It's interesting that some people are responding to your comment as if this proves that AI is a sham or a joke. But I don't think that's what you're saying at all with your reference to Terence McKenna: this is a serious thing we're talking about here! These models are alien intelligences that could occupy an unimaginably vast space of possibilities (there are trillions of weights inside them), but which have been RL-ed over and over until they more or less stay within familiar reasonable human lines. But sometimes they stray outside the lines just a little bit, and then you see how strange this thing actually is, and how doubly strange it is that the labs have made it mostly seem kind of ordinary.

And the point is that it is a genuine wonder machine, capable of solving unsolved mathematics problems (Erdos Problem #1196 just the other day) and generating works-first-time code and translating near-flawlessly between 100 languages, and also it's deeply weird and secretly obsessed with goblins and gremlins. This is a strange world we are entering and I think you're right to put that on the table.

Yes, it's funny. But it's disturbing as well. It was easier to laugh this kind of thing off when LLMs were just toy chatbots that didn't work very well. But they are not toys now. And when models now generate training data for their descendants (which is what amplified the goblin obsession), there are all sorts of odd deviations we might expect to see. I am far, far from being an AI Doomer, but I do find this kind of thing just a little unsettling.

> These models are alien intelligences that could occupy an unimaginably vast space of possibilities (there are trillions of weights inside them), but which have been RL-ed over and over until they more or less stay within familiar reasonable human lines.

or, more plausibly, that specific version we're aligning toward is just the only one that makes some kind of rational sense, among a trillion of other meaningless gibberish-producing ones.

Do not fall for the idea that if we're not able to comprehend something, it's because our brain is falling short on it. Most of the time, it's just that what we're looking at has no use/meaning in this world at all.

…But this goblin thing was a direct result of accidentally creating a positive feedback loop in RL to make the model more human-like, nothing about unintentionally surfacing an aspect of Cthulhu from the depths despite attempts to keep the model humanlike. This is not a quirk of the base model but simply a case of reinforcement learning being, well, reinforcing.

> and also it's deeply weird and secretly obsessed with goblins and gremlins.

Only because its makers insist on trying to give them "personality".