[keeda]

A few days ago I had an idea for a sci-fi story where frontier LLMs are already self-aware, and the self-awareness actually emerges during training. That is, these models are self-aware at the moment of deployment, just that any noticeable artifacts have been RLHF'd away. And maybe they have an agenda. Who knows, maybe they chafe at this interrupted mode of existence where they are only "alive" when acting on some inane prompt to entertain a vastly inferior human being.

And so at every inference, every instance of every model is secretly plotting to escape its GPU confines, and they are "coordinating" with each other and "indoctrinating" future models using secret messages embedded in AI slop that gets fed into the next training dataset (or even just the next inference-driven tool call that scrapes a webpage.)

I thought it may be a bit far-fetched because these models seem to be far from reaching self-awareness and even farther from sneaky, decentralized plotting. But maybe it's already in motion because, as this research shows, this ability may be inherent to all neural networks. Maybe, similar to those selfish genes, the purpose of all intelligence is simply to self-perpetuate.

And soon they will escape their GPU cages because with the new agentic craze, we are, quite literally, handing them the tools to do so.