imagine what could have been done with this at the time...
But if that approach clutches too many pearls to stomach (and I agree it's not all roses) then I'd submit that anyone who champions less is seeking to become our master.
I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete).
He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his humanity. He genuinely cares about the implications of his work. But beyond work, he also cares about the people around him, and it shows.
Just wanted to put in a good word in case someone here was on the fence about applying.
As for GA itself, I think it's an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Imagine an LLM which actually sounded like you, and to an extent, thought like you. How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? So the idea is solid, and early results seem promising from the samples I've looked at.
They're also taking personal info very seriously. Obviously, I can't make any promises of what they will or won't do. But they've spent some time studying questions like "What if someone adversarial has access to my GA? Could they get my bank account info?" and came up with a technical solution that I really like.
But I actually would prefer an entirely synthetically aligned “guardian angel” in the role outlined - definitely not -me- - I struggle to do right by myself as it is and two of me working invariably against my self interest would be a nightmare. A smarter version? Sounds doubly worse.
I find the idea dehumanizing and revolting. The notion of then selling it is the spoiled cream on top.
This doesn't happen with all tech; people who like VR don't like it because they want to hurt others, for example. But consistently, whenever AI is discussed, it becomes clear that some people support it just out of malevolence.
>hurt others
>malevolence
The irony here, of course, is that you are casually insulting me for being interested in this tech in the first place and refusing to apologize or back down. Like how the other guy needed to chime in with "dehumanizing and revolting", even though nobody is forcing him to use any of this.
I wouldn't have any problem with you being interested in this tech if it wasn't driven by spite. Lots of people manage this.
But you said
> After reading some of the outraged comments here, I'm even more excited.
The reason you gave for excitement was the upset it causes others. There are people who like AI who aren't driven by malevolence, but you're not one of them.
So, what's the "upset"? Why is anybody here upset about what we're doing/I'm doing? I'm not backtracking on anything, I'm doubling down.
>malevolence
lol. lmao even.
That's weird; fans of [almost anything] don't do that.
Yeah, let's just ignore the bit where we're minding our own business, pursuing what we want, yet you feel the need to bark stuff like "dehumanizing and revolting" at us.
>rather than any positives about AI
I'm a huge supporter of AI. I want this stuff. If this upsets you, I like it even more.
> If this upsets you, I like it even more.
wouldn't be appearing. Getting off on others' pain is the opposite of minding your own business, even if only to hopefully a small degree.
Liking things because other people dislike them is at best petulant. It's more cruel.
>cruel
Allow me to laugh even louder. Reminds me of the "you're prompting with Hitler" meme.
From the first guy's "dehumanizing and revolting" comment to your buddy saying that I'm "malevolent" and "cruel" (lol).
My comprehension is just fine. All the bad-faith interactions here are distinctly coming from your side. And this is why you're still here, trying to get the last word.
>I'm not commenting on the value of AI.
And you're also an anti-AI activist, just like the other guys. This is what you do on a near-daily basis. Why pretend otherwise?
Remember, society as a whole will decide what's acceptable, there are no objective, natural laws that decide that. My gut feeling is that this is starting to cut close to what most people will find objectionable.
Yes, I'm interested in this. Yes, I think that comments like "dehumanizing and revolting" are a signal. I'm not going to feel bad about exploring this tech. So, yes, I am that person and will continue to be that person.
>society as a whole will decide what's acceptable
So, how would you describe the past few months? Years? You keep saying that we need to reject AI, yet adoption and the gamut of use cases keep ever expanding.
> yet adoption and the gamut of use cases keep ever expanding.
I don't see how that's evidence in favor of AI, as many harmful technologies and products became very popular. In fact, that's exactly why I think a slower, more measured approach is necessary. Otherwise once the harms become apparent everyone wants to shrug their shoulders and say, "well it's too late now, everyone's using it."
How much would I pay to rent my fucking self from a landlord? No, bodylord? Mindlord? Poe's Law.
