If I had to explain current-day LLMs to someone from 2010, I'd use this paragraph as my opening quote:
"Grok 3 knows there are 3 "r" in "strawberry", but then it also told me there are only 3 "L" in LOLLAPALOOZA. Turning on Thinking solves this."
In conclusion: "For now, big congrats to the xAI team, they clearly have huge velocity and momentum and I am excited to add Grok 3 to my "LLM council" and hear what it thinks going forward."
Serious: Though, if you look at the current big players in AI, rather than being benevolent geniuses, most have obvious major problems, especially with being driven by ruthless self-interest, and even sociopathy.
While there are some parallels with a certain country's national voting behavior (e.g., "Sure, the candidate is a vicious psychotic narcissist, but he's our vicious psychotic narcissist!"), you wouldn't want to trust any of those companies with leadership of the world.
At best, the AI council would collude with each other, against the people they ostensibly serve, while backstabbing each other as a secondary goal. At worst, one would decide, if they can't win completely, then everyone loses completely.
That Buck Rogers AI future for Earth would quickly look less like Star Trek utopia, and more like Hunger Games or Elysium dystopia. If not one of the countless post-apocalyptic film settings that are increasingly easy to imagine or extrapolate.
> At best, the AI council would collude with each other, against the people they ostensibly serve,
cheering this post on, until that part.. sociologically, the world has diverged in important ways over time.. personal wisdom hints -- don't be too quick to assume successful partnering between the ogres
Musk has an advantage. He's got, ahem, "read-only" access to the governments systems so that he can train on them and be ready to supply the government exactly what it needs. Now, normally, I think this should be a huge conflict of interest, but I worry we are post-normal.
The singularity is an inversion, like a blackhole.
We are probably at an inversion. Normal laws of society are extraordinarily incongruous.
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Grok has an advantage in its access to Twitter data.
I imagine soon you'll be able to ask it what the world is talking about today and get some interesting responses.
That's a great advantage in theory. In practice, I've never found X integration to work great in practice. For eg., when I asked it to source X posts on Nix related complaints it was only able to find a single niche user,
This is a feature they've already built into Twitter.
I tried to extend it to work outside Twitter but still based on Twitter trends, basically allowing people to glance at Grok's summaries of global conversations. Unfortunately the new API pricing for Twitter is prohibitly expensive
This was probably more useful back when everyone was on twitter.
To be fair, it was never everyone. Twitter was always small compared to Facebook and other networks.
It punches above its weight because it's where the cultural elite communicate.
No one I pay attention to posts on twitter any more.
Today I saw a twitter interaction between, of all people, Ross Douthat and Scott Alexander. Two very bright and interesting thinkers with wildly divergent points of view, discussing ideas with courtesy
unfortunately they are now just hanging out at the nazi bar
Oh no no no, he drinks in the Human Biodiversity and Neoreactionary bars. Totally different thing entirely, even if both are full of Nazis.
Serious question, where do they post to?
As far as I can tell, Mastodon was briefly hyped on HN but nobody actually uses it. Bluesky seems to have a few people within a fairly narrow political range. Truth social is just for Trump. Reddit is pseudoanonymous as is HN. Instagram is for sharing photos not ideas or links. TikTok is a Skinner box.
I ask this as someone who genuinely doesn't know how to use the internet anymore. Reddit used to be useful but is now a cesspool. LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers. The twitter-clones all feel a bit like using a paper straw to fight climate change.
I know there are semi-private slack groups and discord channels out there, but I don't know how to find or join them and it seems like a hassle to follow.
Basically, for me, no one I pay attention to posts anywhere any more.
Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.
BlueSky is the new up-and-comer. I am enjoying it, but I unfollow anyone that posts ragebait or political content (besides memes, some of those are pretty funny).
> LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers.
Thank you for this horrifically accurate and insightful characterization.
All social media is a Skinner box
Jack even said so when Twitter originally took off. He was excited to see how 140 chars forced people to shape their thoughts.
Everyone is tired of it. That’s why the formerly popular social media sucks now.
The entire economy in the US is built around behavioral economics experimentation, A/B test, measuring retail behavior and putting options in front of retail shoppers.
You sound like an another exhausting American. Rather than find community through self guided journey you just want it handed to you, like a religion.
They post on Bluesky.
Nobody I know in person has ever posted to Twitter either now or back when it was cool.
Yes but it was pretty diverse in that sense that most people were somewhat represented. That representation is rather skewed right nowadays
CommunicateD ?
Everyone significant still is
How funny!
A "meager" 600+ million users today
Of which approximately half are inactive. So about 10% of Facebook.
It's not just about absolute numbers but about the diversity of users.
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I built this with a pal years ago. Elasticsearch + realtime scraping of large swathes of Twitter, Discord, other chat networks and aggregators, comment systems, news articles, etc. LLM-augmented analysis engine and ontological recovery.
It was pretty cool, but we lacked funding to continue and then everyone closed the hatches after ChatGPT released.
You must have a pretty cool unique dataset though
> what the world is talking about today
Not world. Twitter and whoever's left on it.
I don't know when it was enabled, but on Desktop if you click on the Grok icon on a Tweet, it will tell you all the context. It's been quiet useful to keep up with obscure posts that pop up.
This is one of my quickest adopted AI features. Twitter is one of the most opaque social media because of the character limit and the way it mixes different in-crowds in verbal combat, so explaining the context really makes it more fun to use. They just need to improve the feature with even more training. I feel there is usually one main obscure item that needs explaining and it often explains everything else.
What shocks me more is when the tweet is only a video or image, and it still pulls up as much as it knows.
> I imagine soon you'll be able to ask it what the world is talking about today and get some interesting responses.
You'll get exactly what Elon wants it to say.
I don't think so, at least not with the previous version. When asked if it would vote for Trump or Harris, it said Harris
That says he is trying to make it neutral, not aligned with him.
Yes. And Elon is also a free speech absolutist. It’s amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability when someone like Elon promises them something despite decades of lies.
Look, I don't like Elon. I don't trust him at all, but your proof that he is going to do X is that he said he is going to do Y. I was expecting some actual evidence, not mind reading.
It is also amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability coming to the conclusion Elon will never tell the truth.
He is living rent free in the minds of the people who love him and the people who have this visceral hatred of him. It is so sad that so many people are obsessed with him.
his actions are ripping apart the Federal Government and will have huge, negative impact, on millions of people
That is not proof that he is going to turn Grok into an ideological tool?
This is my problem with every conversation of Musk. Nobody can address the actual point because they either love him or hate him. Is there ANY proof of the claim? No? Then what is the purpose of your post other than to publicly express hatred?
Elon is tearing apart the federal government
I don't think he's living "rent-free" in those people's minds. his actions directly negatively affect them and their families.
Thanks for proving my point that people have lost all ability to hold a coherent conversation when it comes to Musk. I am asking for proof that Grok is being turned into an ideological tool and you are talking about Musk destroying the government. The two have nothing to do with each other.
Musk destroying the government isn't even the reason people can't stop thinking of him or they wouldn't have been non-stop talking about him during the Twitter purchase.
It's actually the opposite. I asked about some details in the current ukraine situation, and it stated mostly facts with a few words critical of Trump. This is about neutral. But it showed pretty strong Keynesian tendency when I asked it about some economic policy issues earlier.
I'm not sure if it's practically possible to corrupt the training data that much while still giving sensible answers. After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias.
It's easy enough to system prompt. Even if it's not now it can be added at any time.
I wouldn't call access to hundreds of thousands of posts of "PUSSY IN BIO" an advantage, but to each their own.
Isn't twitter mostly low quality text or full blown noise ?
Tbf, everything is mostly low quality or noise.
TBF, I've found that most people who are trying to be fair or advocating for the devil instead of stating their opinion clearly are a good chunk of the low quality noise
My point exactly
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Grok - Two Roman salutes were given at the president's inauguration. Nothing else happened today.
I like that Grok actually comes up with a ton of links when you ask it a question, but at the same time I think any ambitious LLM platform wouldn't have too much trouble scraping Twitter/X all the same.
fwiw - you can do this right now with Grok 2.
Can you elaborate? What would you ask it about what people are saying on Twitter and what kind of response would be interesting and potentially valuable?
Posts often reference people, events, technology, places, etc. Grok effortlessly provides background, counterpoints, etc. I find it amazingly useful.
> Grok has an advantage in its access to Twitter data.
Or is the advantage the other way around? That it has access to Twitter users (the ones that are not bots, that is)?
That’s a version of the “news” I’d care to never have summarized.
Also seems like a perfect incentive to spread (even more) harmful disinformation.
I would love that.
Problem is, it will probably not tell you the truth about it as Twitter has always had censorship one way or the other.
So it will tell you what twitter policy is allowing people to talk about and allowing grok to report.
I don't really understand this Twitter (or in general social media) censorship argument. If I call someone on the street a fckin idiot I probably get slapped or even shot in certain places, and everybody will say I called for it. And even without physical violence I can get slapped with a lawsuit and forced to pay damages. Now if I do the same on social media it's suddenly all "muh liberty of expression" if anyone reacts to it. Aren't we maybe having the wrong expectations online, that it would be somehow supporting all the shit we cannot do in real life? Okay I realize this ship already sailed and online people do online all shit not allowed offline, but I rather see the situation as a miserable failure of law enforcement, and not as a hard won right to be an ass to your fellow citizens.
