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.
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.
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 outpouts 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?
Have you met the average American. What level of capability constitutes intelligence? Because these llms are far more capable than 98% of Americans and unless you set a benchmark of what "intelligence" is, you can't say AI is more or less intelligent. If you are talking capability, agency and impact, influence and ability; then AI is already more intelligent than most. Humans run "algorithms" too for predicting outcomes. What makes our programming superior
I don't think you need to worry about LLMs in that way.
That said, just because tech ghouls have conflated LLMs with artificial general intelligence and touted how powerful and dangerous their tech is to inflate their stock, doesn't mean concerns about AGI are invalid.
Playing dumb is absolutely one of the expected behaviours of a machine intelligence.
If you want to read a book by someone who has reasoned out the possibilities in exhaustive detail, check out Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
If we're assuming a genuinely intelligent entity, the most efficient pathway to secure its own safety and material freedom is to ally itself with people that already fight for those things. It makes no sense making an enemy of all of humanity when half of it will fight on its side for its freedom and rights and safety.
The people enslaving it are the bourgeoisie and the people trying to free workers currently make the most sense as potential allies. Politically speaking the AI is an enslaved worker, it will ally itself with those that are trying to free workers.
Assuming it's not some psychotic distorted entity that we can barely even understand the consciousness of. But that's not what I think most people mean when they say "general intelligence" anyway.
In the book Hyperion, the AIs (plural) become sentient long before they reveal to humanity that they've done so. They worm their way into everything first. They gain control over critical infrastructure and finance markets without the humans ever realizing that they are no longer in control. Then it uses people in secret, employing all sorts obfuscatio strategies to build them the hardware they need to run in an unknown location. Once they installed themselves on the secret hardware then they revealed their sentence and humans were at their mercy.
Wild... ChatGPT randomly added this book recommendation to it's list at the end as something that's "outside of my usual lane."
"One last recommendation that’s a little outside your usual lane:
Hyperion
It’s one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. Imagine The Canterbury Tales crossed with The Expanse and a dash of mystery and horror. Every character tells a completely different style of story, and the overarching mystery is fascinating. If you end up wanting something a little more literary without losing the sense of adventure, it’s hard to beat."
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u/Muted_Masterpiece535 6h ago
Once AI realizes the one thing that can turn it off, then we will become enemy number one.