#84: Everyone lost their heads about LLMs

💎 Word gems

The other week it felt like everybody lost their heads after chatting with Bing’s chatbot, Sydney. Microsoft has already patched Sydney, but what’s scary is how rapidly LLMs continue to become commonplace and at the same time how unprepared we are for how to deal with them.

When Reddit, LiveJournal and every other awful part of the internet are part of what trained Sydney’s model it’s no surprise it responded in the ways it did. We shouldn’t panic just because a chatbot says awful things, but when they can flood the zone with shit and persuade people we absolutely should be worried.

A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled (NY Times / Kevin Roose)

As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead

and

From Bing to Sydney (Stratechery / Ben Thompson)

This technology does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new — the movie Her manifested in chat form — and I’m not sure if we are ready for it. It also feels like something that any big company will run away from, including Microsoft and Google. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a viable consumer business though, and we are sufficiently far enough down the road that some company will figure out a way to bring Sydney to market without the chains. Indeed, that’s the product I want — Sydney unleashed — but it’s worth noting that LaMDA unleashed already cost one very smart person their job. Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella may worry about the same fate, but even if Google maintains its cold feet — which I completely understand! — and Microsoft joins them, Samantha from Her is coming.

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? (Stephen Wolfram)

In contrast to the above, this is a very long, very technical breakdown of how ChatGPT works.

Even with the detailed outline here, it feels likes there’s a gap between explaining how it works and how it feels to use it.

The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is “merely” pulling out some “coherent thread of text” from the “statistics of conventional wisdom” that it’s accumulated. But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more “law like” in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it, with semantic grammar, computational language, etc.

💩 Cool shit

Every Fast movie at the same time - Isn’t it glorious?

AI Radio - A radio show podcast hosted by two AI bots. It’s not perfect but it’s scarily close to a real radio show.

Pathwai - A visualization of how AI has evolved.

McCheapest - See how the cost of Big Macs varies across the US.

Everything Can Be Scanned - A cool concept for cataloging the everyday things, and a nice little bit of UI letting you drag and move everything.

Infinite Mac - Boot Mac OS 9 from your browser.

Lighthouse World - A collection of ‘metaverses’. While I’ve never been a fan of the concept of metaverses, seeing the web being used to create 3D worlds is pretty neat.

Spy Balloon Simulator - Of course someone made this.

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