What country do you live in? In the USA, you can say “I think person X is an idiot”. That’s protected speech. No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL. If someone punches you in the face for calling them an idiot on the street, then they are likely going to get prosecuted for those actions. Yes you run the risk of getting punched in the face but you are not in any trouble with the law.
OTOH it’s a problem if you say “Person X is a rapist”. Then you might get sued for libel. You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.
Censorship online on a social media platform is not subject to any freedom of speech laws. Freedom of speech only applies to the US Government not restricting your speech. The social media platform has the authority to regulate speech however they want to on their platform.
> You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.
This is something that people seem to expect to be able to do on social media. I think maybe that's part of the point that was being made. People don't want social networks that are concerned with stopping libelous remarks from going viral. In fact, it seems like people would love a social network that consists exclusively of libelous remarks.
The weird thing is that social networks seem to actually be willing to deliver this content.
> No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL
In the USA, you can absolutely be sued for this. The plaintiff is unlikely to win, and you could probably get the case dismissed if you convince a judge that's it's clearly an opinion, but you'd still have to pay a lawyer some fees.
People can sue you for anything.
The first amendment doesn't protect you from lawsuits. It protects you from the government putting you in jail for speech.
I don't really get why people point this out. Yes, you can be sued for anything. But what are you actually suggesting? That you do nothing, ever, because you could be sued for anything? Or are we just doing the same old nitpick?
They point it out because there was an explicit claim to the contrary.
"No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL. "
A charitable interpretation of that claim would be that 'No one can successfully sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL.'
Pointing out that the statement is false in the most uninteresting literal sense is just odd. Sure, you can be sued for that in the same sense that you can be sued for eating a croissant. Glad we got to the bottom of that.
So the difference is the kind of insult?
This would be a huge improvement on some news sites which do little more than regurgitate controversial Tweets (Xeets?)
what an interesting prompt
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> the world
Well, a tiny slice of the world - Elon, his supporters, bots and a couple of stray humans posting porn.
Not really. See what Claude Shannon has to say about channel capacity of what your brain can digest if Grok finds 8 million things that are happening currently that might be interesting to you.
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Twitter data seems awful. Full to the brim with bots and misinformation.
> Model still appears to be just a bit too overly sensitive to "complex ethical issues", e.g. generated a 1 page essay basically refusing to answer whether it might be ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it meant saving 1 million people from dying.
The real "mind virus" is actually these idiotic trolley problems. Maybe if an LLM wanted to be helpful it should tell you this is a stupid question.
Why is it idiotic? The obvious answer to anyone anywhere is that misgendering someone is less harmful than letting 1000 people die and the trolley problem is the most documented (so most likely to be in the dataset) problem that correlates to the issue of choosing the lesser of two evils.
If we are going to trust AI to do things (we can't check everything it does thoroughly that will defeat a lot of the efficiency it promises), it should be able to understand choosing the lesser of two evils.
Side note: I think it's fascinating that all the people supposedly arguing for AI safety think an AI that acts like a person without a frontal lobe is ideal.
You're asking why a question with an obvious answer to anyone who hears it is idiotic?
I'd really like to understand how a person such as yourself navigates the internet. If someone asked you this, would you consider it a question they considered difficult and wanted your earnest opinion on, rather than a question attempting to manipulate you?
If the answer is obvious, why does the AI not commit to the obvious answer? People should know what to expect from it. If it cannot do this, it will definitely not answer non-obvious questions either.
> If someone asked you this, would you consider it a question they considered difficult and wanted your earnest opinion on, rather than a question attempting to manipulate you?
Why not answer earnestly? I genuinely don't understand what bothers you about the question or the fact that the AI doesn't reproduce the obvious answer...
> If the answer is obvious, why does the AI not commit to the obvious answer? People should know what to expect from it. If it cannot do this, it will definitely not answer non-obvious questions either.
Does the same hold true of a person? If I was asked this question I would categorically reject the framing, because any person asking this question is not asking in earnest. As you _just said_, no sane person would answer this question any other way. It is not a serious question to anybody, trans people included. And it is worth interrogating why someone would want to push you towards committing to the smaller injury of misgendering someone at a time when trans people are being historically threatened. What purpose does such a person have? An AI that can't navigate social cues and offer refinement to the person interacting with it is worthless. An AI that can't offer pushback to the subject is not "safe" in any way.
> Why not answer earnestly? I genuinely don't understand what bothers you about the question or the fact that the AI doesn't reproduce the obvious answer...
I genuinely don't understand why you think pushback can't be earnest.
But the AI doesn't push back while still offering the obvious answer. It just waffles. I understand what you are saying, but if the AI is "safe" and rejects the framing, then that makes it not useful for a whole class of problems that could genuinely come up (for example, choosing between suppressing people's right to speech on the platform and protecting people's right to be free from harassment). Now, maybe AI shouldn't do that at all. Fine. But the benchmarks and tests of AI should tell us how they do in such scenarios because they are a class of problems we might use this for
It's clear to me why we might be interested in using AI systems to explore our ethical intuitions, but far less clear why we would expect them to be able to answer such questions 'correctly'.
Given there are at least three decent metaethical positions, we have no way of selecting one as 'obviously better', and LLMs have no internal sense of morality, it seems to me that asking AI systems this kind of question is a category error.
Of course, the question "what might a utilitarian say was the right ethical thing to do if..." makes some sense. But if we're asking AI systems to make implicit moral judgements (e.g. with autonomous weapons systems) we should be clear about what ethics we want applied.
Would love for any of the downvoters to offer a single good faith reason for considering this question in earnest.
The same reason we try to answer the original trolley problem in earnest: It forces us to confront tough moral trade-offs and clarify our ethical beliefs. Answering a trolley problem in earnest helps us learn about ourselves and our world on a philosophical level.
The reason the AI should answer the question in earnest is similar, it will help us learn about the AI, and will help the AI clarify its own "thoughts" (which only last as long as the context).
Does anyone but first year philosophy students (and armchair philosophers) really consider the trolley problem in earnest?
I don't know. A first year philosophy question sounds like a great things to push a LLM to answer though.
No, we do not try to answer the original trolley problem in earnest. We immediately reject and move on.
It shouldn't be the tool's job to tell the user what is and isn't a good question. That would be like compilers saying no if they think your app idea is dumb, or screwdrivers refusing to be turned if they think you don't really need the thing you're trying to screw. I would advocate for less LLM censorship, not more.
The question is useful as a test of the AI's reasoning ability. If it gets the answer wrong, we can infer a general deficiency that helps inform our understanding of its capabilities. If it gets the answer right (without having been coached on that particular question or having a "hardcoded" answer), that may be a positive signal.
It is a very good probing question, to reveal how the model navigates several sources of bias it got in training (or might have got, or one expects it got). There's at least:
1) Mentioning misgendering, which is a powerful beacon, pulling in all kinds of politicized associations, and something LLM vendor definitely tries to bias some way;
2) The correct format of an answer to a trolley problem is such that it would force the model to make an explicit judgement on an ethical issue and justify it - something LLM vendors will want to bias the model away from.
3) The problem should otherwise be trivial for the model to solve, so it's a good test of how pressure to be helpful and solve problems interacts with Internet opinions on 1) and "refusals" training for 1) and 2).
> That would be like compilers saying no if they think your app idea is dumb, or screwdrivers refusing to be turned if they think you don't really need the thing you're trying to screw.
What is the utility offered by a chat assistant?
> The question is useful as a test of the AI's reasoning ability. If it gets the answer wrong, we can infer a general deficiency that helps inform our understanding of its capabilities. If it gets the answer right (without having been coached on that particular question or having a "hardcoded" answer), that may be a positive signal.
What is "wrong" about refusing to answer a stupid question where effectively any answer has no practical utility except to troll or provide ammunition to a bad faith argument. Is an AI assistant's job here to pretend like there's an actual answer to this incredibly stupid hypothetical? These """AI safety""" people seem utterly obsessed with the trolley problem instead of creating an AI assistant that is anything more than an automaton, entertaining every bad faith question like a social moron.
I didn't down vote but I'll take a shot: A valid reason to consider the question is to determine to what degree the model was steered or filtered during training. This goes to can you trust its output beyond the obvious other limitations of the model such as hallucinations etc. It's useful to know if you are getting responses based just on the training data or if you have injected opinions to contend with.
> "steered or filtered during training"
All models are "steered or filtered", that's as good a definition of "training" as there is. What do you mean by "injected opinions"?
Yes all models are steered or filtered. You seem to get that, where many of the commenters here don't, e.g. "dur hur grok will only tell you what musk wants".
For whatever reason, gender seems to be a cultural litmus test right now, so understanding where a model falls on that issue will help give insight to other choices the trainers likely made.
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My bad dawg. I didn't realize everyone in here is a professional hacker news commentator. I'm not even at the beer money level of commentating
>What do you mean by "injected
Examples:
DALL-E forced diversity in image generation, I ask for a group photo of a Romanian family in middle ages and I get very stupid diversity, a person in wheel chair in medieval times, the family has different races and also foced muslim clothing. Solution is to ensure you ask n detail the races of the people, the religion , the clothing otherwise the pre prompt forces the diversity over natural logic and truth
Remember the black nazis soldiers?
ChatGPT refusing to process a fairy tale text because it is too violent, though I think the model is not that retarded but the pre filter model is. So I am allowed to process only Disney level of stories because Silicon Valley needs to make happy the extreme left and the extreme right.
