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1. The grandparent commentator is describing strategic behavior of dangerous technologies. Game theory / mechanism design primitives.

2. If there is competition for resources among autonomous agents, the "strongest" agent wins (conceptually the most adaptive / evolutionarily fit).

3. Computer programs serve up webapps today, but they also run utility companies, dams, nuclear arsenals, factory production floors, automated car behaviors, and many other places. If an "agentic" AI has a single-minded goal that has death of all humans as a side effect, we at least want an off switch available.

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angoragoats an hour ago | parent [-]

1. What is “AGI” and why is it a “dangerous technology”?

2. Why would there be competition for resources, assuming there are enough resources for the “AGI” to run in the first place? This seems like a far-fetched hypothetical raised in service of further anthropomorphizing what is decidedly not a person or a mind.

3. LLMs do not have goals and are not minds.

Let’s stop attributing human-like qualities to statistical models.

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tomrod an hour ago | parent [-]

1. While a formal definition is still wanting, most grok that AGI means that tasks can be performed at least at a human level across a broad range of tasks. This includes good things along with bad things like hacking, mis-/disinformation, and more

2. One only needs to look at github going down due to agentic commits overload or data center buildout plans to see that scarcity for resources is present. An economy has no mind and is made up of the decisions of millions to billions of people and, now, agents attempting to perform on behalf of those people.

3. A bare transformer-based language model does not possess persistent goals in the ordinary agentic sense. But deployed agents can exhibit goal-directed behavior because the model is embedded in a harness that supplies an objective, context, tools, state, and an execution loop.

I've found that most regular users don't anthropomorphize LLMs in a strong sense ("AI boyfriend/girlfriend" aside), many in fact do expect agents to make human-like decisions -- which results in very unstable outcomes.

In short - goal-directed behavior does not require that the supporting system be a person/mind/conscious entity.

	▲	angoragoats an hour ago \| parent [-]
		1. This definition is so broad as to be practically useless. One could argue that LLMs of several years ago met these criteria, or that conversely we haven’t come close to meeting them. 2. I thought you were saying the resources that the LLM uses to run were constrained, so I’m sorry for the misunderstanding there. 3. Yes I understand that we use RL to tune post-training. The (huge) difference between this and a human mind is that the LLM can’t develop a dangerous “single-minded goal” on its own, at runtime; it must have been trained to do so. If someone has post-trained an LLM to do something that has an illegal action as its side effect, that person/company/whatever has committed a crime and should be prosecuted. The solution here is legal, not technical.