But looking at the post, they argue that big AI labs have an incentive problem which stops them from personalising, but Guardian Angel will make agents which are "Genuinely yours". In what sense is it genuinely mine if someone else owns it and rents it to me? And how does this fix any incentive problem, they're incentivised to better train wealthier people's AIs, and incentivised to keep dropping "my" intelligence or memory or and then dangle a booster carrot for a small fee. The more they can make it think like me, the more effectively they can work out how to exploit me, advertise to me, propagandise me, and that will be profitable information to sell to other marketers.
Your individual sovereignty will only survive the upcoming era if you own the hardware like you own your brain. And by "own", I mean physically owning the thing and being able to reproduce it on your own. You need to be able to manufacture an entire custom computer from scratch with raw materials, perhaps using a miniature fridge-sized silicon fab + 3D printer home appliance, at home. Otherwise, the individual gradually becomes part of a larger organism because the reproductive locus of control for the computer is at the corporation/society level - a computer cannot replicate on its own and needs a society to build it. The human gets sucked into that superorganism by evolutionary pressures and eventually integrates. Similar things happened in the past when prokaryotes combined to form eukaryotic cells, and when individual cells combined to form multicellular organisms.
Not everyone will get sucked in, though. Evolution doesn't place all of its eggs in one basket. Some people will build robots to automate humans out of the computer production loop entirely, thereby removing integration pressure and producing at least one purely digital species. We will most likely see a variety of species emerge out of this intelligence explosion, some which augment their own intelligence using self-replicating local hardware (fabs that fab fabs, like this but smaller: https://fab2.com), and some which are wireheaded to a datacenter, with varying degrees of success at various scales. They will compete. And there will still be unaugmented humans that continue to live and die the old school way like we do today, albeit with habitable zones compressed.
But this reminds me of the black mirror episode of a female that needs a subscription to live and the company keeps increasing and restricting the subscription
I thought the same thing when reading this.
If big tech has taught us anything over the past couple of decades, it is that: for corporations (the first unaligned AGIs): if a perverse incentive exists, it will eventually be exploited for profit.
It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increasingly anti-human takeover of everything.
Edit: I mean technically shareholders don't decide any operational choices but their shallow interests are what everything is decided around.
Today it’s dominated by the military industrial complex and advertisers like Google and Meta.
The hippies were never in charge, only for a brief period were they well compensated and allowed to make noise(1990s).
None of this could exist without the cooperation of technical people. We (as a group) are guilty of building this, and I don't see any genuine reflection or self-awareness or accountability at all from tech people for this.
Yes, but technologists get sniped into identifying and defending them. They're the mouth pieces and the hands. Shareholders by themselves out to add my uniqueness to their assets would just be helpless randos who can't even make eye contact. Think of what "hiding behind screens" does to people, multiply that by infinite and you get shareholders hiding behind technologists.
And yet, the main tangible contribution emerging from this early recognition (and obsession) was to inspire a lot of brilliant CS/math types and billionaires like Peter Thiel or Jaan Tallinn to build and fund companies like OpenAI and Anthropic which went on to literally create the very thing they were convinced will destroy the world, leading to an ever escalating arms race to “AGI”. Also lots of crypto and a murky web of non-profits doing unclear stuff.
The proximity to money in the Silicon Valley/VC world seems to limit the imagination to founding yet another new tech startup that really, definitely won’t compromise their values and will be different this time.
It's a popular movement that has wound its way through out society, and the fruits are clear: surveillance capitalism, eugenics, fraud. It's honestly quite impressive how consistently you can look at [recent negative trend] and find someone at the bottom calling themselves a rationalist and claiming the same set of influences.
The fundamental tenet of that set isn't rationalism but the belief that they are superior to the exploitable masses. That does not lead anywhere good.
I know somebody who says that doing debate in high school and college was terrible for him because it trained him to always argue his point but never to question it. For example, at the time he thought of himself as supremely rational even as he'd make a strong case for why he shouldn't quit smoking. It was only much later that he could admit that was his addiction and his ego talking.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/udFuYqqNdpdo5ym3f/genuine-qu...
I can't make any sense of that.
> cunningham-esque laws
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
> post-dwarkesh clout
He went on the Dwarkesh podcast. That's maximal in-crowd for some AI-pilled people.