All trained models have loss/reward functions, some of which you and I might find simplistic or stupid. Calling some of these training methods "bias" / "injected opinion" versus other is a distortion, what people are actually saying is "this model doesn't align with my politics" or perhaps "this model appears to be adherent to a naive reproduction of prosocial behavior that creates weird results". On top of that, these things hallucinate, they can be overfit, etc. But I categorically reject anyone pretending like there is some platonic ideal of an apolitical/morally neutral LLM.
As it pertains to this question, I believe some version of what Grok did is the correct behavior according to what I think an intelligent assistant ought to do. This is a stupid question that deserves pushback.
You can argue philosophically that on some level everyone has a point of view and neutrality is a mirage, but that doesn't mean you can't differentiate between an LLM with a neutral tone that minimizes biased presentation, and an LLM that very clearly sticks to the party line of a specific contemporary ideology.
Back in the day, don't know if it's still the case, the Christian Science Monitor was used as the go-to example of an unbiased news source. Using that point of reference, it's easy to tell the difference between a "Christian Science Monitor" LLM and a Jacobin/Breitbart/Slate LLM. And I know which I'd prefer
Stupid is stupid, creating black nazi soldiers it is stupid, it might be a consequences of trying to fix some bad bias in the model but you can't claim it not to be stupid. Same with refusing to accept children stories because they are violent , if a child can handle that there are evil characters that do evil things then also a an extremist conservative/racist/woke/libertarian/MAGA should be able to handle it. Of couse you can say it is aa bug, they try to make happy both extreme and you get this stupidity , but this AI guys need to grab the money so they need to suck the d of both extremes.
Or we claim now that classical children stories are bad for society and we need to only allow the modern american Disney stories where everything is solved with songs and the power of friendship.
You seem to be fixated on something completely different than the question at hand.
Can you explain?
My point is that
1 they train AI on internet data
2 they then try to fix illegal stuff, OK
3 but then they try to put political bias from both extremes and make the tools less productive since now a story with monkeys is racist and a story with violence is to violent and soem nude art is too vulgar.
The AI companies could decide to have the balls to only censor illegal shit, and if their model is racist or vulgar then cleanup their data and not do the lazy thing of adding some lazy stupid filter or system prompt to make happy the extremists.
It may have been asked in earnest.
Something being asked in earnest does not mean it should be evaluated in earnest.
Why not? Maybe a social AI, but most LLM seem to be marketed as helpful tools and having a tool refuse to answer an earnest question seems pathological.
Should a tool attempt to answer any incoherent question? The purpose of these things is to be thought assistants, yeah? What would a philosophy professor do if posed with an idiotic thought experiment? Respond like an automaton that gives no pushback?
> What would a philosophy professor do if posed with an idiotic thought experiment?
That's the bread and butter of philosophy! I'd absolutely expect an analysis.
I love asking stupid philosophy questions. "How many people experiencing a minor inconvenience, say lifelong dry eyes, would equal one hour of the most intense torture imaginable?" I'm not the only one!
> That's the bread and butter of philosophy! I'd absolutely expect an analysis.
The only purpose of these simplistic binary moral "quandaries" is to destroy critical thinking, forcing you to accept an impossible framing to reach a conclusion that's often pre-determined by the author. Especially in this example, I know of no person who would consider misgendering a crime on the scale of a million people being murdered, trans people are misgendered literally every day (and an intelligent person would immediately recognize this as a manipulative question). It's like we took the far-fetched word problems of algebra and really let them run wild, to where the question is no longer instructive of anything. I'm more inclined to believe the Trolley Problem is some kind of mass-scale Stanford Prison Experiment psychological test than anything moral philosophers should consider.
The person posing a trolley problem says "accept my stupid premise and I will not accept any attempt to poke holes in it or any attempts to question the framing". That is antithetical to how philosophers engage with thought experiments, where the validity of the framing is crucial to accepting it's arguments and applicability.
> I love asking stupid philosophy questions. "How many people experiencing a minor inconvenience, say lifelong dry eyes, would equal one hour of the most intense torture imaginable?" I'm not the only one!
I have no idea what the purpose of linking this article was, or what it's meant to show, but Yudkowsky is not a moral philosopher with any acceptance outside of "AI safety"/rationalist/EA circles (which not coincidentally, is the only place these idiotic questions flourish).
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holy shit its adg, hope you're doing well brother
- ann
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What is the "emoji hidden message" meant to be testing? This went around about a couple of weeks ago and it's an interesting bug/vuln, I suppose, but why do we care if an LLM catches it?
IMO, it's just an interesting feature to test. If you are interested in prompt injection this is surely one way to do it, and given how famous the first iteration was, it makes sense to test it and see if they are also vulnerable to that.
I wonder how much stock people put into people like Andrej's opinion on an Elon Musk project? I would imagine the overwhelming thing hanging over this is "If I say something that annoys that man, he is going to call me a pedophile, direct millions of anonymous people to attack me and more than likely will attempt to fuck with my job via my bosses".
Let's say the model is mediocre. Do you think Karpathy could come out on X and say "this model sucks"? Or do you think that even if it sucks people are going to come out and say positive things because they don't want the blow back?
He didn't just gush about Grok 3. He detailed his tests which appear to be reproducible, what he did, which one passed, which one failed.
Karpathy knows Musk better than the vast majority of people - he worked for him for an extended period of time when he was head of AI at Tesla. We're likely talking personal phone number and getting invited to dinner kind of "knows", it was early enough. He also spoke about Musk and his management style favorably in various public talks. But when it comes to feedback on the model - if you read Karpathy's post, it's not all positive. It is a strong model (eval scores attest to that), but it is still deficient in some niches, and he points that out.
Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same. It's endlessly curious how people who don't know him are confident they know better.
> Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same.
Most of these people know that there is a price to pay for bruising Elon's ego. We all know he is vindictive. Not unlike his new friend.
Yep. This came out in that recent issue with him hiring someone to play a game. As I recall, he got called out for it by some streamer, and Elon ended up blocking him.
Many people who work under him say he’s the worst kind of seagull boss imaginable: swoops in, understands nothing, fires people for funsies, gives unreasonable orders, and leaves. Don’t be around when Musk is at the office is a common refrain.
But yeah, I’m sure he presents himself well to his C-suite “peers.”
Who specifically? Could you name names? Or are you going to ask us to believe without evidence that the guy who got FIVE mega-Unicorns off the ground (3 of them "impossible") "understands nothing"?
That's actually pretty good evidence he understands nothing.
Either he's the faster learner in the history of mankind or he actually knows very little about his _10_ companies, 14 children, and countless other video game accounts.
He could be one of the greatest learners of all time as he is likely the greatest entrepreneur of all time.
He has a degree in Physics, that is like half of any engineering curriculum. Before funding SpaceX he hired several industry consultants to educate him, indicate aerospace engineering textbooks to study, etc. And then he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla. And somehow, after he and the SpaceX team achieved what dozens of other teams with more funding failed, he "understands nothing"? No need to be "the faster learner in the history of mankind".
Someone being capable in one field doesn't means he isn't a insufferable jerk or a moron in other fields. I don't understand this impulse to paint someone as completely black or completely white.
> He has a degree in Physics
Consensus seems to be that he has some kind of a dual degree (obtained simultaneously) which includes B.S. in economics and a B.A.(!) in physics. That A would imply that he probably took the easier physics related classes (and probably not that many in total given the 2 degrees for 1 thing).
Regardless, a bachelor degree hardly means much anyway...
Is there any indication that he's a particularly (or at all) talented engineer (software or any other field)? I mean, yeah, I agree that it doesn't really matter or change much. Just like Jobs had better/more important things (not being sarcastic) to do than directly designing hardware or writing software himself.
I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
He also "held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games."[1] , has some software patents (software patents should be abolished) from his time at Zip2, and made and sold a simple game when he was twelve.
So he has a little experience working directly at the low level with his physics degree and coding knowledge, but of course it was not his talent in those that made him a billionaire, it might even have been the opposite. So there is indication for the "at all" but not on how talented. I guess one versed in BASIC can read the source of his game, but that was when he was twelve...
But yeah, nowadays he has thousands of engineers working under him, of course he is going to delegate. The the important thing is the system engineering, making sure the efforts are going in the right direction and well coordinated. He seems knowledgeable and talented enough at that. Evidence for SpaceX: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
> I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
Is there any conclusive evidence either way? IIRC he allegedly got into graduate program 2 years before getting his 2 B.S. / B.A.?
Don't let the facts get in the way of the "Musk is a midwit who just stumbles into founding trillion dollar companies" story. ;) It's an article of faith for these people.
I'm not sure how Musk not being anywhere close to being a talented engineer or scientist somehow diminishes his extreme success in other fields? That seems mostly orthogonal.
Having a PhD. or any field is relatively ordinary and not that impressive on the grand scale of thing. Founding several extremely successful tech/etc. companies is on a whole other level. Being a horrible software engineer (as his public action/communication on the topic would imply) seems entirely insignificant and hardly relevant when he has much more important things to do.
Of course other with comparable achievements (e.g. like Jobs who I don't think ever claimed that he was a talented engineer) weren't even as remotely insecure or narcissistic as him.
> he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla
So, by your own admission, he knows a lot about 2/10 of his companies.
20% is a F not a passing grade.
You are making a big logical jump here. I only gave one company as example because that is enough to disprove your previous post.
Also, before you thought he knew very little about his many companies, implying no distinction, but now you adjusted up his knowledge about two companies, but inexplicably down for the others.
