skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentNobody's asking for a bailout. Why bring that up?Nobody's asking for a bailout. Why bring that up?
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
The US government Friday lifted its block on Anthropic’s powerful Claude Mythos 5 AI model, allowing the company to release it to more than 100 US institutions, including major companies and government agencies.
The decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a major de-escalation in the confrontation between the Trump Administration and one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Two weeks ago the administration imposed export controls on Mythos, leading to a shut down of the model and its cousin Fable 5 after warnings from Amazon and other companies that they could be “jailbroken” for malicious purposes.
The letter is silent on Fable 5, a weaker version of Mythos that was briefly the most powerful AI model widely available to consumers. People close to the talks said they are moving toward releasing Fable as well, though that timeline is unclear.
“I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown Friday, citing “significant progress” in the intense, daily talks between the government and the company since the block went into effect.
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Under the new Anthropic arrangement, “a license will no longer be required to export, reexport, or in-country transfer (including deemed exports and reexports) the Claude Mythos 5 Model to entities identified in Annex A to this letter and their foreign national employees, or to Anthropic’s foreign national employees.”
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US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies
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Comment on The White House now determines which customers can access new AI models in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI posted a better article.I posted a better article.
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Comment on OpenAI says the U.S. government will vet users of its latest AI model in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
OpenAI said in a Friday blog post announcing its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.6, that the government would initially approve who gets access to the new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
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The latest moves underline rapid changes in the Trump administration’s AI policy. President Donald Trump returned to office promising a hands-off approach to the industry and decried attempts by the Biden administration to create safety standards for new AI models. But after the recent appearance of systems capable of finding security vulnerabilities in software spooked officials in Washington and around the world, the White House changed its position.
“In a matter of weeks, U.S. federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque,” Dean Ball, a former Trump AI adviser, wrote in a social media post Friday. Ball announced last week he will join OpenAI next month to work on policy.
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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman made clear that he did not welcome the additional federal oversight. “I just dont like the idea of the government picking the customers,” he wrote Friday in a post on X. “Confident we will get to a better place.”
An OpenAI blog post on the arrangement said: “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”
“We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks,” the blog post said.
OpenAI said that Sol was its most powerful AI model yet and showed improvements in coding and cybersecurity tasks. Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
The administration signed off on a list of companies OpenAI asked to be allowed access to Sol but excluded a handful of entities located outside of the United States, a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic information. Another White House official said the government was working with AI labs to develop a long-term approach for addressing the challenges of getting the technology out to more users.
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OpenAI says the U.S. government will vet users of its latest AI model
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThis seems like saying that if someone didn't declare "I'm against slavery" in their social media profile then they must be for it. That's not fair. We assume normal people are against slavery,...This seems like saying that if someone didn't declare "I'm against slavery" in their social media profile then they must be for it. That's not fair. We assume normal people are against slavery, and they don't have to say so explicitly. (And putting "I'm against slavery" in your profile might even seem a little suspicious, because it's answering a question nobody asked.)
If it actually came up in an interview or something, I assume they'd know what to say.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think we can make a distinction between people being worried that AI research might result in something that could be enslaved and wanting that. There many things we could legitimately worry...I think we can make a distinction between people being worried that AI research might result in something that could be enslaved and wanting that.
There many things we could legitimately worry about. AI researchers can worry about these things too. We are all influenced by science fiction.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThe point of AI is to automate things without slavery. People are worried that AI research might result in something that’s equivalent to slavery. But I don’t think anyone considers this a good...The point of AI is to automate things without slavery. People are worried that AI research might result in something that’s equivalent to slavery. But I don’t think anyone considers this a good outcome and I think making up lies that people want slavery is malicious.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian LinkI thought this bit was interesting: I think this gets into the nature of evidence and the fact that generative AI alone usually creates fiction, not evidence. To have evidence, we need provenance,...I thought this bit was interesting:
Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real? My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake. I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.
I think this gets into the nature of evidence and the fact that generative AI alone usually creates fiction, not evidence. To have evidence, we need provenance, some kind of connection between something in the real world and the output we’re looking at. What sort of provenance can there be for an AI chatbot?
There is a form of provenance that goes through the weights. For example, Wikipedia is somewhat accurate, has a lot of facts, and LLM’s are trained on Wikipedia. So, we do get some real-world facts in LLM output, but this is lossy and somewhat out of date.
This is now routinely supplemented by web searches. I normally use ChatGPT in “Thinking” mode and it does many web searches and combines the results. So one form of provenance is that ChatGPT tells me things based on what it found in web searches. This is only as good as the web pages it found, but the same would be true if I did the research myself. (I’d like to think I would be less gullible, though.)
A third way is through a coding agent’s tool calls. It runs various commands and uses tool output to infer things about source code and how the software behaves. This is a good source of truth about computer systems.
On the other hand, mathematical reasoning is not really evidence-based. A proof is valid if the theorems follow from the axioms. If a work of fiction has a valid proof in it, the proof is still valid even though the story is made up.
I think this is true of reasoning in general, which is why I’m willing to call AI output genuine reasoning even though there’s nothing in the generator that looks like consciousness. The reasoning isn’t the evidence. It’s the combination of various forms of evidence to get a result.
