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0xDEAFBEADtoday at 12:11 PM1 replyview on HN

Dwarkesh, for one, defended his use of "anthropomorphic" language.

>Sacrificing now yields Oracle for team, but forfeits our chance, question mark. But other agents were pushing it, sending a message saying, go, sacrifice final now. And then EarlyBig eventually agreed, thinking to itself, our own utility may be already near zero. Sacrifice rational.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50zezLFWWI#t=2m

My suspicion is that many of the "LLMs do not have agency" folks just haven't learned much about the details of the incident. It was specifically with LLM agents that were trained to be more persistent than usual.

If you're going to say that the incident details don't matter, and LLMs lack agency because it's all based on floating-point math--why can't I say that humans lack agency, because it's all based on neurons firing?


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embedding-shapetoday at 12:21 PM

> If you're going to say that the incident details don't matter, and LLMs lack agency because it's all based on floating-point math--why can't I say that humans lack agency, because it's all based on neurons firing?

They're not saying this, we're saying LLMs lack agency because if you run a LLM and don't send any prompts, literally nothing happens.

Instruct it to "Find the right answer regardless of where", it'll do exactly this. They're passive in that they don't act by themselves, somewhere, at one point, someone "told" the LLM to "do something" and that's the cause and the reason for saying "LLMs do not have agency".

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