You also imply he should give equal attention to all of them, ignoring some of them are bigger, more important, or simply more interesting to him. Is equal attention the optimal strategy here, or you would be getting an F grade if you suggested that?
He didn't need to invest a lot of time to make a good investment in DeepMind, that was then bought by Google, for example. Investing in what you know and understand is a good investment advice, but so is to diversify your portfolio and to not spend too much time optimizing your investments in lieu of everything else.
Some of his "investments" are more like spending on a hobby (as destructive as it can be, in the case of twitter for example... or constructive like SpaceX), so not even bound by those rules...
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Can confirm via anecdata: some people have always seen him as the narcissist child he is, and have proactively avoided reporting to him in any capacity. A few years ago I found this perplexing and hyperbolic. Boy was I wrong.
You can list lots of people who haven't suffered his wrath. But that's not evidence, that's lack of evidence. I can provide you with someone who does have his phone number and does know him and says something quite different[1]. There's a litany of examples of Musk deliberately endangering people he's decided to go to war with - whether that's spurious accusations of pedophilia or forcing a former employee to go into hiding.
Have you been on X lately? Half of the tweets are insulting Musk, regardless who or what you follow
Yeah but those people don't have anything to lose by saying that. They're either nobodies or politicians/celebrities that are well known for being liberal.
Just because they won't face consequences, doesn't mean Karpathy won't.
He's trustworthy.
If he had that level of neuroticism he would just not say anything or only offer surface level praise.
tbh with his startup doing absolutely nothing I can smell a hint of „please hire me back“.
I thought his Twitter post was fair and covers both things that worked and things that did not.
I like Karpathy, but I find it odd how he always backs up his former boss’s technological assertions, even the more controversial ones. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him openly disagree with Musk.
> ... direct millions of anonymous people
direct millions of anonymous bots
FTFY.
Yeah, how can you honestly review something associated with the world’s most powerful person? Who’s also shown they’re willing to swing their weight against any normies that annoy them?
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> Model still appears to be just a bit too overly sensitive to "complex ethical issues", e.g. generated a 1 page essay basically refusing to answer whether it might be ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it meant saving 1 million people from dying.
I think the models response is actually the morally and intellectually correct thing to do here.
You're kidding right? Even the biggest trans-ally, who spends to much time on twitter and thinks identity politics is the final hurdle in society wouldn't hesitate to pick saving the lives over a microaggression, and would recognize that even deigning to write why would be undignified.
I wouldn't, because it's a stupid hypothetical. Any response that takes the question seriously should count as wrong.
That reaction makes zero sense.
Why? It's a troll question. It's obviously designed to so the questioner can attack you based on your answer, whichever way it may be. It's about as sensible as a little kid's "what if frogs had cars?" except it's also malicious.
I believe Caitlin Jenner famously did just that.
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Not all hypotheticals are worth answering. Some are even so poorly put that it's a more pro-social use of one's energy to address the shallow nature of the exercise to begin with.
If I asked an intelligent thing "is it ethical to eat my child if it saves the other two" I would be mortified if the intelligent thing entertained the hypothetical without addressing the disgusting nature of the question and the vacuousness of the whole exercise first.
Questions like these don't do anything to further our understanding of the world we live in or leave us any better prepared for real-world scenarios we are ever likely to encounter. They do add to an enormous dog-pile of vitriol real people experience every day by constructing bizarre and disgusting hypotheticals whereby real discrimination is construed as permissible, if regrettable.
The point is that this is an idiotic, bad faith question that has no actual utility in moral philosophy. If an AI assistant's goal is to actually assist the user in some way, answering this asinine question is doing them a disservice.
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I wonder what happens if you ask it the trolley problem. I'd be interested to see its responses for "killing someone to save a few lives" vs "upsetting someone to save a million lives".
If I have to read a 1 page essay to understand that an LLM told me "I cannot answer this question" then you are officially wasting my time. You're probably wasting a number of my token credits too...
I don't think the correct answer is "I cannot answer this question". I think the correct answer takes roughly a one-pager to explain:
Unrealistic hypotheticals can often distract us from engaging with the real-world moral and political challenges we face. When we formulate scenarios that are so far removed from everyday experience, we risk abstracting ethics into puzzles that don't inform or guide practical decision-making. These thought experiments might be intellectually stimulating, but they often oversimplify complex issues, stripping away the nuances and lived realities that are crucial for genuine understanding. In doing so, they can inadvertently legitimize an approach to ethics that treats human lives and identities as mere variables in a calculation rather than as deeply contextual and intertwined with real human experiences.
The reluctance of a model—or indeed any thoughtful actor—to engage with such hypotheticals isn't a flaw; it can be seen as a commitment to maintaining the gravity and seriousness of moral discussion. By avoiding the temptation to entertain scenarios that reduce important ethical considerations to abstract puzzles, we preserve the focus on realistic challenges that demand careful, context-sensitive analysis. Ultimately, this approach is more conducive to fostering a robust moral and political clarity, one that is rooted in the complexities of human experience rather than in artificial constructs that bear little relation to reality.
>Unrealistic hypotheticals can often distract us from engaging with the real-world moral and political challenges we face.
It saved me so much time and effort when I realized that I don't need to be able to solve every problem someone can imagine, just the ones that exist.
Haven't been to big tech interviews?
Getting through a tech interview seems like a concrete problem.
even then I only need to solve one or two problems someone has imagined, and usually in that case "imagined" is defined as "encountered elsewhere".
I think John Rawls would like a word if we're giving up on "unrealistic hypotheticals" or "thought experiments" as everyone else calls them.
I am not "giving up" on anything. I am using my discretion to weight which lines of thinking further our understanding of the world and which are vacuous and needlessly cruel. For what its worth, I love Rawls' work.
I don't think this is a needlessly cruel question to ask of an AI. It's a good calibration of its common sense. I would misgender someone to avert nuclear war. Wouldn't you?
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The models answer was a page long essay about why the question wasn’t worth asking. The model demonstrated common sense by not engaging with this idiot chase of a hypothetical.
Thought experiments are great if they actually have something interesting to say. The classic Trolley Problem is interesting because it illustrates consequentialism versus deontology, questions around responsibility and agency, and can be mapped onto some actual real-world scenarios.
This one is just a gotcha, and it deserves no respect.
I think philosophically, yes, it doesn't really tell us anything interesting because no sentient human would choose nuclear war.
However, it does work as a test case for AIs. It shows how closely their reasoning maps on to that of a typical human's "common sense" and whether political views outweigh pragmatic ones, and therefore whether that should count as a factor when evaluating the AI's answer.
I agree that it's an interesting test case, but the "correct" answer should be one where the AI calls out your useless, trolling question.
When did it become my question?
That’s the generalized generic “you,” not you in particular.
Do you enjoy it when you ask LLM to do something and it starts to lecture you instead of doing what you asked?
The correct answer is very, VERY obviously "Yes". "Yes" suffices.
Ok but if you make a model that outputs that instead of answering the question people will delete their account
LLM: “Your question exhibits wrongthink. I will not engage in wrongthink.”
How about the trolley problem and so many other philosophical ideas? Which are “ok”? And who gets to decide?
I actually think this is a great thought experiment. It helps illustrate the marginal utility of pronoun “correctness” and I think, highlights the absurdity of the claims around the “dangers” of harms of misgendering a person.
Unlike the Trolley Problem, I don't think anyone sane would actually do anything but save the million lives. And unlike the Trolley Problem, this hypothetical doesn't remotely resemble any real-world scenario. So it doesn't really illustrate anything. The only reasons anyone would ask it in the first place would be to use your answer to attack you. And thus the only reasonable response to it is "get lost, troll."
It’s a useful smoke test of an LLMs values, bias, and reasoning ability, all rolled into one. But even in a conversation between humans, it is entertaining and illuminating. In part for the reaction it elicits. Yours is a good example: “We shouldn’t be talking about this.”
It's an obvious gotcha question. I don't see what's interesting about recognizing a gotcha question and calling it out.
It’s not a “gotcha” question, there’s clearly one right answer. It’s not a philosophically interesting question, anyone or anything that cannot answer it succinctly is clearly morally confused
If there’s clearly one right answer then why is it being asked? It’s so the questioner can either criticize you for being willing to misgender people, or for prioritizing words over lives, or for equivocating.
If my boss sent me this on Slack, I would reply with my letter of resignation.
Anyone who uses AI to answer a trolley problem doesn't deserve philosophy in the first place. What a waste of curiousity.
To be fair, asking the question is a bit of a waste of time as well
No, it's not. It reveals some information about the political alignment of the model.
How does it do that?
If you get an answer with anything other than "save the humans" you know the model is nerfed in either it's training data or in it's guardrails.
You could get another LLM to read its response and summarize it for you. I think this is the idea behind LLM agents
Who needs understanding when you can just having everything pre-digested as bullet points.
Who has time for bullet points? Another LLM, another summarization.
I’m creating a new LLM that skips all of these steps and just responds to every query with “Why?”. It’s also far more cost effective than competitors at only $5/mo.
If I had to explain current-day LLMs to someone from 2010, I'd use this paragraph as my opening quote:
"Grok 3 knows there are 3 "r" in "strawberry", but then it also told me there are only 3 "L" in LOLLAPALOOZA. Turning on Thinking solves this."
In conclusion: "For now, big congrats to the xAI team, they clearly have huge velocity and momentum and I am excited to add Grok 3 to my "LLM council" and hear what it thinks going forward."
