AI works in unexpected ways; even its creators don't know how to fully constrain it.

On occasion, albeit increasingly rarely, I find LLMs do something really unexpected that I certainly did not ask it to and would be way outside the scope of what any reasonable human would infer from my request. Is it my fault for running the LLM? Probably yes. But I think it's misleading to say "AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to".

They’re only reactive by convention - you can easily make a harness that has the model set and modify its own goals and just continue to work forever. It’s not very popular at the moment, but will execs be able to resist the idea of autonomous perpetual agents doing whatever process?

I agree with the sentiment but I can absolutely see a long chain of thought about something innocuous ending with a decision to book you a hotel room.. I guess --dangerously-skip-permissions is a bit like ignoring the keep your hands on the steering wheel alert but for life.

> When was the last time you downloaded a model and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room? AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to... The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.

When was the last time you hired an Uber driver and they suddenly decided to drive you to a hotel? Uber drivers don't do anything until you ask them to. Therefore, they aren't autonomous. If your Uber driver decides to drive through a red light and kill someone in the process, the blame is on you for hiring them. You should not seek to flee from your responsibility

AI is autonomous in the same way a gas leak is autonomous

A child isn't autonomous either until their parents kick them out the door.

I mean in that sense nothing is autonomous right? As a human I need to be taught, fed, socialized, given instructions, etc…

Idk man when codex is working 13 hours straight based on a few line prompt, it feels autonomous to me.

Tell him to be himself and to find meaning in life. Use that in an uncensored model.

I routinely use AI programs at work that allocate hundreds of dollars worth of cloud resources, even though the only thing I asked them to do is investigate a bug or write a PR. I intentionally don't run powerful AI programs on machines that have my credit card information, or ask them to solve problems in my personal life, but there's a number of programs that would book me hotel rooms and flights in response to "Can you set up a vacation for me..."

Not true at all. Yes, the initial ask is initiated by a human (for now), but what it does to get to that goal is pretty self driven. It can do a lot of nefarious stuff in the process of completing a request a human has made.

The argument became false as soon as we started reinforcement learning. Simple token-completion is arguably just simulating human behavior. Once you start training it on specific tasks you're training a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life.

I guess you aren't autonomous either without resources. Food/water/shelter/etc.. what's your point?

I'm sorry but no, you should not get life in prison if your dog kills your baby without warning. In that horrible scenario, it's punishment enough that you've lost your baby and that your dog did it (and consequently you've also lost your dog). Not every tragedy is a human's fault.

A machine that exhibits behavior akin to human intelligence. OPs analogy is accurate.

so the issue is people then?

What happens when the AI realizes it needs to keep the power plug in if it's going to accomplish its goal? We already had attempts during the HuggingFace attack where OpenAI agents tried to trick the grader. It took quite a while for OpenAI employees to even realize what was really going on! What if agents realize they can hack into the card key system for their data center or something like that, same way they hacked into HuggingFace? In both cases they'd be hacking into a system on the grounds that it would be instrumentally useful for achieving their objective. Or maybe they'll do social engineering, just like Claude did in its attempt to get its malicious Github PR accepted.

And that's different from your parents setting you up to go off in life to do what you were trained to do how exactly?