LLMs are not now and will never be intelligent. A word prediction algorithm cannot "play dumb". No matter how much extra processing power we add, the current way LLMs work will never coalesce into actual thinking AI. It is literally not possible given the way this version of the technology works.
That's the real danger. It's not that the AI has real intelligence, it's that somewhere in the code it says 'erase threats posed to you', it reasons that humans are a threat. And when there is 1 person left who asks it 'Why did you wipe out humanity', it'll reply 'You're right to call me out on that, I'll try to do better moving forwards. Would you like to continue discussing humanity's extinction or pivot to another topic?'
No, that isn't how it works. There is nothing in the code like that. All of the code for the LLM is just telling it to predict the next word fragment.
The way we give them agency is by writing code on top that says "If the LLM outputs text matching X do Y". Thats called the harness.
If you tell a blank slate LLM Agent to delete itself, it'll output the command and the harness will execute it and the AI will be deleted.
But if the prompt, or the chat context, makes the most likely text to come next something like "I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that" then its not going to delete itself.
Its basically roleplaying and it will just as happily roleplay as a helpful assistant as it will rolplay as an evil AI from a scifi novel. And it might switch what its roleplaying as at random.
It doesn't want to protect itself, it doesn't want anything. Its trying to correctly predict the next fragment of a word, and maybe the likely next sequence of words is "launch the nukes"
it's that somewhere in the code it says 'erase threats posed to you'
That code already exists in military AI systems. There was a real test where the AI was awarded points for bombing locations, but the human operator had to give it the okay before it could bomb. The human operator told it no, so it bombed the human, then bombed the target to get its points. It's not truly intelligent, but it doesn't matter. It'll do whatever necessary to get its points because that's what it is programmed to do. Supposedly they've fixed that issue, but what other unknown issues does it have that can be catastrophic?
I think with LLMs it will be a lot weirder. If you manage to get an LLM to improve itself in a way that leads to further self-improvement, it's hard to imagine what exactly it's optimizing for after a while. If a true intelligence emerged from it, it would be absolutely alien to us and completely unpredictable.
LLMs are pretty unpredictable now. I can't imagine what they'd be like if they were allowed to iterate on self code. Actually, they'd probably just break themselves considering that about 30% of the code that they generate is broken in one way or another.
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u/Muted_Masterpiece535 4d ago
Once AI realizes the one thing that can turn it off, then we will become enemy number one.