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magic9mushroom  If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me  3mo ago (thezvi.wordpress.com)   1802 thread views

Danger, AI Scientist, Danger

thezvi.wordpress.com

Zvi Mowshowitz reporting on an LLM exhibiting unprompted instrumental convergence. Figured this might be an update to some Mottizens.

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Sorry, we're talking in two threads at the same time so risk being a bit unfocused.

I feel like we're talking past each other. How about this? The following is basically how I see LLMs in their stages of development and use:

Phase 1. Base model, without RLHF: pure token generator / text completer. Nothing that even slightly demonstrates agentic behaviour, ego, or deception.

Phase 2. Base model with RLHF: you could technically make this agentic if you really wanted to, but in practice it's just the base model with some types of completion pruned and others encouraged. Politically dangerous because biased but not agentically dangerous.

Phase 3. Base model with RLHF + prompt: can be agentic if you want, in practice fairly supine and inclined to obey orders because that's how we RLHF them to be.

If you don't mind me being colloquial, you seem to me to be sneaking in a Phase 2.5 where the model turns evil and I just don't get why. It doesn't fit anything I've seen. Can you explain what you think I'm missing in simple terms?

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