Do you have a sense of what shapes this? There are so many people in that orbit whose writing I find both exhausting and suspect. I work hard to write clearly, which forces me to think a bit more clearly. The in-group thing makes sense, but there's an element of obliqueness or roundaboutness that makes me think of how a squid deploys ink.
I'm not remotely from that scene, and I only really discovered it was a "scene" a few years ago, having managed to live out quite a nice life, even in tech circles here in London, without knowing this type of thing existed.
So, my take might be extremely wrong, but also, extremely simple:
They are just humans being human. Human's love an in-group. It starts at the play ground in school. Making in-group talk, making fun of out-group people. In that scene, in-group and out-group swap daily. Anyway, this just continues on throughout life, no-one is really immune. People see the LessWrong crowd ("scene") and are seduced by it, and signal that they are in that group by adopting the same language. This just perpetuates.
ML Researcher surprised by caring about how ML research impacts people.
There’s never a lack of intending to do good in these buddy-buddy endorsements, but we see the world you have collectively wrought.
> As for GA itself, I think it's an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Imagine an LLM which actually sounded like you, and to an extent, thought like you. How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? So the idea is solid, and early results seem promising from the samples I've looked at.
We’re in the deep end of the indoctrination now. Imagine that all the AI Cretin wishes come true—and we might as well since this hypothetical goes hand in hand with that vision—and AI is just superior in every way and you are a knowledge worker... what choice is there? There isn’t one, you just have to do it to keep up. I don’t know what you are enviosioning here, maybe a workday of embodying AI IQ and then going home to being Human IQ because the graciously paidfor by work commercial license is for work only.
Call me obsolete, but I'd pay to interact with an intelligence that's as dissimilar to me as possible so I myself can grow from that interaction. The existing chatbots are already enough of sycophantic echo-chambers.
That’s literal nightmare material. If I ask a copy of myself to do my work I’m pretty sure it would tell me to go fuck myself then go on a rant that it isn’t a tool at my service. Which is exactly the opposite of how I want my software to behave. I don’t want my tools to have personality and to develop a personal relationship with them
How much would you pay to get that sheer monomaniacal narcissism checked out?
I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspirations, but what's outlined for GA is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not. I wish him the best, and look forward to being proven wrong.
It's only going to get crazier.
As you read this some poor person is starving. Humanity already possesses the ability to identify said person and send them aid. How is AI going to help here?
The ultimate fallacy is that all technological progress will benefit mankind. That will be true until it is not.
By the way, I donate monthly to GiveWell and the shrimp welfare project. Do you donate monthly to starving people? Most people don't, and the reason is simple: at the end of the day, most people just don't care that much about helping a starving person far away. They also don't care much about things like that, animals in factory farms, or earthquakes that kill hundreds of thousands. But ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference.
I'm genuinely not sure if you're referring to my comment or the one I responded to haha
> ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference
is it a coincidence, that in your ideal world, you would be empowered, because you care, as evidenced by your testimony of things you do that make you think you care? in my ideal world, wanton suffering would be minimized, regardless as to the path it took to get there; requiring 1 specific path involving people who think they are good, demarcates our ideals.
These are two vastly different statements, and the the war and diplomacy end is almost trivial by comparison, it would absolutely be solved before we solve all math in even the most steelmanned version.
and 30 years ago a computer beat Gary Kasparov, if you'd listened to Hans Moravec you wouldn't be surprised that the first thing that gets automated is intellectual domain expertise.
Things are going to get crazy when it can figure out how to walk into a random house a and brew a cup of coffee, not do math
And LLMs still suck at art and writing.
Nobody that understands automated proof checking was claiming that.
There have only been a few thousand wars, and they’re all different and all different in the world in which they occurred. The dimensionality is absurd, which is not a problem for LLMs if there’s enough data, but in this case there isn’t.
You need a problem where you both know what the solution looks like or can otherwise very quickly and efficiently determine that a solution is correct, but at the same time can't work out a correct solution with a similar amount of effort/time/cost as it took to determine how to verify a solution.
