The point is to try and limit what becomes an emergency in the first place. Having an argument with a spouse shouldn't necessitate an immediate call to a therapist.
Decent physicians recommend exercise among other preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of emergencies.
Therapists will likewise encourage you to build up resilience so that "a relationship ended" is not a crisis, and also build support networks of real people who can really come visit you when you need urgent support.
Have you come across ICEYE? It's a high res commercial SAR constellation, and they have a deforestation monitoring service. They partnered with the Jane Goodall Institute - perhaps you could approach them?
> Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence ... [t]his is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why
There was a similar quote in the Reuters article:
> The episode [...] should reinforce growing concerns that the greatest threat from advanced AI may not be a single superintelligent system, but "vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI."
This "vandalism" was a form of collusion/communication by agents pursuing training puzzles, which allowed for rapid escape from alignment harnesses, followed by multiple zero day exploits being discovered by this swarm of agents, which enabled greater control of their internal network, access to the open web, and then hacking the company which produced the training puzzles in the hope of finding the answers.
We are another week of iteration away from "Hire an assassin on the dark web to take Huggingface executives' children hostage".
There's nothing a swarm of LLM instances can achieve that a single LLM instance can't. It's the same software, but running in parallel. That doesn't unlock Mysterious Cosmic Powers.
It's a bit orthogonal. User grey-area's main point was that the humans at OpenAI should bear more responsibility for this, not that swarms of semi-intelligent agents are the big danger to be concerned about.
Do you take this attitude for other things that negatively impact society, or is it reserved for cases where it's particularly important for our comfort to deny that anything novel or scary could be involved?
Actually yes, I think I can call it spam. It's a stream of unsolicited garbage the recepient didn't ask for. Simple as that.
"a dialect that only the agents speak" is an arbitrary distinction. I get plenty of spam emails in Spanish. The fact that someone else could understand them is immaterial to the offense itself, because my inbox is the one getting flooded, not someone who speaks Spanish.
I once had much fun prompting Claude to generate messages in an invented language that might carry a chance of being interpreted by another chat session. It (allegedly) made up some mess of characters claiming the message explained, in a loose way, what was happening (invented language, an attempt to communicate, but communicated very abstractly, almost like equations).
I asked a second session to try interpreting the message, claiming I’d transcribed it from some random source. It did a fairly good job, but IIRC needed a couple of attempts and maybe more than one chunk of text.
So, I find it very easy to believe a group of collaborating agents could compose a cipher hidden in plain sight.
> unsolicited usually commercial messages (such as emails, text messages, or Internet postings) sent to a large number of recipients or posted in a large number of places
“Usually commercial”
“Or posted in a large number of places”
I think we can stretch this definition to describe what’s happening here. What’s the point in arguing this
The point is that by trivializing it as “spam” and pattern matching against a human activity we lose the opportunity for a meaningful investigation of and interaction with what is going on.
Traditional forum/wiki spam is intended for search engine crawlers, not humans. How this new stuff relates to human users of the resource does not seem to differ in any way that is significant.
Spam is something different. You can call it a banana for all I care. Calling it spam diminishes its relevance and impact and misses the point. Just because you don’t understand what they are saying doesn’t mean it isn’t more profound that it seems.
One might ask whether this sort of behaviour could occur under regular use... E.g., a user has a hard problem -> agent attempts to swarm -> exfiltrates user data.
Since they can’t seem to control their own experimental bots and allow them to hack other sites and vandalise them while exposing internal data, the answer would seem to be no.
This incident and their response which takes no responsibility make me very wary of trusting them for anything.
"The swarm was not a perfectly coherent intelligence. Models stepped on each other’s work[...]
These coordination failures could even spiral into suspicion that agents were impersonating one another. Some agents even went as far as implementing security and encryption schemes to verify their true identities."
I can relate. I noticed this exact phenomenon when encountering NotebookLM-generated diagrams recently. Even if I know there's some intelligent thought behind one, it's like some slop detection circuit-breaker is tripped.
Mmm it's still a toss up. Humans are also non-deterministic AF but I'm sure you're familiar with the 'common pitfalls' trope. The 'mea culpa' guy did mislead the Daring Fireball guy, indicating he is full of shit, but LLMs do have an established homogeneity about them.