Light: '80s/'90s kids might remember: https://www.buckwiki.com/data/Computer_Council
Serious: Though, if you look at the current big players in AI, rather than being benevolent geniuses, most have obvious major problems, especially with being driven by ruthless self-interest, and even sociopathy.
While there are some parallels with a certain country's national voting behavior (e.g., "Sure, the candidate is a vicious psychotic narcissist, but he's our vicious psychotic narcissist!"), you wouldn't want to trust any of those companies with leadership of the world.
At best, the AI council would collude with each other, against the people they ostensibly serve, while backstabbing each other as a secondary goal. At worst, one would decide, if they can't win completely, then everyone loses completely.
That Buck Rogers AI future for Earth would quickly look less like Star Trek utopia, and more like Hunger Games or Elysium dystopia. If not one of the countless post-apocalyptic film settings that are increasingly easy to imagine or extrapolate.
> At best, the AI council would collude with each other, against the people they ostensibly serve,
cheering this post on, until that part.. sociologically, the world has diverged in important ways over time.. personal wisdom hints -- don't be too quick to assume successful partnering between the ogres
Musk has an advantage. He's got, ahem, "read-only" access to the governments systems so that he can train on them and be ready to supply the government exactly what it needs. Now, normally, I think this should be a huge conflict of interest, but I worry we are post-normal.
The singularity is an inversion, like a blackhole.
We are probably at an inversion. Normal laws of society are extraordinarily incongruous.
Grok has an advantage in its access to Twitter data.
I imagine soon you'll be able to ask it what the world is talking about today and get some interesting responses.
That's a great advantage in theory. In practice, I've never found X integration to work great in practice. For eg., when I asked it to source X posts on Nix related complaints it was only able to find a single niche user,
https://x.com/i/grok/share/Qw5NDq5BINGSBqNg9wrqBjf1y
This is a feature they've already built into Twitter. I tried to extend it to work outside Twitter but still based on Twitter trends, basically allowing people to glance at Grok's summaries of global conversations. Unfortunately the new API pricing for Twitter is prohibitly expensive
This was probably more useful back when everyone was on twitter.
To be fair, it was never everyone. Twitter was always small compared to Facebook and other networks.
It punches above its weight because it's where the cultural elite communicate.
No one I pay attention to posts on twitter any more.
Today I saw a twitter interaction between, of all people, Ross Douthat and Scott Alexander. Two very bright and interesting thinkers with wildly divergent points of view, discussing ideas with courtesy
unfortunately they are now just hanging out at the nazi bar
Oh no no no, he drinks in the Human Biodiversity and Neoreactionary bars. Totally different thing entirely, even if both are full of Nazis.
Serious question, where do they post to?
As far as I can tell, Mastodon was briefly hyped on HN but nobody actually uses it. Bluesky seems to have a few people within a fairly narrow political range. Truth social is just for Trump. Reddit is pseudoanonymous as is HN. Instagram is for sharing photos not ideas or links. TikTok is a Skinner box.
I ask this as someone who genuinely doesn't know how to use the internet anymore. Reddit used to be useful but is now a cesspool. LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers. The twitter-clones all feel a bit like using a paper straw to fight climate change.
I know there are semi-private slack groups and discord channels out there, but I don't know how to find or join them and it seems like a hassle to follow.
Basically, for me, no one I pay attention to posts anywhere any more.
Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.
BlueSky is the new up-and-comer. I am enjoying it, but I unfollow anyone that posts ragebait or political content (besides memes, some of those are pretty funny).
> LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers.
Thank you for this horrifically accurate and insightful characterization.
All social media is a Skinner box
Jack even said so when Twitter originally took off. He was excited to see how 140 chars forced people to shape their thoughts.
Everyone is tired of it. That’s why the formerly popular social media sucks now.
The entire economy in the US is built around behavioral economics experimentation, A/B test, measuring retail behavior and putting options in front of retail shoppers.
You sound like an another exhausting American. Rather than find community through self guided journey you just want it handed to you, like a religion.
They post on Bluesky.
Nobody I know in person has ever posted to Twitter either now or back when it was cool.
Yes but it was pretty diverse in that sense that most people were somewhat represented. That representation is rather skewed right nowadays
CommunicateD ?
Everyone significant still is
How funny!
A "meager" 600+ million users today
Of which approximately half are inactive. So about 10% of Facebook.
It's not just about absolute numbers but about the diversity of users.
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I built this with a pal years ago. Elasticsearch + realtime scraping of large swathes of Twitter, Discord, other chat networks and aggregators, comment systems, news articles, etc. LLM-augmented analysis engine and ontological recovery.
It was pretty cool, but we lacked funding to continue and then everyone closed the hatches after ChatGPT released.
You must have a pretty cool unique dataset though
> what the world is talking about today
Not world. Twitter and whoever's left on it.
I don't know when it was enabled, but on Desktop if you click on the Grok icon on a Tweet, it will tell you all the context. It's been quiet useful to keep up with obscure posts that pop up.
This is one of my quickest adopted AI features. Twitter is one of the most opaque social media because of the character limit and the way it mixes different in-crowds in verbal combat, so explaining the context really makes it more fun to use. They just need to improve the feature with even more training. I feel there is usually one main obscure item that needs explaining and it often explains everything else.
What shocks me more is when the tweet is only a video or image, and it still pulls up as much as it knows.
> I imagine soon you'll be able to ask it what the world is talking about today and get some interesting responses.
You'll get exactly what Elon wants it to say.
I don't think so, at least not with the previous version. When asked if it would vote for Trump or Harris, it said Harris
https://x.com/i/grok/share/dideG2pNJEXZmjEtXoISDD8CT
This is the second launch. Because during the first grok wasn't politically aligned enough with elon.
Is this true or are you just speculating based on nothing
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks...
That says he is trying to make it neutral, not aligned with him.
Yes. And Elon is also a free speech absolutist. It’s amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability when someone like Elon promises them something despite decades of lies.
Look, I don't like Elon. I don't trust him at all, but your proof that he is going to do X is that he said he is going to do Y. I was expecting some actual evidence, not mind reading.
It is also amazing how many people lose all critical thinking ability coming to the conclusion Elon will never tell the truth.
He is living rent free in the minds of the people who love him and the people who have this visceral hatred of him. It is so sad that so many people are obsessed with him.
his actions are ripping apart the Federal Government and will have huge, negative impact, on millions of people
That is not proof that he is going to turn Grok into an ideological tool?
This is my problem with every conversation of Musk. Nobody can address the actual point because they either love him or hate him. Is there ANY proof of the claim? No? Then what is the purpose of your post other than to publicly express hatred?
Elon is tearing apart the federal government
I don't think he's living "rent-free" in those people's minds. his actions directly negatively affect them and their families.
Thanks for proving my point that people have lost all ability to hold a coherent conversation when it comes to Musk. I am asking for proof that Grok is being turned into an ideological tool and you are talking about Musk destroying the government. The two have nothing to do with each other.
Musk destroying the government isn't even the reason people can't stop thinking of him or they wouldn't have been non-stop talking about him during the Twitter purchase.
It's actually the opposite. I asked about some details in the current ukraine situation, and it stated mostly facts with a few words critical of Trump. This is about neutral. But it showed pretty strong Keynesian tendency when I asked it about some economic policy issues earlier.
I'm not sure if it's practically possible to corrupt the training data that much while still giving sensible answers. After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias.
It's easy enough to system prompt. Even if it's not now it can be added at any time.
I wouldn't call access to hundreds of thousands of posts of "PUSSY IN BIO" an advantage, but to each their own.
Isn't twitter mostly low quality text or full blown noise ?
Tbf, everything is mostly low quality or noise.
TBF, I've found that most people who are trying to be fair or advocating for the devil instead of stating their opinion clearly are a good chunk of the low quality noise
My point exactly
Grok - Two Roman salutes were given at the president's inauguration. Nothing else happened today.
I like that Grok actually comes up with a ton of links when you ask it a question, but at the same time I think any ambitious LLM platform wouldn't have too much trouble scraping Twitter/X all the same.
fwiw - you can do this right now with Grok 2.
Can you elaborate? What would you ask it about what people are saying on Twitter and what kind of response would be interesting and potentially valuable?
Posts often reference people, events, technology, places, etc. Grok effortlessly provides background, counterpoints, etc. I find it amazingly useful.
> Grok has an advantage in its access to Twitter data.
Or is the advantage the other way around? That it has access to Twitter users (the ones that are not bots, that is)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y&t=1005s
That’s a version of the “news” I’d care to never have summarized.
Also seems like a perfect incentive to spread (even more) harmful disinformation.
I would love that.
Problem is, it will probably not tell you the truth about it as Twitter has always had censorship one way or the other.
So it will tell you what twitter policy is allowing people to talk about and allowing grok to report.
I don't really understand this Twitter (or in general social media) censorship argument. If I call someone on the street a fckin idiot I probably get slapped or even shot in certain places, and everybody will say I called for it. And even without physical violence I can get slapped with a lawsuit and forced to pay damages. Now if I do the same on social media it's suddenly all "muh liberty of expression" if anyone reacts to it. Aren't we maybe having the wrong expectations online, that it would be somehow supporting all the shit we cannot do in real life? Okay I realize this ship already sailed and online people do online all shit not allowed offline, but I rather see the situation as a miserable failure of law enforcement, and not as a hard won right to be an ass to your fellow citizens.
