And then I tell it to connect to a SSH server it knows nothing about and it's like sure, why not?
Even more annoying: They can be easy to subvert.
I was running something at work that involved an LLM, and kept getting safety refusals. The weird thing was that when I went to our in-house chatbot, set the model to the same one the program was using, entered the same text, it happily answered.
I spent quite a while trying to figure out why my program was being refused. Was I doing something wrong?
No - the chatbot was doing something "right". You see, the chatbot had some tools it injected into the prompt (current time, etc).
So I went back to my program and injected the same tools. Suddenly my request was very safe.
The phrase "security theater" was invented for stuff like this.
I know it’s not the models themselves, but their preflight safety classifiers are a dumpster fire and serious impediment to performing regular work.
That situation can’t go on forever if they’re going to be a competitive service.