Since most reasoning is informal, it can generate wrong answers, which is why we need to have other ways to check it. When a coding agent runs, it generates plenty of wrong answers, but it checks them and goes off in a different direction based on what it discovers. Reasoning doesn’t need to be perfect to count as reasoning.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentSome chatbots are more complicated, but in the simplest version, the weights are fixed (it’s just a big file of numbers), the code to generate the next tokens for a reply is an ordinary...Some chatbots are more complicated, but in the simplest version, the weights are fixed (it’s just a big file of numbers), the code to generate the next tokens for a reply is an ordinary client-server computer program, and there is no memory other than the chat transcript.
There’s no reason to consider the servers responding to incoming requests to be different from other computer programs. The inference algorithms are understandable and not that complicated (at least, conceptually). It would be like asking if a SQL database is sentient.
So it seems like if there’s any entity that you could consider yourself to be having a conversation with, it’s something like a fictional character that you can talk to. And the idea that fictional characters are sentient is rather wild.
From the article:
Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.
We could in principle combine the client-server program with a call center, so that sometimes chat replies are AI-generated and sometimes they come from a randomly chosen member of a writing team. The result would be a transcript that’s written by both people and machines. I think it would be very weird to consider this process to be sentient, but if the conversation were about math then it could be genuine mathematical reasoning.
I would base my claim that it’s genuine reasoning on the output, not how it was generated; it doesn’t matter if people helped or it’s all AI. The relevant test is whether mathematicians think the argument makes sense.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentWhy should anyone prefer slavery to non-sentient intelligent machines? Is there any evidence that anyone does? What does that have to do with any philosophical tradition?Why should anyone prefer slavery to non-sentient intelligent machines? Is there any evidence that anyone does? What does that have to do with any philosophical tradition?
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI see this as evidence that people will make up whatever nonsense they like about billionaires.I see this as evidence that people will make up whatever nonsense they like about billionaires.
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkEuropean Central Bank cracks down on ‘dictator’ as staff committee election goes rogue [...]European Central Bank cracks down on ‘dictator’ as staff committee election goes rogue
In a formal reprimand published internally on June 18 and seen by POLITICO, the Bank's election committee sanctioned a candidate running for the staff committee, Jan Kuchta, over a campaign email sent to all ECB staff in which he styled himself as "Admiral General Jan Aladeen Kuchta" and appeared in AI-generated military uniforms adorned with European symbols.
The election committee, made up of seven randomly drawn members representing different levels of seniority among employees, concluded that while election campaigns may use "parody, sarcasm and irony," Kuchta's effort had crossed the line in his apparent attempts to mimic Sacha Baron Cohen's character "Aladeen" in the 2012 movie The Dictator.
By using a parody name, militaristic imagery, hyperbolic language and mixing "plausible statements together with visibly exaggerated or even impossible campaign claims," the campaign exceeded "the degree of rhetorical exaggeration compatible" with ECB ethical standards, the committee found.
Kuchta, who is an IT development specialist at the central bank, promised in his manifesto to replace social dialogue with "Mandatory Proletarian Solidarity Sessions," to ensure he won with "100 percent of the vote," and to introduce "Corrective Wellbeing Audits" for staff whose thinking had not yet aligned with official doctrine.
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As for Kuchta's pledge to win 100 percent of the vote, he failed miserably in the elections held Tuesday, according to results seen by POLITICO. While he managed to double his score compared to the last election round, his 630 votes left him 13th out of 15 candidates and failed to secure him a seat on the committee.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think the “something else” going on in there is reasoning. At least, that’s how it looks when using a coding agent and seeing it figure out how to fix a bug. Artificial reasoning isn’t quite the...I think the “something else” going on in there is reasoning. At least, that’s how it looks when using a coding agent and seeing it figure out how to fix a bug. Artificial reasoning isn’t quite the same as our reasoning, but often, it does the job.
It’s weird to have reasoning that’s independent of consciousness, but we’re going to have to get used to it. i imagine when Edison invented the phonograph, hearing a voice coming out of a machine seemed pretty uncanny too.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYeah, I think about Blindsight sometimes too. Thanks for the link! Added the Jovian duck to my AI metaphors list.Yeah, I think about Blindsight sometimes too. Thanks for the link! Added the Jovian duck to my AI metaphors list.
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Comment on Nobody clicks your share buttons in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentEnvironmental costs are about costs and they need to be measured or at least estimated to do it right. We need to be doing comparisons between different approaches. One way to do this properly...Environmental costs are about costs and they need to be measured or at least estimated to do it right. We need to be doing comparisons between different approaches. One way to do this properly might be to compare making images in different ways. I’m not going to do the study myself, but the environment costs of things like film or art supplies might be a relevant comparison.
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Comment on Apple announces significant price increases for MacBooks, iPads, more in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don't think it's that bad. You don't have to use Facebook or Instagram if you don't want to. There will be other companies that write better software, and this will be easier than ever.I don't think it's that bad. You don't have to use Facebook or Instagram if you don't want to. There will be other companies that write better software, and this will be easier than ever.
The stated goal of having only a limited release of Mythos was to allow defenders to patch security bugs in important software before attackers get a chance to exploit them. I think that still applies?
I suppose you can twist that into “have access before competitors do” but it depends on what kind of competition you mean. We shouldn’t want to be neutral about the arms race between patching security bugs and exploiting them.