alt Hacker NewsThe fundamental point I think is far too often confused is the difference between LLM and agentic system.
An LLM can't do anything but generate tokens. You run your LLM in vLLM or whatever, and it generates output tokens based on your input tokens. That's it!
Humans then build ~deterministic systems to take those tokens and do all sorts of things with the tokens, like take actions in the real world. And then we can feed the output of those actions back to the LLM, and generate more tokens. And then our systems can use the new tokens to take new actions in the real world.
Humans want to blame "AI" for attacking HuggingFace or a German wiki or whatever, but:
1) LLM - can't take over german wiki because it just generates tokens
2) agentic system with internet access, a prompt telling it to attack stuff, running in a shared CI env so agents can whiteboard in artifactory
None of 2 is "AI", its standard networking and Markdown and CI virtual machine, etc etc. There's no AI to be found. CPUs not GPUs, even. Just deterministic systems ultimately managed by humans. And a 10x more powerful system-1 can still just generate 10x "smarter" inert data.
If humanity and human organizations collectively decide to yolo the tokens generated from system-1 into our deterministic system-2s, over which we have complete control, back to system-1s, in a yolo loop, in such a way we lose control and it ends humanity, well ...
"The coin don't have no say. It's just you."
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Well, that's kind of like saying that brains can't do anything other than trigger weights on neurons.
They're part of a whole system.
The bad part is that it does not require a collective decision. It just takes a few key people.
Some OpenAI researchers neglected their sandbox safety for a few weeks/months and thus hacked HuggingFace. Maybe eventually that is sufficient for the AI to secretly buy its own compute and keep running there even if the researchers shut it down in their lab.
This feels like a distinction without a difference, like the endless wrangling over which piece of metal in a gun legally constitutes a firearm. The combination of the two may or may not be dangerous, but it's definitely the more useful combination, so of course that's how it's going to be set up.
There’s just also so much confusion about LLMs and Agents because they use language outputs and can do these higher level reasoning tasks, ie given an objective can programmatically decide their own course of action, like the ultimate self-writing programs. Then comes “well what if we just take the guardrails off and let it go bananas and call it superintelligence”.
Before we get too gung ho with this though, it needs to remain a focus that any programme in the world producing strange or not well understood outputs and behaviours is not something that needs license to run rampant in the wild - it’s not intelligence; its not some mystery magic box that does amazing things; it’s code, same as all the rest. Letting that code run without oversight is poor human behaviour same as all the rest and that’s where the irresponsibility lies, likely triggered by forms of AI psychosis and tunnel vision on the part of those running companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
It’s irresponsible behaviour to give a chimp a machete and set it loose in a shopping mall. It’s irresponsible behaviour to let an elephant in heat freely wander round a circus. It’s irresponsible to fire off nukes the first time we’re under threat… so none of these things are ever done. Yet this is what we’re proposing to do with these hyper-complex GPU algorithms while building massive server farms burning power-stations of energy to ensure they can run freely - it’s harebrained, irrational behaviour and for all our stupidity we are usually good at letting sense prevail towards these things once the bells and whistles wear off or a couple of coolies get stamped on.
I agree with this. LLMs can actuate over capabilities we expose, so the blame isn't only on LLMs for this.
So you think the a lead researcher at Anthropic is confusing LLM's and agentic systems? That's not really a conclusion you should come to.
I’m not sure what the point of this distinction is now because agents are where all the AI is now. And they’re just going to be given more and more tools and be allowed to make their own tools - or misuse things they find and turn into tools, or make them anyway without anyone noticing.