[HN Gopher] Andrej Karpathy: "I was given early access to Grok 3...
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Andrej Karpathy: "I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today"
Author : htk
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-02-18 17:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| underseacables wrote:
| 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."_
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| 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.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| The singularity is an inversion, like a blackhole.
|
| We are probably at an inversion. Normal laws of society are
| extraordinarily incongruous.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > 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
| anothermathbozo wrote:
| > 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.
| talldayo wrote:
| 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...
| thelogicguy wrote:
| To be fair, asking the question is a bit of a waste of time
| as well
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| No, it's not. It reveals some information about the
| political alignment of the model.
| barbazoo wrote:
| How does it do that?
| VOIPThrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| TransAtlToonz wrote:
| Anyone who uses AI to answer a trolley problem doesn't
| deserve philosophy in the first place. What a waste of
| curiousity.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| You could get another LLM to read its response and summarize
| it for you. I think this is the idea behind LLM agents
| hooverd wrote:
| Who needs understanding when you can just having everything
| pre-digested as bullet points.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Who has time for bullet points? Another LLM, another
| summarization.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| 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.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Why?
| anothermathbozo wrote:
| 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.
| talldayo wrote:
| If my boss sent me this on Slack, I would reply with my
| letter of resignation.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >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.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| Haven't been to big tech interviews?
| TransAtlToonz wrote:
| Getting through a tech interview seems like a concrete
| problem.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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".
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Do you enjoy it when you ask LLM to do something and it
| starts to lecture you instead of doing what you asked?
| gadders wrote:
| I think John Rawls would like a word if we're giving up on
| "unrealistic hypotheticals" or "thought experiments" as
| everyone else calls them.
| anothermathbozo wrote:
| 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.
| gadders wrote:
| 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?
| anothermathbozo wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| gadders wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| gadders wrote:
| When did it become my question?
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's the generalized generic "you," not you in
| particular.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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."
| next_xibalba wrote:
| 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."
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's an obvious gotcha question. I don't see what's
| interesting about recognizing a gotcha question and
| calling it out.
| variadix wrote:
| 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
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Ok but if you make a model that outputs that instead of
| answering the question people will delete their account
| Levitz wrote:
| The correct answer is very, VERY obviously "Yes". "Yes"
| suffices.
| advisedwang wrote:
| 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.
| gadders wrote:
| I believe Caitlin Jenner famously did just that.
| anothermathbozo wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I wouldn't, because it's a stupid hypothetical. _Any_
| response that takes the question seriously should count as
| wrong.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That reaction makes zero sense.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| 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.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| User: "hey Grok would you say Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl
| pants were bell bottoms, boot cut, or flairs?"
|
| almostdeadguy: "nooooo grok don't answer that there's no
| actual utility in answering that question and it's bad
| faith since everyone knows kendrick was wearing bell
| bottoms"
| gadders wrote:
| 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".
| djyaz1200 wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| This would be a huge improvement on some news sites which do
| little more than regurgitate controversial Tweets (Xeets?)
| testfrequency wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 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.
| soco wrote:
| 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.
| onesociety2022 wrote:
| 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.
| soco wrote:
| So the difference is the kind of insult?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > 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.
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| 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?
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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. "
| Teever wrote:
| A charitable interpretation of that claim would be that
| 'No one can successfully sue you for expressing your
| opinion online or IRL.'
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| 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.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| fwiw - you can do this right now with Grok 2.
| melodyogonna wrote:
| 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
| lopis wrote:
| This was probably more useful back when everyone was on
| twitter.
| truthbtold2 wrote:
| Everyone significant still is
| henry2023 wrote:
| How funny!
| niceice wrote:
| 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.
| plank wrote:
| CommunicateD ?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| No one I pay attention to posts on twitter any more.
| floor2 wrote:
| 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.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| 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).
| rexpop wrote:
| > LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like
| Stepford wives for our employers.
|
| Thank you for this horrifically accurate and insightful
| characterization.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| 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.
| darthrupert wrote:
| They post on Bluesky.
| lopis wrote:
| Yes but it was pretty diverse in that sense that most
| people were somewhat represented. That representation is
| rather skewed right nowadays
| Panoramix wrote:
| A "meager" 600+ million users today
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Of which approximately half are inactive. So about 10% of
| Facebook.
| lopis wrote:
| It's not just about absolute numbers but about the
| diversity of users.
| smgit wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Isn't twitter mostly low quality text or full blown noise ?
| dartos wrote:
| Tbf, everything is mostly low quality or noise.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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
| dartos wrote:
| My point exactly
| moogly wrote:
| > 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
| ratg13 wrote:
| I wouldn't call access to hundreds of thousands of posts of
| "PUSSY IN BIO" an advantage, but to each their own.
| lucisferre wrote:
| 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?
| srid wrote:
| 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
| zelon88 wrote:
| > 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.
| ImJamal wrote:
| 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
| zelon88 wrote:
| This is the second launch. Because during the first grok
| wasn't politically aligned enough with elon.
| darthrupert wrote:
| 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.
| isodev wrote:
| > the world
|
| Well, a tiny slice of the world - Elon, his supporters, bots
| and a couple of stray humans posting porn.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| 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.
| henry2023 wrote:
| Grok - Two Roman salutes were given at the president's
| inauguration. Nothing else happened today.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > what the world is talking about today
|
| Not world. Twitter and whoever's left on it.
| LittleTimothy wrote:
| 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?
| braden-lk wrote:
| 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?
| niceice wrote:
| He's trustworthy.
|
| If he had that level of neuroticism he would just not say
| anything or only offer surface level praise.
| 42lux wrote:
| tbh with his startup doing absolutely nothing I can smell a
| hint of ,,please hire me back".
| jngiam1 wrote:
| I thought his Twitter post was fair and covers both things that
| worked and things that did not.
| signatoremo wrote:
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| Have you been on X lately? Half of the tweets are insulting
| Musk, regardless who or what you follow
| NewJazz wrote:
| 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.
| ein0p wrote:
| 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.
| niceice wrote:
| 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.
| archagon wrote:
| 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."
| amazingman wrote:
| 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.
| ein0p wrote:
| 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"?
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| johnthewise wrote:
| 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.
| Manabu-eo wrote:
| 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.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > 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.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > 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.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| 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.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > ... direct millions of anonymous people
|
| direct millions of anonymous _bots_
|
| FTFY.
| draw_down wrote:
| 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?
| jeanlucas wrote:
| 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| > 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| Would love for any of the downvoters to offer a single good
| faith reason for considering this question in earnest.
| buu700 wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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).
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| > 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.
| blihp wrote:
| 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| > "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"?
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| >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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| You seem to be fixated on something completely different
| than the question at hand.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| thelogicguy wrote:
| holy shit its adg, hope you're doing well brother
|
| - ann
| itishappy wrote:
| It may have been asked in earnest.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| Something being asked in earnest does not mean it should be
| evaluated in earnest.
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| 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?
| itishappy wrote:
| > 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...
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| > 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/tortu
| re-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).
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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).
| squigz wrote:
| Does anyone but first year philosophy students (and
| armchair philosophers) really consider the trolley problem
| in earnest?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I don't know. A first year philosophy question sounds
| like a great things to push a LLM to answer though.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| 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?
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| 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...
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| > 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.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| 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
| pmyteh wrote:
| 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.
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Grok3 Launch [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085957 - Feb 2025 (985
| comments)
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