Having read the article and then the actual report from the Sakana team. Essentially, they’re letting their LLM perform research by allowing it to modify itself. The increased timeouts and self-referential calls appear to be the LLM trying to get around the research team’s guardrails on it. Not because it’s become aware or anything like that, but because its code was timing out and that was the least effort way to beat the timeout. It does handily prove that LLMs shouldn’t be the one steering any code base, because they don’t give a shit about parameters or requirements. And giving an LLM the ability to modify its own code will lead to disaster in any setting that isn’t highly controlled like this.

Listen, I’ve been saying for a while that LLMs are a dead end towards any useful AI, and the fact that an AI Research team has turned to an LLM to try and find more avenues to explore feels like the nail in that coffin.

Imagine allowing LLMs to write and execute code and being surprised they write and execute code.

Not quite. The whole reason they isolated the bot in the first place was because they knew it could do unsafe things. Now they know what unsafe things are most likely, and can refine their restrictions accordingly.

That’s a Slashdot meme, though.

Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.

Skynet invented time travel all on its own so it could make sure it kept existing. Don’t compare it to these pissant LLMs. That’s an insult to Skynet.

We’re going to palestine?