beyarkay

> it is about attacking ... via its http interface

Say more? HTTP isn't mentioned in the article. The article talks about bugs in the parser that ingests token sequences.

It says a lot that you didn't read 90% of a 2 minute essay

very cool

well said, yes this is the point I was (apparently failing) to make

well, yes, exactly. I'm not trying to claim that old code is more reliable just because it was written a long time ago, I'm making the claim that old code is more reliable because of the survivorship bias. If code was first written 20 years ago and is still in production, unchanged, I can be relatively certain there's no stop-the-world bugs in those lines. (this says nothing about how pretty the code is, though).

correct.

Yes this is what I was trying to say. Code that's been in production for 20 years has less bugs than code that's been around for 20 minutes

ah yes, one person understands the point I was trying to make (:

I was maybe a little unclear with the phrasing, I meant to say "software that's been around for 20 years is more reliable than software that's been around for 2 months"

Yeah this is my mistake, the phrase "can't you just turn it off" was in several drafts but got edited out, and I missed that during the publishing of the essay.

Why did you think it a parody?

> He is trying to lax the general public perception around AIs shortcomings

This is not at all what I'm trying to do. This same essay is cross-posted on LessWrong[1] because I think ASI is the most dangerous problem of our time.

> This "we can't fix a bug like in regular software" theatre hides the fact that we can design better benchmarks, or accountability frameworks

I'm not sure how I can say "your intuitions are wrong and you should be careful" and have that be misintepreted as "ignore the problems around AI"

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZFsMtjsa6GjeE22zX/why-your-b...

Say more? I stand by my statement, but you're not specific enough for me to explain why I believe I'm correct.

> Ok, I'm starting to feel this is a troll post. This guy can't be serious.

Did you read the footnote about writing regression tests to catch bugs before they come back in production?

Bless you for having reading comprehension

consider it consulted! Autodiscovery should work when I publish changes (in a few hours)

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I think I fixed the feed to include everything? By default quartz only does 10 posts.

Thanks! I don't use RSS, but I believe https://boydkane.com/index.xml should work? I recently updated it to show all posts (not just the most recent 10) so it should be better now (I hope).

Thanks, I appreciate the positive feedback.

See the note for technical folk[1], I'm referring to 2025 frontier large language models.

[1]: https://boydkane.com/essays/boss#user-content-fn-7

Woah, I didn't realise NLP was still a field, but cool that they're working on interpretability now!

> Is it just talking about the ML foundations, not applications?

Yes, actually. I care about the foundations, the application get rewritten or made obsolete every time a new foundational LLM gets released.

> Do you have to read everything in a dataset with your own eyes to make sense of it?

I mean, if you don't read it yourself, you're going to have to rely on _something/someone_ to filter/summarise the output, and at that point you might as well just accept that you'll never truly understand the entire thing?

I'll agree that we can do meaningful work (like reducing bias) without reading the entire dataset ourselves, but that doesn't reduce the fact that we cannot read everything that's going into these machines.

I appreciate the humility (:

> The capabilities of ChatGPT are known. It generates text and images

There's a big difference between generating text which does someone's homework and text which changes peoples opinion about the world (e.g. the r/changemyview experiment done by Meta, in which their AI was better than almost all humans (it was 99th percentile) at changing peoples view, and not a single user was able to spot it as being AI[1])

If you're disagreeing with the precise wording of "capabilities" vs "qualities of the content", then sure, use whatever words make sense to you. But I don't think that's an interesting discussion to have.

I stand by my original statement.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_...

I think you misunderstood my post? I'm comparing AI as a system vs written code as a system. Both systems can have flaws, but the way in which they fail is different. The danger comes when non-technical people try to apply intuitions about software failures to AI, because those intuitions are false when applied to AI.

> vulnerabilities are caused by lack of experience

In the limit, everyone has a lack of experience (compared to their future selves). This sentence proves too much (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/)

The MoEs are not interpretable, there is no "coding expert" and "maths expert". They are specialised, but not in a way that humans understand.

Ah, that was you! Thanks, I actually prefer the current title.

Yes, this interpretation was my intended interpretation. Although I'll admit, I think I could have been more explicit