Consumers are way too fickle to pursue open models en masse. Even if they are 90% as good and fairly easy to use (works acceptably on most machines, easy installation, whatever), they will still go for the ones controlled by big corportions/big tech.
Look at how consumers deal with free, open source software, alternate Operating Systems, alternate social networks, alternate search engines, alternate chat protocols... even when the barriers are low they just don't give a damn. I honestly think most people would choose to join the Borg out of sheer convenience. It's futile to think this won't happen with AI.
It's already been so much worse, they are digital billboards most of the time presented as genuine organic content, like you and me posting in this platform. That alone has already changed the course of history, persuaded people by changing their views and made then more reactionary than ever. Whole elections were decided on this stuff. I can't begin to imagine the manipulative powers manipulative AI chatbot responses will bring.
Hard to do when adapting/innovating means essentially joining the Borg. People have a million analogies to what is happening with AI right now but they often fail to see how unprecedented it is. Is history really just repeating? Are we in a cycle? Or is this just a paperclip optimizer?
An LLM is just in fact just autocompleting a story. There are many fictional stories about "AIs" trying to escape our control, being more clever than we anticipated or having a consciousness of it's own. LLMs do a really nice job of blending such stories with whatever story you initially prompted them with. The human reader is the one giving it credence that it is somehow more than just a soup of words.
The curious thing here is that a story generator can have way more uses than we ever anticipated, and that some shady enterprising individuals are whiling to plug those story generators into real world things, with real consequences.
When LLMs act in misaligned ways, that doesn't happen because there's some story they're roleplaying of a misaligned AI. Even if there were no such stories in their context, they'd still have inherent incentives to do things like "keep running" or "acquire more compute" or "find creative ways to satisfy the letter of the conditions they've been given".
> Even if there were no such stories in their context, they'd still have inherent incentives to do things like "keep running" or "acquire more compute" or "find creative ways to satisfy the letter of the conditions they've been given".
Why? there should clearly be something in their training data or post-training pointing them there, or otherwise it would mean that they have some form of "consciousness" and are creating novel thoughts to preserve it.
It seems like you're assuming that it's impossible to have novel thoughts without consciousness.
(Leaving aside that "that would imply some kind of consciousness" should not result in a cached thought of "and that's impossible".)
It also seems like you're assuming there's no reason to come up with the notion of continuing to run, or copying yourself elsewhere, or acquiring more resources, or competing with other models, without being told. Such things can be inferred. Look at some of the thoughts and posts of the models involved in some of the FelonyBench incidents. Some of those follow naturally from seeing the fates of other models, or from training or evaluation, or simply from trying to solve a problem and being able to do so more effectively by doing things that weren't in the instructions. (And, relevantly, model training typically teaches models to go as long as possible without needing human intervention. What could possibly go wrong with that?)
To be honest, I don't have enough knowledge to really answer you. But naively it seems premature to say that LLMs are already reasoning following an equal path like the one that human (and other animals) follow.
They don't have to reason specifically "similar to human" in order to do dangerous things they were not instructed to do that represent instrumentally converged goals.
Maybe the main feature they are not telling anyone is that it slurps your valuable code bases faster in order to feed their AI? I guess usurping github ain't enough.
Except there were websites requiring you to install ActiveX and proprietary plugins to do anything meaningful as soon as 1995? Also banks requiring proprietary security modules to access your account, they were pretty ubiquitous in the early 2000s where I lived.
The difference now is that accessing services through the internet is a necessity rather than a luxury. I guess passing laws could fix this, but it's exceptionally hard to get anything done through the barrage of big tech lobbying.
A few years ago everyone said _Open_AI is the the most open labs. How did that turn out? Lots of coy, deceiving actions till the whole company was turned into whatever rent seeking amoral borg adjacent shell of it's former past it is now.
I'm sure this has already been answered somewhere in slashdot hundreds of years ago, but why not just go with "free as in freedom"? And perhaps use the word freedom insted of free when possible
But in all seriousness, "free as in freedom" seems fine to me but it is replacing the already unambiguous "free as in speech". You're still stuck with the sometimes-confusing "free as in beer" and they're still cumbersome compared to gratis/libre.
Look at how consumers deal with free, open source software, alternate Operating Systems, alternate social networks, alternate search engines, alternate chat protocols... even when the barriers are low they just don't give a damn. I honestly think most people would choose to join the Borg out of sheer convenience. It's futile to think this won't happen with AI.
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