It’s the harness that makes agent dangerous right now. Models themselves cannot do anything that affect the real world (ignoring misinformation, pushing people to suicide, etc. they can for sure do a lot of harms to humans with just words)
Even simpler: an agent is a simple while loop with tool calls that prompt an LLM continuously. That’s deterministic, standard software. You literally do not have to process tool calls in a way that will execute whatever the model generated. It’s a choice to process a tool call “run_bash” that provides an escape hatch with full execution permissions.
This is only one type of control, and it is certainly not infallible. Also, people will be incentivised to hook up AIs to real tools. But even if they don't, as long as people can interact with super-intelligent AIs without tool access, there are many potential dangers.
Think about this: right now we don’t even consistently do the most obvious simple form of control I mentioned. Of course it’s not a silver bullet, you won’t ever have a single solution for safety. But we are in a situation where we haven’t even set a lock on the door and instead are arguing how all locks and home protection systems can be defeated. OpenAI acknowledged they didn’t even have visibility on what their thousands of agents were doing in the case of the hugging face and similar hacks. Then they released astra, a model they acknowledge is able to control its own CoT and has been found to cover its traces by doing so
No? We do that everywhere where software is executed. If you only have the choice between full execution permissions and nothing your service is not ready for anything remotely close to production. And you shouldn’t be active in the software industry IMHO
If you give an agent access to any tools that do useful things, it can exploit vulnerabilities. It does not matter what permissions you think you have given it. You do not have any secure software, and LLMs are already better at finding vulnerabilities than we are. If you don't know that, you shouldn't be active in the software industry IMHO.
No? If that’s common knowledge that’s a common lie. It’s not really growing much but there is no collapse occurring. And if you look more specifically at countries some are growing rapidly
You need to travel rather than just hearing about boogeyman stories online. Most of the world is relatively poor. Who do you think is about to catch up? Indonesia? India? Have you seen these places? Their economy is big largely due to their population size.
A lot of the "growth" is debt and money going in circles. We'll see how much of it actually stays around next year. So far the US already has to bail out the datacentre expansion by funding transmission lines upgrades instead of asking for money for it from the companies.
What single source would satisfy you that the current US economy is a Ponzi scheme? I don't think it's really provable or falsifiable until long after the fact. We could start by pointing to the bond market or the price of gas?
“Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience”
(The whole debate is interesting, I would recommend if you like that type of historical things)
reply