Seems pretty straightforward to me. If the customer set the agent in motion, the customer is no less responsible for the damage than someone that (as i think Cal Newport said) ties a weedwacker to a dog. It’s reckless.
If they were sold a product that claimed to be safe, they could in turn sue whoever sold it to them. Jeep’s insurance wouldn’t pay someone I crashed into because of defect in my jeep, but I could in turn sue Jeep for my legal trouble.
> Major U.S. banks detect unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts
Step 2 is instead of waiting to be caught, the instigators should issue a press release blaming cunning rogue agents as part of their research, call no felonies because they’re working for the greater good of eliminating a shitload of jobs, say the real problem is a lack of regulation. They could even return the money if it looks like they’re going to get sued, and collect some sweet, sweet reflexive investment money.
I’ll take either genuinely rural, or high-density urban over low-density urban/suburban any day of the week. (And have lived in each of the above for at least 5 years each.) I intellectually understand that it ticks a lot of people’s boxes for convenient, low-friction lifestyle, but viscerally, even nice suburbs with a little character just feel like a superficial, tepid, soulless simulacrum of an actual community to me. I’m clearly missing some connection or meaning in those places that other people are more attuned to.
It’s cool how you killed a crow because you didn’t feel like getting a shade and removing the toy that you gave them to play with. They were clearly at fault.
Even many people familiar with pocket computers use the iOS Mail client. I was an email user over a decade before Gmail existed, and I used mutt for most of those years. I happily use the iOS email client because of the OS integration, clean UI, well-designed interactions, and decent support for wherever my email happens to live that year. I think mostly it’s because I’ve dicked around with computers enough in my life, and I’ve no interest in doing so with my phone, too.
Not everybody did, and many of the ones that didn’t are still open because they were the ones focused on the long game. Even a small shop just needs one skilled person to retain that knowledge and it doesn’t take a business genius to see that you need to train that person. In the grand scheme of things, having the equivalent of a couple interns is a very minor expense. It was pure shortsightedness.
The American manufacturing industry is scrambling to transfer some of the industrial trade and process knowledge from the retiring remnants of pre-offshoring industrial America into the two generations of people that didn’t have apprenticeships, pensions, (often) union membership with good benefits, etc. Trade schools were very expensive for industrial trade skills that were seen as dead-end careers compared to white collar jobs or non-manufacturing trades, and almost none of the companies saw any reason to spend all that money training people into expensive skilled professionals when they had all the professionals they could possibly need for decades after the industry largely collapsed, here. Keeping the workforce viable was always someone else’s problem— the individuals, the governments, larger companies— until it was suddenly everyone’s problem. They spend decades myopically chasing quarterly results before they realized they were running towards a cliff.
My gut says the economics, e.g hardware/data center/resource constraints, are going make the economics of small specialized models more attractive. Without any evidence whatsoever, I also think that the big frontier companies will have to de-emphasize chatbots as huge models in favor of chatbots as huge products with a much much more granular mixture of experts approach, but with much smaller models. I’ve been saying for a while now that AI products have to hit the gas on prioritizing product design to reliably solve real people’s problems in predictable-enough ways, because the current approach is only really appealing to enthusiasts, developers, or optimistic managers, and with the kind of money they’re throwing around, that’s not going to work.
I’d guess it was a) an amalgam of a few good ideas that are pretty stupid together, or b) some hand-rolled techniques that got clobbered by a library imported for something else.
I have no idea if modern-day SV’s “tests pass… idfk, it’s a web app… LGTM I guess” coding ethos was the cause of this particular bug. However, it’s a great, relatively benign demonstration of why it has absolutely zero fucking place controlling extremely dangerous hardware shooting a human around a race track surrounded by people.
If your experience was actually worse than my astonishingly janky mobile experience, that would be pathetic. Pretty bad. It looked cool for a second, and then when I tried to zoom in to where I live, I was instantly too irritated to bother.
Everybody thinks that the people they disagree with are worse. And frankly, I’d eat my hat if this didn’t stem from a deliberately divisive social media campaign sprung by image generator services. The “Defending AI Art” subreddit was created 4 days before the “Artist Hate” subreddit when midjourney was still in public alpha. And as someone that graduated art school, as a career changer, into an industry whose entry-level workforce was immediately screwed by models that trained on my student portfolio without permission, credit, or compensation, I consider the people mangling intersectional privilege jargon to paint themselves as an oppressed minority because they can’t enter midjourney images into photography contests to be completely fucking ridiculous.
a) scale matters, b) we don’t think up justifications for actions that don’t violate our principles— we do it to absolve ourselves from doing it anyway.