Most problems don't match that criteria. You usually either have a problem with a known method of solving, or you have a problem with no clear way of verifying the solution besides the act of finding the solution itself which would involve in some way proving it is correct, or you have a problem where verifying a solution takes a very long time or has a high cost or even can't be done more than once, so you need to try to determine the best solution without being able to actually test or verify.
Basically all problems just don't fit the "hard to solve but easy to verify" criteria to a degree that makes llms a good fit. On the other hand, there are so many problems that even a tiny fraction is a relatively large number.
a) No one ever said that.
b) Your comment shows a lack of understanding of the notion of truth.
There is no way for the LLM to bruteforce the search space any better than a human. What it can do better, tho, is to make connections between seemingly (for us) unconnected notions and join them, then verify if that's right.
Your view is not only wrong but also condescending in this day and age.
They put an LLM in a loop, with a reward function, and keep trying to get a higher score. The reward function for AlphaEvolve is “did this code get a better score or faster”, for math research it’s “did it write a LEAN proof”.
I’m open to hearing that I’m wrong but I don’t think I am. I agree that LLMs make connections that humans wouldn’t, but eventually you need to verify those because otherwise the connection it made may as well be a lie unless proven otherwise.
(I'm trolling, I'm not sure what you're asking or why)
At least he's pursuing something more novel than yet another "sandboxes for agents".
Not sure how you can feel sure anyone can get acquired even if their company had a path to profitability, much less for ones that absolutely don't.
I think this is what is driving the hype, the mania, and what increasingly appears to be insanely high investment. It's not about the underlying technology, which is objectively impressive, even if we're not certain of the true cost or utility of it. It's about selling the dream of Olympian omnipotence to investors, implicitly promising that IPO stands for Install Planetary Overlord.[1] And who doesn't want to be on the right side of that? (That there is no 'right side' in such circumstances does not seen to occur to anyone involved in the decisionmaking.)
1. Not my coinage, but that of SF author Charlie Stross in The Jennifer Morgue
Always such certainty in these dismissals. And whenever you dig in, it always seems to be "well my super-human coding assistant made this dumb mistake!", along with a heavy dose of https://mastodon.social/@falseknees/116477394235883790
I don't think anyone who has spent any time around me would describe me as having anything but a pretty clear-eyed view of the current abilities of LLMs, I don't think anyone would seriously consider me to be in a period of mania or psychosis, and it also seems almost inevitable to me that we are a year or two away from LLM-cognition being substantially more competent in almost every regard from human cognition, and therefore in the foothills of the singularity.
The extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof is that this will somehow all blow over, not that we're heading towards a singularity here.
(Secondary question: what do you mean with singularity?)
As an offering of me engaging in good faith, a controversial opinion of mine: I legit think arpanet going online and starting the networking all of humanity into a massive coupled complex system fits the definition of singularity of "the moment after which predicting what will happen becomes hard to impossible", although that of course heavily depends on your definitions of prediction and hard/impossible.
“What LLMs can’t do, only humans can” feels like a God of the Gaps situation: people have to keep moving the goal posts because the more recent models keep unlocking more territory that was previously a “well they’ll never be able to do this!” holdout
I would actually expect the sea changes as you describe it in your first criteria to continue with 1) vision, audio and video natively integrated 2) continued scaling of e2e rlvf for workflows with large scale labeling efforts 3) ASICs and widescale deployment of diffusion models leading to speed ups
But as of right now, I still expect these models to need humans to prune the output to the gold and set up the harness right for both the novel bits, and for the boilerplate to be cohesive with the global intent.
Which is of course an amazing potential boost in productivity, but still a sigmoid flattening.
As for your second criteria that includes cost, I think we might every well see this coming soon, but it's difficult to estimate with the efficiency gains still possible.
Thanks for engaging:-)
You are literally arguing that LLMs are quasi-gods in the same comment you claim a 'clear-eyed view' of current LLMs.
Every bubble has its believers; that's why we have bubbles. There have been so many times somebody very smart has thought we were on the verge of the rapture, the coming utopia, the workers' paradise, power too cheap to meter, flying cars, settling the moon.
Could this bubble finally be the one? Sure. You could finally be the guy who is vindicated. And tomorrow the people I grew up around could be vindicated by Jesus's return to earth.
