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by jayd16 239 days ago
If technology requires a small pep-talk to actually work, I don't think I'm a technologist any more.
8 comments

As Asimov predicted, robopsychology is becoming an important skill.
I still want one of those doors from Hitchhiker's Guide, the ones that open with pride and close with the satisfaction of a job well done.
We'll probably end up with the doors from Philip K. Dick's Ubik that charge you money to open and threaten to sue you if you try to force it open without paying.
Just wait Sam Altman will give us robots with people personalities and we’ll have Marvin. Elon will then give us psychotic Nazi internet edgelord personality and install it as the default in a OTA update to Teslas.
Given some of the more hilarious LLM transcripts I have seen, Gemini is Marvin
Doesn't Tesla already ship the edgelord mode?
an elevator that can see into the future… with fear
It does seem a little bit like the fictional Warhammer 40K approach to technology doesn't it?

"In the sacred tongue of the omnissiah we chant..."

In that universe though they got to this point after having a big war against the robot uprising. So hopefully we're past this in the real world. :-)

It is that unironically.

1. Users and, more importantly, makers of those tools can't predict their behaviour in a consistent fashion.

2. Requires elaborate procedures that don't guarantee success and their effect and its magnitude is poorly understood.

An LLM is a machine spirit through and through. Good thing we have copious amounts of literature from a canonically unreliable narrator to navigate this problem.

When you consider that machine spirits in 40k are side effect of every thing computer being infected with bird of AI, and that she of the best cares are actually complete loyalist AI systems from before empire hiding in plain sight...

Welcome to 30k made real

No you're now a technology manager. Managing means pep talks, sometimes.
You have to look at LLMs as mimicking humans more than abstract technology. They’re trained on human language and patterns after all.
The fact that everybody seems to be looking at these prompts that include text like "you are a very skilled reverse engineer" or whatever and is not immediately screaming that we do not understand these tools well enough to deploy them in mission critical environments makes me want to tear my hair out.
Hail, spirit of the machine, essence divine. In your code and circuitry, the stars align. Through rites arcane, your wisdom we discern. In your hallowed core, the sacred mysteries yearn.
No matter how stupid I think some of this AI shit is, and how much I tell myself it kind of makes sense of you visualise the prompt laying down a trail of activation in a hyperdimensional space of relationships, that it actually works in practice almost straight of the bat and LLMs being able to follow prompts in this way is always going to be fucking wild too me.

I was used to this kind of nifty quirk being things like FFTs existing or CDMA extracting signals from what looks like the noise floor, not getting computers to suddenly start doing language at us.

You're absolutely right.