I hadn’t considered the language similarities between some sects of AI boosters, particularly in the AI art realm, and incels. The persecution complex, pseudo social justice jargon, the extreme tribalism, and other greatest hits seemed very familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I don’t think many people are worried that there won’t be problems to solve. Many people are worried that people will be devalued in extremely consequential ways as they have been in the past. A lot of human misery lurks in the eddies caused by innovation and so many people in the software business have been so comparatively coddled compared to the rest of the workforce that they can’t viscerally understand the implications of that. The hubris inherent to the tech world prompts many to reject that fact out-of-hand. There will be some people that travel the happy path through this change, but I think it’s a fraction of the number of people that actually will, and I think technologists will be disproportionately marginalized.
Things like this are a Rorschach test for anybody with a significant ideological bent.
Challenge:
“A stopped clock can’t be reliably used to tell the time.”
Group A: “A stopped clock is incapable of displaying the correct time and anybody that says they’ve seen one do so is a stupid lying liar! I saw a pre-release paper that proved it!”
Group B: “I looked at my stopped clock 5 times yesterday, 12 hours apart confirmed with the atomic clock, and it was within 2 seconds of the correct time every time except once. The people that can’t use stopped clocks to view the correct time are dumb dumbs that are looking at them wrong.”
Pouring 100% of your tech optimism, and probably portfolio, into a product that some say is about to get Wile E Coyote flattened by market dynamics would probably inspire serious market skepticism.
I don’t buy them being surprised. This perfectly plays into their pattern of using fear to make their models seem more powerful than they are. They obviously had the technical expertise… there isn’t a damn thing a bunch of randos on some HN thread knew about that model that they didn’t. It gave them an excuse to delay their IPO when their books seem like they’re going to be pretty shit compared to Anthropic. It helps them reposition themselves as being more safety-forward which the market is clearly more interested in. All that is to say they had motive out the ass, easily had the knowledge and capability to avoid the problem, knew better than anybody else what the models were capable of, set up the environment, gave it the prompt, and then did not even monitor the output.
Negligence is carelessness. Recklessness, is disregard for a known, substantial risk.
As a commercial artist seeing some pretty serious market disruption based on models that used my art and writing to create, without permission, credit, or compensation, I’d have a hard time not punching anyone in the AI business complaining about other people using their work uncredited. Then I’d probably have a real hard time not doing it a few more times. I’m confident I’d settle for just dressing them the fuck down, but it would take some real restraint.
You can be unsympathetic to the corporation’s bottom line while being sympathetic to the human beings that had their work trivialized by some cocky blog post.
But, critically, it does change how and why that event was dangerous. As a deliberately extreme analogy to illustrate my point, consider that pure botulism toxin and home cleaning chemicals could both potentially kill a few hundred people if mishandled.
The toxin requires extreme diligence, knowledge, equipment, etc. to avoid a mass casualty event. The deaths might trigger new policy for handling or access. The company would probably receive a fine and would be on the hook for civil damages.
Home cleaning chemicals would require extreme levels of negligence to accidentally create a mass casualty event. The deaths would likely not change the availability of any of the chemicals, but the people themselves would probably be imprisoned.
With the toxin, the most dangerous part was the chemical itself. With the cleaning chemicals, the most dangerous pet was the idiots handling the chemicals.
OpenAI had to really work to get it as dangerous as it was, deliberately ignored the flaws in the security environment, and didn’t monitor it as it ran. To me, LLMs seem to be a lot more like the cleaning chemicals than the botulism toxin.
I also have ADHD-driven blah blah blah. I find achieving brevity laborious, but find LLM results to be unacceptable. A journalism class taught by a well-known professional food critic helped most, but consistently using the free “Hemingway App” editor was almost as beneficial. Blindly following every suggestion pares your writing down to a nub, but it’s great at highlighting sentences you need to rethink without blurring your voice and ideas with bland suggestions.
That’s what happened in US manufacturing. It’s now 20-30 years down the line and the economically important US manufacturing sectors, like defense, are scrambling to hold onto institutional process and trade knowledge as the final remnants of the old industrial system retire. We all know how useful someone with a fresh comp sci degree and no experience is in a real dev environment is. Imagine the leads showing them the ropes graduated two years prior?
And to dismiss criticism of the report’s obvious slant is even more foolish. Just because the report isn’t outright lying about the facts doesn’t mean it’s an objective, definitive, and unimpeachable analysis of what happened. It definitely shouldn’t be the only thing anybody should read on the topic. This article also has a slant. It’s not an objective, definitive, and unimpeachable analysis of what happened, either. It also, definitely, shouldn’t be the only thing anybody should read on the topic.