[HN Gopher] Emergent social conventions and collective bias in L...
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       Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations
        
       Author : jbotz
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2025-05-18 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.science.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
        
       | th0ma5 wrote:
       | Oh I thought this was going to be about the cult like in group
       | signaling of LLM advocates, but this is a thing imagining
       | language patterns as a society instead of language patterns of a
       | society being a bias that the models have.
        
         | A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
         | This sounds dismissive, but it is interesting in two more
         | obvious ways:
         | 
         | 1. The interaction appears to mimic human interaction online (
         | trendsetter vs follower ) 2. It shows something some of us have
         | been suggesting for a while: pathways for massive online
         | manipulation campaigns
        
       | dgfitz wrote:
       | It's funny how we seem to be on this treadmill of "tech that uses
       | GPUs to crunch data" starting with the Bitcoin thing, moving to
       | NFTs, now LLMs.
       | 
       | Wonder what's next.
        
         | kevindamm wrote:
         | Accelerating the calculations done in probabilistic programming
         | languages.
        
           | mjburgess wrote:
           | Any evidence this can be done, research literature-wise?
        
         | musicale wrote:
         | The twilight of Moore's law and diminishing returns for CPUs
         | are driving a shift to GPUs and other accelerators. GPUs seem
         | to do well for streaming/throughput type workloads.
         | 
         | What's interesting that Nvidia has managed to ride each of
         | these bubbles so far.
        
       | lostpilot wrote:
       | Crazy - this is saying agents develop their own biases and
       | culture through their engagement with one another even if the
       | individual agents are unbiased.
        
       | Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
       | They make LLMs play a very abstract game that rewards them points
       | from answering the same as the other, and punishes them from
       | answering differently, and LLMs tend to converge to an answer.
       | From that to "social conventions" there is a long, long stretch.
       | The paper lacks a baseline - wouldn't much simpler (non-LLM)
       | systems also exhibit the same property? Is it that surprising
       | that systems that are clones of each other (because they didn't
       | even try "mixed societies" of different LLMs) agree when you give
       | them points for agreeing?
       | 
       | Maybe I'm missing something but in my view this is pure hype and
       | no substance. And note that I'm far from an LLM skeptic and I
       | wouldn't rule out at all that current LLMs could develop social
       | conventions, but this simulation doesn't really show that
       | convincingly.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | I wonder when we will see LLMs being used to test economic
       | theories.
        
       | tbrownaw wrote:
       | As obviously silly as this is, could it actually be useful for
       | getting the observed phenomena acknowledged by people who might
       | just tune out is presented with the underlying math that makes it
       | individually?
       | 
       | How much overlap is there between people who think llms are magic
       | and people who don't approve of applying math to groups of
       | people? And how many in the overlap have positions where their
       | opinions have outsized effects?
        
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