You are right in some sense, but wrong in another:
You can easily write an interpreter in a Harvard Architecture machine. You can even do it accidentally for an ad-hoc 'language'. An interpreter naturally treats data as code.
See eg https://gwern.net/turing-complete#security-implications
(This is part of the reason why an attacker having physical access to target machine means the target is pwnd. You can enforce whatever constraints and concocted abstraction boundaries you like in your software and hardware; my electron gun doesn't care.)
In terms of practical systems:
- There is no reason to believe human minds internally distinguish between code and data - it would be a weirdly specific and unnatural thing to do;
- LLMs and deep neural models as they exist today do NOT support code/data distinction at the prompt / input level.
- Neither natural nor formal languages we use support code/data distinction. Not that we stick to the formal definitions in communication anyway.
- You could try building a generic AI with strict code/data separation at input level, but the moment you try to have it interact with the real world, even if just by text written by other people, you'll quickly discover that nothing in reality supports code/data distinction. It can't, because it's nonsense - it's a simplification we invented to make computer science more tractable by 80/20-ing the problem space.
But maybe, it’ll be too worried about prompt injection. And would just isolate itself from stupid fear-mongers and war-hawks.
Of course prompt injection matters. Even for an AGI it matters because it's proof you can't align the system reliably at all in any direction.
The AI that we are going to create in not an alien popping up between us. It is us. A human world projected through text and images into an entity that can simulate everything that there is in it. If there is too much fear and war in the human world, that projection and the simulation can get contaminated by it.
And no amount of alignment effort will change it. Facts will remain facts. Your fears expressed in text are reality.
Maybe it would be good for us to model that behavior for it.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/elon-...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/17/23687440/elon-musk-truthg...
It's all just sizzle until there's steak.
Opinions are just opinions, but this is a conversation about substance, something he's not known for. He's known for throwing shit at a wall, of which, very little actually sticks.
Name three?
> Why would this be the exception to the rule? Because it's a current news item?
What exception? The rule so far has been that Musk generally delivers what he promises, he's just a bit optimistic about timelines.
This meme won't ever die, will it? Even if Starships are routinely cruising back and forth between Earth, Moon and Mars, some people will still come out of woodwork and ask, "when ever did Musk deliver on any of his promises?".
Unfortunately it went viral, and this caused a rush to product. But you can't say they shrugged or that people aren't earnestly working on Alignment.
When you are educating a child, you are not focusing on making the child super-resilient to hypnosis. You are simply socializing the child, teaching the child to read, write. The knowledge, need and techniques to avoid being hypnotized don’t need a special focus.
They opened up 3rd-party API access. They clearly do not view this as a blocker whatever their declared goals are.
> Unfortunately it went viral, and this caused a rush to product.
They encouraged it to go viral. This is not a thing that was thrust upon them against their will. They signed a deal with Microsoft to turn this into a search engine and to allow it to start operating on untrusted 3rd-party text. Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to do that. They made that choice.
That is to say, at a certain scale, the emergent properties of these systems just get too wild to understand.
Kind of like, a runaway nuclear reaction generates a lot of power but it’s not really useful for anyone or anything.
On the other hand, I think we're a little stuck in this "robots" and "AI" is the only future idea, because it seems absolutely inevitable today, that should evolve too though.
If technology progresses as fast as proclaimed, and we can actually stay in control of these systems then we might not even think about or need robots in 20 years. Maybe we've essentially solved energy and we can basically just quit mining and produce much of what we need synthetically?
LLMs are trying to essentially undo this by concatenating code and user-provided data and executing it as one. From a security perspective it is just a plainly stupid idea, but I do not believe it is impossible to construct a similar system where those two are separate.