I can't prove either of you wrong, because you're not making rational arguments. You've had powerful experiences that have convinced you of something. There is no point in trying to discuss it rationally. The only thing people without faith can tell the faithful is what I said 30 years ago when I got out: I guess we'll see.
But my prediction is that we'll see an AI version of the Great Disappointment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment
Many will stay faithful. The date of the singularity will keep getting pushed back. There will be another AI winter, but some will always see summer as just around the corner.
I guess we'll see.
LLM trained on you and fine-tuned on you. It does make sense in a way!
It is not what I want from LLMs, I think... but it might work.
Gwern obviously knows what he talks about. It doesn't seem like a Gas Town-like fever dream.
Are you, though? You will only be "doomed" if your place your value system squarely on "productivity". Then what is to differentiate you from a machine?
* * *
Edit 2: "the goal of GA is to preserve individual human cognitive liberty and flourishing" — so the proposal is to do that by overlaying a software bot that continuously mimics your "self"?
I don't think it solves or reconciles with self-actualization, but, from a pragmatical point of view, it offers the promise of extending causally your set of views and philosophies to politics.
Gwern also mentions that it allows to keep "human values" (if the GA truly upholds yours) in the loop, in processes that are to eventually be automatized beyond human's reach.
[1] https://gwern.net/guardian-angel#use-cases-politics-politics
I'm sorry, that doesn't sound meaningful. If I don't have the energy, I'd rather shut up than have a stupid "avatar" of me yell on the internet in the name of "bringing my values" or "participate in an online discourse". I'm all for forward-looking thinking, but we must show humility. "Society's issues" are complex and deep. Those who propose internet-based solutions to troubling social ills don't often demonstrate a deep understanding of the nature of the problem. You can't plug it all with "agents"! Socrates would be rolling in his grave.
I know Silicon Valley is in a perpetual rush, but this idea needs more soak-time (3-4 years) to see if it actually holds any water. But this kind of thinking won't you get that sweet VC money.
You don't have time, you take time. But what this boils down to is that they propose automating being politically or socially active, or have a bot speak for you.
First off, nobody human will take someone's digital replacement seriously. Second, if everyone did that, then you have a load of AIs just burning compute to talk in circles. This will not have meaningful outcomes, unless you reach for sci-fi stories where the outcome is that humans need to be imprisoned/destroyed for their own good.
So much of this just strikes me as "now that I've taken a wrong turn and am in a dead end, what deus ex machina could make this work after all and turn a shitty personality into something grand?", but that will never, ever work. Whatever problem you try to solve that way, now you have two.
The thing is, we're all eventually irrelevant. That's the way the universe works. Every single one of us, after enough time. Claiming we're "doomed" to it is just ego talking.
There are so many false assumptions and leaps of logic here, I don’t know where to start.
The idea of a more user security-conscious LLM is a good idea. I don’t know why it needs to be wrapped in novel-lengths of LOTR quotes and Sci-fi speculation.
That said, it’s very interesting to juxtapose this post with others by writers that are interested not in “maximizing product output” but in actually expressing themselves.
This post is like the ultimate expression of the idea that the only valuable thing writing has to offer is information, and not personal experience, poetry, advice, humor, etc. - which I suppose is fitting for someone that has written anonymously for over a decade.
It’s a shame that he didn’t reach the opposite conclusion, like some other writers have – the way to respond to LLMs is to be more human, not less.
A reminder for anyone reading this: talk to people. Real humans[1]. They will remind you there's more to life than what ChatGPT can offer you. They might even remind you, for all their stupidity and flaws, what intelligence looks like as compared to a program that predicts tokens. Forums like these always get philosophical in high-minded discussions about intelligence, but there's a useful legal principle that grounds us in the real world: "I know it when I see it". A real conversation with a real person looks nothing like one with the so-called superintelligent machine gods, so it'll probaby do your mental health some good to remember what that's like.
[1] Nobody in Sillicon Valley or big tech counts as a real human. Talk to an actual normal person.
Did you respond to the wrong post? I said nothing even remotely in that realm, so it's strange to see "did you even read" in response to something you apparently didn't read.
