Tootfinder

People often assume that LLM output is some kind of neutral "average" of "all knowledge" (or at least, most of the internet), and that perhaps it picks up and amplifies biases already present in the training data, but these are merely innate human biases to begin with. Already, that shouldn't be comforting, given how biased LLM resume-scanning systems are against female-sounding names, for example, but let's put that aside. We can actually see that LLMs also have intentionally engineered biases added to them in custom training steps:
You know all the LLM syncophancy? The way it agrees with whatever the user says, even if that contradicts itself, or something else the user said earlier? Where did that come from? How often in the internet pre-LLMs did you see someone disagree, only for the other person to immediately apologize and back down? Is that the average behavior on Reddit? On other internet forums? Even in private chat messages or on IRC?
In fact, the internet is legendary for the exact opposite behavior? Where did the collective reply-guy tendency of the training data go? It must have been painstakingly trained out of the model by OpenAI. There's a few viable approaches to this, but likely, it involved optimizing for continued conversation and/or some kind of "pleasantness" score, and that kind of optimization always has side effects. More to the point, if we know the big models are doing this kind of intentional tuning, there probably tuning for other stuff too, and in general, the output of the models is much closer to "things OpenAI wants it to say" than "things the internet would naturally have said" than we might suspect.
#AI #LLMs

Protecting our FLOSS commons from #LLMs
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

On #learning #programming in an age of #LLMs

In my latest article for Inquirer.net, I look at the possible role that #AI and #LLMs might have in the literary world. Should AI be only limited to spellchecking and copyediting? Or could they be used to write entire paragraphs?

The burden of human authorship in the age of ChatGPT
Contest poster courtesy of the F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award MANILA, Philippines - Exploring authorship in the age of AI and ChatGPT. The F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award, first

A couple of billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Suddenly they could turn the abundant atmospheric C02 into carbon for replicating themselves. The only side effect was the release of oxygen.
It was a monumental success, but it ended up turning Earth's C02 centered atmosphere into an Oxygen centered one, leading to what may have been the first great extinction event. Cyanobacteria still exist, but they are no longer the dominant life on Earth.
Some things that thrive in one environment also change that environment such that they destroy the resource they need to thrive. We're seeing this today with #LLMs They were only possible to create given massive amounts of clean human-generated content. As they dump their memetic effluent back into the data they feed from, they produce statistical distortions that degrade models trained on the same data. Like the cyanobacteria, they poison the air they breathe.
I encourage everyone to think in terms of systems, not simply components. Because, though this lens, it becomes obvious that some systems include within themselves the logic of their own collapse. And, like a Greek tragedy, it is often precisely a system's strength that leads to its collapse.

Ich glaube die #LLMs halluzinieren garnicht selber. Das ist alles #Merz.
Schluss mit den #Nebenverdiensten!

Ich glaube die #LLMs halluzinieren garnicht selber. Das ist alles #Merz.
Schluss mit den #Nebenverdiensten!

RE: #LLMs to access the

Openrouter is a commercial provider that gives you access to all models available. For that reason they can give a good overview what models people actually use and for what. Open Weights and chinese models are increasingly important in the business domain. See their interesting rankings page.
#AI #OpenRouter #Rankings #models #LLMs

An excellent exemplar of objectively terrible research that can only be explained by completely irrational levels of LLM hype:
#AI #LLMs

I keep beating this drum, but...
It's.... Interesting that we're having an entire conversation about "AI alignment" when Sam Altman and Darius Amodei have flat out said that their goal is to make paperclips out of everything even if the human race goes extinct in the process.
Oh I'm sorry, dollars. They're making dollars, not paperclips. That changes everything, clearly.
...
What's more insidious is that even if you Luigi'd Altman and Amodei tomorrow, OpenAI and Anthropic would happily elect new leaders and continue with business as usual. There is no shortage of humans willing to step up and run the paperclip machines and who have the same misalignment issue (they're not actually a large percentage of humans, mind, but there are plenty of them). So the thing you have you defeat in order to stop the paperclipization is in fact a corporation (and the idea that wealth makes right behind it), not a human.
It's almost as if we're *already* locked in an existential battle with an inhuman entity whose effective goals are dangerously misaligned by nature... 🤔
...
I wonder if the same techniques used to defeat the entity already threatening us would work against the hypothetical threat it's waving around to distract us? Only one way to find out!
#AI #LLMs

It only takes a very rudimentary understanding of economics to see that, in the long run, the market price of running "agentic AI" (or whatever the latest buzz becomes) and the salary of any kind of knowledge worker can only be separated by a gap that's dependent on *management's* ability to tell their output apart.
There is a cosmic-scale gap between the long-term value to a company in paying a salary to a human vs. getting an LLM to "do" the "same" work, but it's a gap that many people are investing heavily in hiding right now, and CEOs and managers become incredibly gullible when you promise them they won't have to deal with humans who might ask for raises, even though it should be obvious you plan to jack up prices once they're locked in. They also aren't well-known for a deep understanding of how their workers actually generate value, and tend to be easily distracted by shiny but shallow demos, which is exactly what LLMs can produce well.
Even in the most optimistic scenario I can imagine for these developments, the myth of upward mobility that's been a lynchpin for defusing class solidarity among wage laborers is going to take a significant beating. There's a completely obvious game plan underway to try to use fascism to shore up the power of the wealthy against any kind of mass movement, and to play the ancient divide-and-conquer game along race and gender lines just as usual, so the range of outcomes is huge, but every time you use an LLM you're pushing this closer to a sharper conflict.
#AI #LLMs

Mid- (ongoing) -pandemic "back to the office" mandates and "use AI" mandates are two sides of the same coin that illustrate just how much "technology" happens at the whims of the CEO class, and any description of generative AI as an "inevitable" or "here to stay" technology that doesn't account for that is propaganda.
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

This afternoon a couple of my CI/CD pipelines broke because a user deleted all their their public repositories from #Github .
I suppose many people are starting to be fed up with all what's going on with big companies stealing our code to train their #LLMs, or maybe it's something else... who knows. It's not like we have a single reason to be discontent with Github / Microsoft.
Anyway... I started reviewing all my projects to ensure that I mirror all my critical dependencies so I don't suffer the same problem again.
#CICD #AI #GenerativeAI #SupplyChain

Apparently somebody posted a #counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture on X last night (found by an LLM). I won’t link that junk site, but somebody added it to Wikipedia already if you care:
#math #LLMs #ai

The Segway is here to stay, you know! Once someone invents something, the cat's out of the bag! Oh you don't use a Segway? Watch out, or this amazing new technology will leave you (slightly) behind! You'd better invest now you know! This technology is poised to revolutionize personal transportation! If you don't get in early, you'll never catch up and make the big bucks (unless you can manage a brisk jog or have a car or something). I don't know what they're teaching in PE these days, but they definitely need to start teaching how to ride a Segway! It's completely intuitive, you see! Should athletes be allowed to ride Segways around the track instead of running laps? Of course! After all, sports are already starting to shift to Segway leagues. These things *are* the future! They're totally safe,* even around cliffs!
*Remember to always wear your helmet when riding, and be prepared to land on your feet like a cat if user error results in an unexpected temporary levitation event. Segway, inc. is not liable for damages caused by failure to deploy superhuman reflexes at a moment's notice.
This post contains some hyperbole, but not a much as you might think. For the curious: #AI #LLMs #GenAI