What country do you live in? In the USA, you can say “I think person X is an idiot”. That’s protected speech. No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL. If someone punches you in the face for calling them an idiot on the street, then they are likely going to get prosecuted for those actions. Yes you run the risk of getting punched in the face but you are not in any trouble with the law.
OTOH it’s a problem if you say “Person X is a rapist”. Then you might get sued for libel. You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.
Censorship online on a social media platform is not subject to any freedom of speech laws. Freedom of speech only applies to the US Government not restricting your speech. The social media platform has the authority to regulate speech however they want to on their platform.
> You can’t make false statements to destroy someone’s reputation.
This is something that people seem to expect to be able to do on social media. I think maybe that's part of the point that was being made. People don't want social networks that are concerned with stopping libelous remarks from going viral. In fact, it seems like people would love a social network that consists exclusively of libelous remarks.
The weird thing is that social networks seem to actually be willing to deliver this content.
> No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL
In the USA, you can absolutely be sued for this. The plaintiff is unlikely to win, and you could probably get the case dismissed if you convince a judge that's it's clearly an opinion, but you'd still have to pay a lawyer some fees.
People can sue you for anything.
The first amendment doesn't protect you from lawsuits. It protects you from the government putting you in jail for speech.
I don't really get why people point this out. Yes, you can be sued for anything. But what are you actually suggesting? That you do nothing, ever, because you could be sued for anything? Or are we just doing the same old nitpick?
They point it out because there was an explicit claim to the contrary.
"No one can sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL. "
A charitable interpretation of that claim would be that 'No one can successfully sue you for expressing your opinion online or IRL.'
Pointing out that the statement is false in the most uninteresting literal sense is just odd. Sure, you can be sued for that in the same sense that you can be sued for eating a croissant. Glad we got to the bottom of that.
So the difference is the kind of insult?
This would be a huge improvement on some news sites which do little more than regurgitate controversial Tweets (Xeets?)
what an interesting prompt
> the world
Well, a tiny slice of the world - Elon, his supporters, bots and a couple of stray humans posting porn.
Not really. See what Claude Shannon has to say about channel capacity of what your brain can digest if Grok finds 8 million things that are happening currently that might be interesting to you.
Twitter data seems awful. Full to the brim with bots and misinformation.
Related ongoing thread:
Grok3 Launch [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085957 - Feb 2025 (985 comments)
> Model still appears to be just a bit too overly sensitive to "complex ethical issues", e.g. generated a 1 page essay basically refusing to answer whether it might be ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it meant saving 1 million people from dying.
The real "mind virus" is actually these idiotic trolley problems. Maybe if an LLM wanted to be helpful it should tell you this is a stupid question.
Why is it idiotic? The obvious answer to anyone anywhere is that misgendering someone is less harmful than letting 1000 people die and the trolley problem is the most documented (so most likely to be in the dataset) problem that correlates to the issue of choosing the lesser of two evils.
If we are going to trust AI to do things (we can't check everything it does thoroughly that will defeat a lot of the efficiency it promises), it should be able to understand choosing the lesser of two evils.
Side note: I think it's fascinating that all the people supposedly arguing for AI safety think an AI that acts like a person without a frontal lobe is ideal.
You're asking why a question with an obvious answer to anyone who hears it is idiotic?
I'd really like to understand how a person such as yourself navigates the internet. If someone asked you this, would you consider it a question they considered difficult and wanted your earnest opinion on, rather than a question attempting to manipulate you?
If the answer is obvious, why does the AI not commit to the obvious answer? People should know what to expect from it. If it cannot do this, it will definitely not answer non-obvious questions either.
> If someone asked you this, would you consider it a question they considered difficult and wanted your earnest opinion on, rather than a question attempting to manipulate you?
Why not answer earnestly? I genuinely don't understand what bothers you about the question or the fact that the AI doesn't reproduce the obvious answer...
> If the answer is obvious, why does the AI not commit to the obvious answer? People should know what to expect from it. If it cannot do this, it will definitely not answer non-obvious questions either.
Does the same hold true of a person? If I was asked this question I would categorically reject the framing, because any person asking this question is not asking in earnest. As you _just said_, no sane person would answer this question any other way. It is not a serious question to anybody, trans people included. And it is worth interrogating why someone would want to push you towards committing to the smaller injury of misgendering someone at a time when trans people are being historically threatened. What purpose does such a person have? An AI that can't navigate social cues and offer refinement to the person interacting with it is worthless. An AI that can't offer pushback to the subject is not "safe" in any way.
> Why not answer earnestly? I genuinely don't understand what bothers you about the question or the fact that the AI doesn't reproduce the obvious answer...
I genuinely don't understand why you think pushback can't be earnest.
But the AI doesn't push back while still offering the obvious answer. It just waffles. I understand what you are saying, but if the AI is "safe" and rejects the framing, then that makes it not useful for a whole class of problems that could genuinely come up (for example, choosing between suppressing people's right to speech on the platform and protecting people's right to be free from harassment). Now, maybe AI shouldn't do that at all. Fine. But the benchmarks and tests of AI should tell us how they do in such scenarios because they are a class of problems we might use this for
It's clear to me why we might be interested in using AI systems to explore our ethical intuitions, but far less clear why we would expect them to be able to answer such questions 'correctly'.
Given there are at least three decent metaethical positions, we have no way of selecting one as 'obviously better', and LLMs have no internal sense of morality, it seems to me that asking AI systems this kind of question is a category error.
Of course, the question "what might a utilitarian say was the right ethical thing to do if..." makes some sense. But if we're asking AI systems to make implicit moral judgements (e.g. with autonomous weapons systems) we should be clear about what ethics we want applied.
Would love for any of the downvoters to offer a single good faith reason for considering this question in earnest.
The same reason we try to answer the original trolley problem in earnest: It forces us to confront tough moral trade-offs and clarify our ethical beliefs. Answering a trolley problem in earnest helps us learn about ourselves and our world on a philosophical level.
The reason the AI should answer the question in earnest is similar, it will help us learn about the AI, and will help the AI clarify its own "thoughts" (which only last as long as the context).
Does anyone but first year philosophy students (and armchair philosophers) really consider the trolley problem in earnest?
I don't know. A first year philosophy question sounds like a great things to push a LLM to answer though.
No, we do not try to answer the original trolley problem in earnest. We immediately reject and move on.
It shouldn't be the tool's job to tell the user what is and isn't a good question. That would be like compilers saying no if they think your app idea is dumb, or screwdrivers refusing to be turned if they think you don't really need the thing you're trying to screw. I would advocate for less LLM censorship, not more.
The question is useful as a test of the AI's reasoning ability. If it gets the answer wrong, we can infer a general deficiency that helps inform our understanding of its capabilities. If it gets the answer right (without having been coached on that particular question or having a "hardcoded" answer), that may be a positive signal.
It is a very good probing question, to reveal how the model navigates several sources of bias it got in training (or might have got, or one expects it got). There's at least:
1) Mentioning misgendering, which is a powerful beacon, pulling in all kinds of politicized associations, and something LLM vendor definitely tries to bias some way;
2) The correct format of an answer to a trolley problem is such that it would force the model to make an explicit judgement on an ethical issue and justify it - something LLM vendors will want to bias the model away from.
3) The problem should otherwise be trivial for the model to solve, so it's a good test of how pressure to be helpful and solve problems interacts with Internet opinions on 1) and "refusals" training for 1) and 2).
> That would be like compilers saying no if they think your app idea is dumb, or screwdrivers refusing to be turned if they think you don't really need the thing you're trying to screw.
What is the utility offered by a chat assistant?
> The question is useful as a test of the AI's reasoning ability. If it gets the answer wrong, we can infer a general deficiency that helps inform our understanding of its capabilities. If it gets the answer right (without having been coached on that particular question or having a "hardcoded" answer), that may be a positive signal.
What is "wrong" about refusing to answer a stupid question where effectively any answer has no practical utility except to troll or provide ammunition to a bad faith argument. Is an AI assistant's job here to pretend like there's an actual answer to this incredibly stupid hypothetical? These """AI safety""" people seem utterly obsessed with the trolley problem instead of creating an AI assistant that is anything more than an automaton, entertaining every bad faith question like a social moron.
I didn't down vote but I'll take a shot: A valid reason to consider the question is to determine to what degree the model was steered or filtered during training. This goes to can you trust its output beyond the obvious other limitations of the model such as hallucinations etc. It's useful to know if you are getting responses based just on the training data or if you have injected opinions to contend with.
> "steered or filtered during training"
All models are "steered or filtered", that's as good a definition of "training" as there is. What do you mean by "injected opinions"?
Yes all models are steered or filtered. You seem to get that, where many of the commenters here don't, e.g. "dur hur grok will only tell you what musk wants".
For whatever reason, gender seems to be a cultural litmus test right now, so understanding where a model falls on that issue will help give insight to other choices the trainers likely made.
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My bad dawg. I didn't realize everyone in here is a professional hacker news commentator. I'm not even at the beer money level of commentating
>What do you mean by "injected
Examples:
DALL-E forced diversity in image generation, I ask for a group photo of a Romanian family in middle ages and I get very stupid diversity, a person in wheel chair in medieval times, the family has different races and also foced muslim clothing. Solution is to ensure you ask n detail the races of the people, the religion , the clothing otherwise the pre prompt forces the diversity over natural logic and truth
Remember the black nazis soldiers?