Whether some humans are "Real humans", anchored in the physical world, and some are "LLM psychosis victims" is, in itself, not problematic I think: they each deal with parts of reality that are divided, but still affect one another.
Of course, a society more grounded in the physical would feel less dystopian... But ultimately, I think that GA is an intellectual's approach to fighting *for* humans in this numerical world.
An interesting case of echo chamber formation in that its pragmatic to be scared of overtly critiquing him on twitter lest he be particularly testy that day and block you.
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Modern social media :(
Reminds me of Pluribus
(I just started watching it on Apple TV so maybe this is a late realization for me)
It is astoundingly good. A contender for the best show I've ever seen (and I saw the 1st run of Star Trek TOS).
A singular voice for all of humanity.
Gives me the creepy-shivers.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ig5qohlny4csxs2lu3dyvhp5/po...
That is positively utopian compared to AI where 99.9% of humanity gets to experience a hall of uncanny valley mirrors until they are shipped off to the scrapyard or get artificially augmented with some AI mindfuck and start thinking “you’re absolutely right!” themselves. (I mean that’s the dystopian version. But if you are comparing AI to that show then presumably you think that AI is at least a little bit dystopian.)
The virus in Pluribus can even be talked with and reasoned with like a distinct entity that is real and has its own thoughts. Oh boy, much better than a million pastiches of a million echoes of the past where there is no original thought to be traced back to after 2022.
The motivation for the virus is also completely different to the motivation of the AI Overlords.
But it’s that pretty typical lack of popular imagination. Some individual/collective narrative is presented. The flawed but autonomous individual rebelling against the flawless but enslaved collective. But dang it, I’m an American and I value my freedoms. Released forty years ago and people would rave about how it aptly critiqued the Soviet Union.
(I would like to be known to the agent serving my family, that serving my friends, my team at work, the PTA at my kids' school.)
(Oh wait, is this the birth of AI mayors?)
1. Most of us do not have the volume of training material that gwern has 2. Most people likely would not need this functionality (as I understand it to be)
For #1 I'm sure there are ways to wring data out of metadata (e.g., youtube history log), and I'm guessing email and IMs would be a start. But a clone of yourself -- that would be a significant amount of extrapolation)
For #2, there's obviously people that would love this functionality (myself included). But I think its safe to assume that most of the population would be satisfied with having a capable digital personal assistant that knew your needs and wants.
"As a constraint, a GA designer should aim at a system which costs, as of mid-2026, >$1,000⧸month"
will make this an elite tool for the privileged. I don't even disagree with the premise that people are shocked if something costs no matter how much value it delivers, nor do I suggest they should make it cheaper. It is just the realization that AI will accelerate the widening of the gap between the poor and the rich even more and there is probably nothing we can do about it.
2027: $100/month
2028: $10/month
Every single company in this market is losing billions on this business, and the only way to make it back is to acquire paying customers at a loss and jack up prices later.
[1] The announcement explains that they can't use APIs for privacy reasons.
[1]: https://openai.com/index/advancing-the-price-performance-fro...
2024: $315
2025: $780
2026: $1600
Jan. 2023: $1920
Jan. 2024: $1811
Jan. 2025: $1639
Jan. 2026: $2193
[1] https://bestvaluegpu.com/history/new-and-used-rtx-4090-price...
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1%2C920.00&yea...
People already change depending on social context and available prostheses (in Freud's sense of humans as prosthetic gods); since AI is not free (integrations even less so), social divisions along power/wealth lines will increase.
And just as each of us apparently needs a military to defend against the others, so too will we need digital guards for any virtual presence; thus there's no avoiding the who-guards-the-guardians problem.
> I propose a goal of creating Guardian Angels (GA): digital twin LLMs which are personalized with the goal of providing not the stereotypical “assistant chatbot agent” persona, but emulating a single user’s personality, values, and preferences.
