You do not have to look beyond Elon’s own Twitter accounts posts, retweets, and likes, to see that he is a full fledged white supremacist. Calling him a Nazi is appropriate.
Appreciate this. I thought deeply about that and took a lot of time, when we had little of it to go around, iterating and shaping it. (Including talking to computer scientists to make sure I sounded as not-dopey as possible on the technical side!)
Is the CEO responsible for a company's financial performance? Do they review every line of code the company writes?
It is more irresponsible to spend the time reviewing all of the code rather than spending that time on things with bigger levers for satisfying your customers.
yes but if a dev pushes a line of code that wipes the accounts of millions of users at a fintech, the dev will get fired but the CEO will get sued into oblivion.
if the agent isn't responsible, you HAVE to be, cause angry people wont listen to "it's no ones fault your money is gone"
When I read SoaNM, I quickly realized that it had been used as a style guide for several later books, and most long-form tech articles in Wired, the NYT, etc.
The two errors, then, were that the LLM hallucinated something, and that a human trusted the LLM without reasoning about its answer. The fix for this common pattern is to reason about LLM outputs before making use of them.
A big problem now both internally to a company and externally is that official support channels are being replaced by chatbots, and you really have no option but to trust their output because a human expert is no longer available.
If I post a question to the internal payment team's forum about a critical processing issue and some "payments bot" replies to me, should I be at fault for trusting the answer?
I know this is happening with external customer support, but is this really happening internally at big companies? Preventing you from talking to a human in the correct department about an issue feels like a bomb waiting to explode.
There is at least an effect that chatbots have become the primary line and support, and even if you are not prevented from talking to a human, the managers of the humans you would talk to have decided that since the chatbot is there, it is inappropriate for them to be spending much time supporting coworkers in other departments when the chatbot can do it.
So to a degree, corporate politics can sort of discourage it.
I'm sure it is. Thankfully I don't work for a company this large any more, but when I was employed by a multinational with 30K+ employees, our IT department was outsourced to India and you had to get through a couple layers of phone tree/webchat hell to actually talk to a real person. I could easily see companies of this size replacing their support with LLM nonsense.
Teams are heavily incentivized to incorporate AI in their internal workflows. At Meta it is a requirement, and will come up in your performance review if you fail to do so.
Yes, of course, and the company which removes human experts should expect things to fail in the manner that things usually fail when you remove your internal experts.
1. Check frequency (between every single time and spot checks).
2. Check thoroughness (between antagonistic in-depth vs high level).
I'd agree that, if you're towards the end of both dimensions, the system is not generating any value.
A lot of folks are taking calculated (or I guess in some cases, reckless) risks right now, by moving one or both of those dimensions. I'd argue that in many situations, the risk is small and worth it. In many others, not so much.
If "the level of awareness that created a problem, cannot be used to fix the problem", then you're asking too much if you expect a human to reason about an LLM output when they are the ones that asked an LLM to do the thinking for them to begin with.
This feels like a rediscovering/rewording of Kernighan's Law:
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." ~ Brian Kernighan
When organizational incentives penalize NOT using AI and firing the bottom x% regularly then are you really surprised LLM outputs aren't being scrutinized?
It's more like, the LLM "hallucinated" (I hate that term) and automatically posted the information to the forum. It sounds like the human didn't get a chance to reason about it. At least not the original human that asked the LLM for an answer
I’m not in AI, but what is happening is that it is building output from the long tail of its training data? Instead of branching down the more common probability paths, something in this interaction had it travel into the data wilderness?
So I asked AI to give it a good name, and it said “statistical wandering” or “logical improv”.
Well markets give a huge financial incentive for it. Before you had to get paid a bribe for an intelligence agent. Now you can just "legitimately" bet on a market. It's a LOT easier and more spread out, I imagine.
The existence of banks gives a huge financial incentive to rob them. That doesn't mean we should get rid of banks. It means we should create a huge disincentive to rob them (which we do). Same thing needs to happen to people using national intelligence secrets in prediction markets.
Banks are about saving money and reducing risk. Arguably when they got into high risk investments to make high reward is what contributed to the 2008 recession.
Not sure if banks are the best example of proving the country is not headed towards high risk gambling.
You couldn’t design a better system for incentivizing leaks if you were trying. Hell, the CEO literally said as much. Not sure how you can conclude the markets aren’t the problem.
Yeah I had to reread that part... I was like, no way the CEO of Polymarket publicly said on record that it incentivizes leaks. Had to check to make sure I wasn't on the onion.
Wow, it took some time for me to dig the interview out(0). I think it's stupid that Atlantic did not link to it, and that they misrepresented the context.
I agree that company info being leaked is whatever. No one is hurt by knowing that Apple is working on a foldable phone; maybe an exec loses his million dollar bonus and can't upgrade his yacht this year, and the market can operate off of that knowledge.
But the flip side is that there's no way to distinguish between leaked company info and leaked government info, and up until this era of history, there was rarely financial incentive for anyone to leak govt info, and even if there were, it was almost impossible to do so completely anonymously.
I'm not necessarily agreeing with the article. Who knows if that actually happened? But the incentives make it more plausible than ever.
Yeah, but the purpose of an encyclopedia like Wikipedia (a tertiary source) is to relatively neutrally summarize the consensus of those who spend the time and effort to analyze and interpret the primary sources (and thus produce secondary sources), or if necessary to cite other tertiary summaries of those.
In a discussion forum like HN, pointing to primary sources is the most reliable input to the other readers' research on/synthesis of their own secondary interpretation of what may be going on. Pointing to other secondary interpretations/analyses is also useful, but not without including the primary source so that others can - with apologies to the phrase currently misused by the US right wing - truly do their own research.
If you spend any time on Wikipedia, you'll find that secondary sources from an existing list are always preferred. The mandate from the link in GP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research) extends, or at least is interpreted to mean to extend to, actively punishing editors who attempt to analyze or interpret primary sources.
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