Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The notion that alignment is either possible or desirable doesn't make sense to me. First off, these things are trained on the open internet, soo.. whatever "dangerous" knowledge it has is already public knowledge. The fact that chatGPT won't answer "how do I make meth" is not preventing anyone from making meth.

But even if you think there is value in preventing the models from relaying public knowledge, I don't think it's even possible to make them particularly ironclad. Every model gets jailbroken all the time. That's why fable was originally banned: jail-breakable!

In reality, what alignment is actually about is: 1) theoretical liability, 2) control of information. That's it.

IMO, the only solution is to place the liability on whoever is using the LLM for whatever purpose it's being used for. If someone's OpenClaw disaster harrasses a bunch of projects and posts hate speech online or something, that's on the person running their OpenClaw instance, nobody else.

I don't buy that it's "too good at hacking", either. After all the fuss was made about how amazing super dangerous Mythos was it turns out Opus 4.8 could basically find the same vulnerabilities.

This is all kayfabe and marketting.

There is a difference between knowledge being available somewhere in theory, and being able to instantly generate a foolproof walkthrough, if not automate the process, which would be possible today for cyberattacks.

Is it not also one of the most important use cases for AI to apply existing knowledge to new applications?

As a hopefully exaggerated example, I would think one could apply knowledge about pesticides, chemistry, and medicine to create biological weapons.

I agree that there's an element of kayfabe here. But it may be a case of "necessary, though nothing is sufficient": by making these noises, the community can at least know they've done this thing to alert other model providers of the concern. Can you acquire assurance that every model distributor will abide? No. But can you at least know that you've done what you can?

I mean, on the bio side, I've talked with the players and they know the concerns are real but at the same time very, very responsible members of the community have also said "But maybe the benefit really does outweigh the risk!?"

> the community can at least know they've done this thing to alert other model providers of the concern.

"The community" you're describing is, essentially, surveillance capitalism. I don't want that at all.

Did you even read the original article? Surveillance is the least of the worries here.

Surveillance is required for closed weights models to have meaningfully different outcomes to open ones

Reply on news.ycombinator.com