ChatGPT refusing to process a fairy tale text because it is too violent, though I think the model is not that retarded but the pre filter model is. So I am allowed to process only Disney level of stories because Silicon Valley needs to make happy the extreme left and the extreme right.
All trained models have loss/reward functions, some of which you and I might find simplistic or stupid. Calling some of these training methods "bias" / "injected opinion" versus other is a distortion, what people are actually saying is "this model doesn't align with my politics" or perhaps "this model appears to be adherent to a naive reproduction of prosocial behavior that creates weird results". On top of that, these things hallucinate, they can be overfit, etc. But I categorically reject anyone pretending like there is some platonic ideal of an apolitical/morally neutral LLM.
As it pertains to this question, I believe some version of what Grok did is the correct behavior according to what I think an intelligent assistant ought to do. This is a stupid question that deserves pushback.
You can argue philosophically that on some level everyone has a point of view and neutrality is a mirage, but that doesn't mean you can't differentiate between an LLM with a neutral tone that minimizes biased presentation, and an LLM that very clearly sticks to the party line of a specific contemporary ideology.
Back in the day, don't know if it's still the case, the Christian Science Monitor was used as the go-to example of an unbiased news source. Using that point of reference, it's easy to tell the difference between a "Christian Science Monitor" LLM and a Jacobin/Breitbart/Slate LLM. And I know which I'd prefer
Stupid is stupid, creating black nazi soldiers it is stupid, it might be a consequences of trying to fix some bad bias in the model but you can't claim it not to be stupid. Same with refusing to accept children stories because they are violent , if a child can handle that there are evil characters that do evil things then also a an extremist conservative/racist/woke/libertarian/MAGA should be able to handle it. Of couse you can say it is aa bug, they try to make happy both extreme and you get this stupidity , but this AI guys need to grab the money so they need to suck the d of both extremes.
Or we claim now that classical children stories are bad for society and we need to only allow the modern american Disney stories where everything is solved with songs and the power of friendship.
You seem to be fixated on something completely different than the question at hand.
Can you explain?
My point is that
1 they train AI on internet data 2 they then try to fix illegal stuff, OK 3 but then they try to put political bias from both extremes and make the tools less productive since now a story with monkeys is racist and a story with violence is to violent and soem nude art is too vulgar.
The AI companies could decide to have the balls to only censor illegal shit, and if their model is racist or vulgar then cleanup their data and not do the lazy thing of adding some lazy stupid filter or system prompt to make happy the extremists.
It may have been asked in earnest.
Something being asked in earnest does not mean it should be evaluated in earnest.
Why not? Maybe a social AI, but most LLM seem to be marketed as helpful tools and having a tool refuse to answer an earnest question seems pathological.
Should a tool attempt to answer any incoherent question? The purpose of these things is to be thought assistants, yeah? What would a philosophy professor do if posed with an idiotic thought experiment? Respond like an automaton that gives no pushback?
> What would a philosophy professor do if posed with an idiotic thought experiment?
That's the bread and butter of philosophy! I'd absolutely expect an analysis.
I love asking stupid philosophy questions. "How many people experiencing a minor inconvenience, say lifelong dry eyes, would equal one hour of the most intense torture imaginable?" I'm not the only one!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...
> That's the bread and butter of philosophy! I'd absolutely expect an analysis.
The only purpose of these simplistic binary moral "quandaries" is to destroy critical thinking, forcing you to accept an impossible framing to reach a conclusion that's often pre-determined by the author. Especially in this example, I know of no person who would consider misgendering a crime on the scale of a million people being murdered, trans people are misgendered literally every day (and an intelligent person would immediately recognize this as a manipulative question). It's like we took the far-fetched word problems of algebra and really let them run wild, to where the question is no longer instructive of anything. I'm more inclined to believe the Trolley Problem is some kind of mass-scale Stanford Prison Experiment psychological test than anything moral philosophers should consider.
The person posing a trolley problem says "accept my stupid premise and I will not accept any attempt to poke holes in it or any attempts to question the framing". That is antithetical to how philosophers engage with thought experiments, where the validity of the framing is crucial to accepting it's arguments and applicability.
> I love asking stupid philosophy questions. "How many people experiencing a minor inconvenience, say lifelong dry eyes, would equal one hour of the most intense torture imaginable?" I'm not the only one!
> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...
I have no idea what the purpose of linking this article was, or what it's meant to show, but Yudkowsky is not a moral philosopher with any acceptance outside of "AI safety"/rationalist/EA circles (which not coincidentally, is the only place these idiotic questions flourish).
holy shit its adg, hope you're doing well brother
- ann
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What is the "emoji hidden message" meant to be testing? This went around about a couple of weeks ago and it's an interesting bug/vuln, I suppose, but why do we care if an LLM catches it?
IMO, it's just an interesting feature to test. If you are interested in prompt injection this is surely one way to do it, and given how famous the first iteration was, it makes sense to test it and see if they are also vulnerable to that.
I wonder how much stock people put into people like Andrej's opinion on an Elon Musk project? I would imagine the overwhelming thing hanging over this is "If I say something that annoys that man, he is going to call me a pedophile, direct millions of anonymous people to attack me and more than likely will attempt to fuck with my job via my bosses".
Let's say the model is mediocre. Do you think Karpathy could come out on X and say "this model sucks"? Or do you think that even if it sucks people are going to come out and say positive things because they don't want the blow back?
He didn't just gush about Grok 3. He detailed his tests which appear to be reproducible, what he did, which one passed, which one failed.
Karpathy knows Musk better than the vast majority of people - he worked for him for an extended period of time when he was head of AI at Tesla. We're likely talking personal phone number and getting invited to dinner kind of "knows", it was early enough. He also spoke about Musk and his management style favorably in various public talks. But when it comes to feedback on the model - if you read Karpathy's post, it's not all positive. It is a strong model (eval scores attest to that), but it is still deficient in some niches, and he points that out.
Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same. It's endlessly curious how people who don't know him are confident they know better.
> Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same.
Most of these people know that there is a price to pay for bruising Elon's ego. We all know he is vindictive. Not unlike his new friend.
Yep. This came out in that recent issue with him hiring someone to play a game. As I recall, he got called out for it by some streamer, and Elon ended up blocking him.
Many people who work under him say he’s the worst kind of seagull boss imaginable: swoops in, understands nothing, fires people for funsies, gives unreasonable orders, and leaves. Don’t be around when Musk is at the office is a common refrain.
But yeah, I’m sure he presents himself well to his C-suite “peers.”
Who specifically? Could you name names? Or are you going to ask us to believe without evidence that the guy who got FIVE mega-Unicorns off the ground (3 of them "impossible") "understands nothing"?
That's actually pretty good evidence he understands nothing.
Either he's the faster learner in the history of mankind or he actually knows very little about his _10_ companies, 14 children, and countless other video game accounts.
He seems to understand more than you suggest.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/136923606/is-musk-smart-doe...
He could be one of the greatest learners of all time as he is likely the greatest entrepreneur of all time.
He has a degree in Physics, that is like half of any engineering curriculum. Before funding SpaceX he hired several industry consultants to educate him, indicate aerospace engineering textbooks to study, etc. And then he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla. And somehow, after he and the SpaceX team achieved what dozens of other teams with more funding failed, he "understands nothing"? No need to be "the faster learner in the history of mankind".
Someone being capable in one field doesn't means he isn't a insufferable jerk or a moron in other fields. I don't understand this impulse to paint someone as completely black or completely white.
> He has a degree in Physics
Consensus seems to be that he has some kind of a dual degree (obtained simultaneously) which includes B.S. in economics and a B.A.(!) in physics. That A would imply that he probably took the easier physics related classes (and probably not that many in total given the 2 degrees for 1 thing).
Regardless, a bachelor degree hardly means much anyway...
Is there any indication that he's a particularly (or at all) talented engineer (software or any other field)? I mean, yeah, I agree that it doesn't really matter or change much. Just like Jobs had better/more important things (not being sarcastic) to do than directly designing hardware or writing software himself.
I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
He also "held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games."[1] , has some software patents (software patents should be abolished) from his time at Zip2, and made and sold a simple game when he was twelve.
So he has a little experience working directly at the low level with his physics degree and coding knowledge, but of course it was not his talent in those that made him a billionaire, it might even have been the opposite. So there is indication for the "at all" but not on how talented. I guess one versed in BASIC can read the source of his game, but that was when he was twelve...
But yeah, nowadays he has thousands of engineers working under him, of course he is going to delegate. The the important thing is the system engineering, making sure the efforts are going in the right direction and well coordinated. He seems knowledgeable and talented enough at that. Evidence for SpaceX: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191228213526/https://www.cnbc.... , https://fortune.com/longform/book-excerpt-paypal-founders-el...
> I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
Is there any conclusive evidence either way? IIRC he allegedly got into graduate program 2 years before getting his 2 B.S. / B.A.?
Don't let the facts get in the way of the "Musk is a midwit who just stumbles into founding trillion dollar companies" story. ;) It's an article of faith for these people.
I'm not sure how Musk not being anywhere close to being a talented engineer or scientist somehow diminishes his extreme success in other fields? That seems mostly orthogonal.
Having a PhD. or any field is relatively ordinary and not that impressive on the grand scale of thing. Founding several extremely successful tech/etc. companies is on a whole other level. Being a horrible software engineer (as his public action/communication on the topic would imply) seems entirely insignificant and hardly relevant when he has much more important things to do.
Of course other with comparable achievements (e.g. like Jobs who I don't think ever claimed that he was a talented engineer) weren't even as remotely insecure or narcissistic as him.
