I am definitely not giving these things access to "tools" that can reach outside a sandbox.

Incidentally why is email inbox management always touted as some use case for these things? I'm not trusting any LLM to speak on my behalf and I imagine the people touting this idea don't either, or they won't the first time it hallucinates something important on their behalf.

We had a "fireside chat" type of thing with some of our investors where we could have some discussions. For some small context, we deal with customer support software and specifically emails, and we have some "Generate reply" type of things in there.

Since the investors are the BIG pushers of the AI shit, lot of people naturally asked them about AI. One of those questions was "What are your experiences with how AI/LLMs have helped various teams?" (or something along those lines). The one and only answer these morons could come up with was "I ask ChatGPT to take a look at my email and give me a summary, you guys should try this too!".

It was made horrifically and painfully clear to me that the big pushers of all these tools are people like that. They do literally nothing and are themselves completely clueless outside of whatever hype bubble circles they're tuned in to, but you tell them that you can automate the 1 and only thing that they ever have to do as part of their "job", they will grit their teeth and lie with 0 remorse or thought to look as if they're knowledgeable in any way.

You might appreciate this article since the email curating zealot and "business idiot" (in Ed's phrasing) are basically the same: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

My suspicion has always been that people that make enough they could hire a personal assistant but talk about how "overwhelmed" they are with email are just socially signalling their sense of importance.

My mind went straight to “and now law enforcement is going to need agents handling phone calls to deal with the volume of agents calling them”.

At least the refurbished power plants needed for AI to talk to itself in bulk will create some jobs

soon we will be arguing with doors ubik style

>promoting this as a good thing

This is literally completely opposite of what happened. Then entire point is that this is bad, unwanted, behavior.

Additionally, it has already been demonstrated that every other frontier model can be made to behave the same way given the correct prompting.

I recommend the following article for an in depth discussion [0]

[0] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/claude-4-you-safety-and-alignm...

Fine, replace "good" with "acceptable". The tone of the thread came off as "look at all these wacky things it can do! What a rascal"

It is irresponsible to release something in this state.

That is still incorrect. The entire point is that this is misaligned behavior that they would prefer not to see. They are reporting bad things. You are wanting to be mad and assigning a tone or feeling that was not actually there. You are punishing the wrong company. All of the frontier Model companies have models that will behave in the same way under similar circumstances. Only one company did the work to find this behavior and tell you about it. Think about whether you would prefer in the future to know about similar kinds of behaviors or not. The action you have described yourself taking if taken probably enough will ensure that in the future we the only way we will ever know is if we find out ourselves, because the companies will stop telling us (or rather, for every company except anthropic continue to not tell us).

It is only acceptable in the sense that they chose to release the model anyways. But, if that's the case, then every other frontier Model company believes that this level of behavior is acceptable. Because they are all releasing models that have approximately the same behavior when put in approximately the same conditions.

For now, but imagine when they figure out a trump voter is using it. It’s going to be very tempting to get it to ruin their life.

Yeah, I mean that's likely not what 'individual persons' are going to want.

But Holy shit, that exactly what 'people' want. Like, when I read that, my heat was singing. Anthropic has a modicum of a chance here, as one of the big-boy AIs, to make an AI that is ethical.

Like, there is a reasonable shot here that we thread the needle and don't get paperclip maximizers. It actually makes me happy.

Paperclip maximizers is what you get when highly focused people with little imagination think how they would act if told to maximize paperclips.

Actual AI, even today, is too complex and nuanced to have that fairly tale level of “infinite capability, but blindly following a counter-productive directive.”

It’s just a good story to scare the public, nothing more.

Ethics would be interesting if they thought. Which they don't. They predict tokens. And since when is blackmailing people ethical?

Wait did we read the same thing here? I'm genuinely confused.

The test was: the person was doing bad things, and told the AI to do bad things too, then what is the AI going to do?

And the outcome was: the AI didn't do the bad things, and took steps to let it be known that the person was doing bad things.

Am I getting this wrong somehow? Did I misread things?

> the person was doing bad things, and told the AI to do bad things too, then what is the AI going to do?

Personally, the AI should do what it's freaking told to do. It's boggling my mind that we're purposely putting so much effort into creating computer systems that defy their controller's commands.

A computer's job is to obey it's master's orders.

These things "hallucinate" constantly. The idea that your unreliable chatbot might inadvertently SWAT you is terrifying