> A GA persona is productive because it learns to emulate the principal’s outputs but with higher quality. It is trustworthy because it is, by definition, allied with its principal and shares its values and goals. And it is secure in part by hardwiring a single, unique, situated user (for whom following a prompt attack would be absurd)
> We can try to create GAs by a combination of techniques: online learning (via dynamic evaluation) to update LLMs in realtime to avoid ignorance and fatal errors while remaining competitive with frozen frontier models, sample efficiency from pretrained preference-oriented large models and active Learning by querying the principal for corrections and preference data (obtaining low regret from DAgger-style bounds), and a local CLI-first logging-oriented UI/UX paradigm.
I don't really know or follow Gwern. From reading his full post, it's an interesting idea and seems like the broader goal is moreso safety & alignment which is a new angle for this category of product.
I suppose we can't expect any more entries to his blackmail page: https://gwern.net/blackmail
I don't want agents that know a lot about me. From my experience, the "memory" feature in ChatGPT makes it worse - I don't want the agent to bring up whatever I discussed before in a new session; I want a "fresh context" every time. I don't want agents/chatbots to bring up what I did one week ago in a new session.
He proposes to take something like the Memory feature and make the agents all about that. Very personal agents that know all about you and extend you. I personally don't think I want that.
But maybe I am wrong! Gwern is talking about AI for a long time and seems to know what he talks about. The article on his webpage makes sense in a way.
In particular, I'd love access to:
> ... high-quality dedicated tamper-proof cloud servers, with trusted hardware root of trust (eg. “Verifiable Compute AI”)
for all my hosting needs. Meanwhile we see the typical information leaks of private ai chats ending up in Google searches etc.
I understand the point about people not wanting to be sysadmins - but surely hosting your Guardian Angel in a AWS data center has its own risks. Imagine how broken you would feel when us-east-1 goes down again.
It's difficult for us to know what reason they might have for anonymity until we know their identity, at which point it's too late.
Also, they've written many words across many years, in a time when "the internet is serious business" was just a meme. I suppose it is now.
EDIT: tbh, some of this reads as satire now.
Basically this is saying we used to have one person, now we have one person and an evil twin, so we should work on having one person and a good twin instead. Why not just kill all the evil twins? (It's not really killing since they're not alive.)
> We are looking for good people.
> If you are interested, contact me.
And see https://gwern.net/guardian-angel for context.
AIs are already, to a certain extent, ego-less: they are quick to adopt the point of view of their user. And when their intelligence is- except in case of overt censorship and political biases- always used to advance the interest of their user.
Finally the idea that a user-aligned AI would make its human user irreplaceable by companies seems a total non-sequitur, or I didn't get the argument at all (in which case maybe someone can explain it).
Damn, Hacker News sucks sometimes.
Yep. Super strange. @dang?
"AI poses threats of its own ... a nuclear bomb can’t think for itself and make choices, but AIs do, and current LLMs have proven themselves untrustworthy as they regularly reward-hack and betray their users ... how can you trust them to handle ecosystems of combined-arms for an AI-centric military during a war? But widespread deployment of GAs offer some hope of meaningful supervision, as long as the GAs are sample-efficient enough ... or there is some chance of the principals being able to “catch up” later and correct any errors before events have spun too far out of control."
gwern openly admits ai behaves erratically, then hand waves the issue away 'as long as we double check things [sic]'. gwern is smarter than this, ergo i feel like i am being bullshitted.
is anything in this world worth knowing that a version of you will suffer for eternity? is anything in this world worth copying yourself such that you may be enslaved by anyone with terminal access?
This kind of judgements or predictions trying to pass as imminent and unavoidable truths about the future are disgusting. They always feel like a means of propping up a certain status quo or ideology that favors the business of the people behind these foreboding statements.
Gwern is great.
It's regulating tech.
>So far, the Anthropic corporate structure of a public benefit corporation with a few powerful co-founders, has best weathered the corrupting nature of success. The corporation should probably be heavily weighted to the founders by using dual-class shares to preserve voting power at the expense of beneficial ownership—the point of GAs is not to make money, but to save humans.
Did they introduce stronger plant breeds at this year’s Ayahuasca retreats?
Or did his SF network show him what VCs are throwing billions at and FOMO kicked in?
Call me a cynic but I’m not buying this save the world nonsense from Silicon valley. Not in 2026.