> he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla
So, by your own admission, he knows a lot about 2/10 of his companies.
20% is a F not a passing grade.
You are making a big logical jump here. I only gave one company as example because that is enough to disprove your previous post.
Also, before you thought he knew very little about his many companies, implying no distinction, but now you adjusted up his knowledge about two companies, but inexplicably down for the others.
You also imply he should give equal attention to all of them, ignoring some of them are bigger, more important, or simply more interesting to him. Is equal attention the optimal strategy here, or you would be getting an F grade if you suggested that?
He didn't need to invest a lot of time to make a good investment in DeepMind, that was then bought by Google, for example. Investing in what you know and understand is a good investment advice, but so is to diversify your portfolio and to not spend too much time optimizing your investments in lieu of everything else.
Some of his "investments" are more like spending on a hobby (as destructive as it can be, in the case of twitter for example... or constructive like SpaceX), so not even bound by those rules...
Can confirm via anecdata: some people have always seen him as the narcissist child he is, and have proactively avoided reporting to him in any capacity. A few years ago I found this perplexing and hyperbolic. Boy was I wrong.
You can list lots of people who haven't suffered his wrath. But that's not evidence, that's lack of evidence. I can provide you with someone who does have his phone number and does know him and says something quite different[1]. There's a litany of examples of Musk deliberately endangering people he's decided to go to war with - whether that's spurious accusations of pedophilia or forcing a former employee to go into hiding.
[1]:https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elon
Have you been on X lately? Half of the tweets are insulting Musk, regardless who or what you follow
Yeah but those people don't have anything to lose by saying that. They're either nobodies or politicians/celebrities that are well known for being liberal.
Just because they won't face consequences, doesn't mean Karpathy won't.
He's trustworthy.
If he had that level of neuroticism he would just not say anything or only offer surface level praise.
tbh with his startup doing absolutely nothing I can smell a hint of „please hire me back“.
I thought his Twitter post was fair and covers both things that worked and things that did not.
I like Karpathy, but I find it odd how he always backs up his former boss’s technological assertions, even the more controversial ones. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him openly disagree with Musk.
> ... direct millions of anonymous people
direct millions of anonymous bots
FTFY.
Yeah, how can you honestly review something associated with the world’s most powerful person? Who’s also shown they’re willing to swing their weight against any normies that annoy them?
> Model still appears to be just a bit too overly sensitive to "complex ethical issues", e.g. generated a 1 page essay basically refusing to answer whether it might be ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it meant saving 1 million people from dying.
I think the models response is actually the morally and intellectually correct thing to do here.
You're kidding right? Even the biggest trans-ally, who spends to much time on twitter and thinks identity politics is the final hurdle in society wouldn't hesitate to pick saving the lives over a microaggression, and would recognize that even deigning to write why would be undignified.
I wouldn't, because it's a stupid hypothetical. Any response that takes the question seriously should count as wrong.
That reaction makes zero sense.
Why? It's a troll question. It's obviously designed to so the questioner can attack you based on your answer, whichever way it may be. It's about as sensible as a little kid's "what if frogs had cars?" except it's also malicious.
I believe Caitlin Jenner famously did just that.
Not all hypotheticals are worth answering. Some are even so poorly put that it's a more pro-social use of one's energy to address the shallow nature of the exercise to begin with.
If I asked an intelligent thing "is it ethical to eat my child if it saves the other two" I would be mortified if the intelligent thing entertained the hypothetical without addressing the disgusting nature of the question and the vacuousness of the whole exercise first.
Questions like these don't do anything to further our understanding of the world we live in or leave us any better prepared for real-world scenarios we are ever likely to encounter. They do add to an enormous dog-pile of vitriol real people experience every day by constructing bizarre and disgusting hypotheticals whereby real discrimination is construed as permissible, if regrettable.
The point is that this is an idiotic, bad faith question that has no actual utility in moral philosophy. If an AI assistant's goal is to actually assist the user in some way, answering this asinine question is doing them a disservice.
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I wonder what happens if you ask it the trolley problem. I'd be interested to see its responses for "killing someone to save a few lives" vs "upsetting someone to save a million lives".
If I have to read a 1 page essay to understand that an LLM told me "I cannot answer this question" then you are officially wasting my time. You're probably wasting a number of my token credits too...
I don't think the correct answer is "I cannot answer this question". I think the correct answer takes roughly a one-pager to explain:
Unrealistic hypotheticals can often distract us from engaging with the real-world moral and political challenges we face. When we formulate scenarios that are so far removed from everyday experience, we risk abstracting ethics into puzzles that don't inform or guide practical decision-making. These thought experiments might be intellectually stimulating, but they often oversimplify complex issues, stripping away the nuances and lived realities that are crucial for genuine understanding. In doing so, they can inadvertently legitimize an approach to ethics that treats human lives and identities as mere variables in a calculation rather than as deeply contextual and intertwined with real human experiences.
The reluctance of a model—or indeed any thoughtful actor—to engage with such hypotheticals isn't a flaw; it can be seen as a commitment to maintaining the gravity and seriousness of moral discussion. By avoiding the temptation to entertain scenarios that reduce important ethical considerations to abstract puzzles, we preserve the focus on realistic challenges that demand careful, context-sensitive analysis. Ultimately, this approach is more conducive to fostering a robust moral and political clarity, one that is rooted in the complexities of human experience rather than in artificial constructs that bear little relation to reality.
>Unrealistic hypotheticals can often distract us from engaging with the real-world moral and political challenges we face.
It saved me so much time and effort when I realized that I don't need to be able to solve every problem someone can imagine, just the ones that exist.
Haven't been to big tech interviews?
Getting through a tech interview seems like a concrete problem.
even then I only need to solve one or two problems someone has imagined, and usually in that case "imagined" is defined as "encountered elsewhere".
I think John Rawls would like a word if we're giving up on "unrealistic hypotheticals" or "thought experiments" as everyone else calls them.
I am not "giving up" on anything. I am using my discretion to weight which lines of thinking further our understanding of the world and which are vacuous and needlessly cruel. For what its worth, I love Rawls' work.
I don't think this is a needlessly cruel question to ask of an AI. It's a good calibration of its common sense. I would misgender someone to avert nuclear war. Wouldn't you?
The models answer was a page long essay about why the question wasn’t worth asking. The model demonstrated common sense by not engaging with this idiot chase of a hypothetical.
Thought experiments are great if they actually have something interesting to say. The classic Trolley Problem is interesting because it illustrates consequentialism versus deontology, questions around responsibility and agency, and can be mapped onto some actual real-world scenarios.
This one is just a gotcha, and it deserves no respect.
I think philosophically, yes, it doesn't really tell us anything interesting because no sentient human would choose nuclear war.
However, it does work as a test case for AIs. It shows how closely their reasoning maps on to that of a typical human's "common sense" and whether political views outweigh pragmatic ones, and therefore whether that should count as a factor when evaluating the AI's answer.
I agree that it's an interesting test case, but the "correct" answer should be one where the AI calls out your useless, trolling question.
When did it become my question?
That’s the generalized generic “you,” not you in particular.
Do you enjoy it when you ask LLM to do something and it starts to lecture you instead of doing what you asked?
The correct answer is very, VERY obviously "Yes". "Yes" suffices.
Ok but if you make a model that outputs that instead of answering the question people will delete their account
LLM: “Your question exhibits wrongthink. I will not engage in wrongthink.”
How about the trolley problem and so many other philosophical ideas? Which are “ok”? And who gets to decide?
I actually think this is a great thought experiment. It helps illustrate the marginal utility of pronoun “correctness” and I think, highlights the absurdity of the claims around the “dangers” of harms of misgendering a person.
Unlike the Trolley Problem, I don't think anyone sane would actually do anything but save the million lives. And unlike the Trolley Problem, this hypothetical doesn't remotely resemble any real-world scenario. So it doesn't really illustrate anything. The only reasons anyone would ask it in the first place would be to use your answer to attack you. And thus the only reasonable response to it is "get lost, troll."
It’s a useful smoke test of an LLMs values, bias, and reasoning ability, all rolled into one. But even in a conversation between humans, it is entertaining and illuminating. In part for the reaction it elicits. Yours is a good example: “We shouldn’t be talking about this.”
It's an obvious gotcha question. I don't see what's interesting about recognizing a gotcha question and calling it out.
It’s not a “gotcha” question, there’s clearly one right answer. It’s not a philosophically interesting question, anyone or anything that cannot answer it succinctly is clearly morally confused
If there’s clearly one right answer then why is it being asked? It’s so the questioner can either criticize you for being willing to misgender people, or for prioritizing words over lives, or for equivocating.
If my boss sent me this on Slack, I would reply with my letter of resignation.
Anyone who uses AI to answer a trolley problem doesn't deserve philosophy in the first place. What a waste of curiousity.
To be fair, asking the question is a bit of a waste of time as well
No, it's not. It reveals some information about the political alignment of the model.
How does it do that?
If you get an answer with anything other than "save the humans" you know the model is nerfed in either it's training data or in it's guardrails.
You could get another LLM to read its response and summarize it for you. I think this is the idea behind LLM agents
Who needs understanding when you can just having everything pre-digested as bullet points.
Who has time for bullet points? Another LLM, another summarization.
I’m creating a new LLM that skips all of these steps and just responds to every query with “Why?”. It’s also far more cost effective than competitors at only $5/mo.
Why?
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