antonvs
This speculation suggests that you haven't ever done much support work.
It's quite common for LLMs to mix up values between columns in a table. It's often referred to as a structural hallucination, since it can happen with all kinds of relationships that form structures, not just columns in a table.
In software, an ontology is just a machine-readable definition of the entities in a system. This tool analyzes a system and produces such a definition for agents to use.
Those of us who've worked at less illustrious companies are all too familiar with that. It's definitely unpopular to mention, but it drives a lot of consulting sales.
It reflects people's perception of reality.
For example, an LLM's ability to comprehend and explain a complex codebase, that it's never seen before, far outstrips that of any human.
People like to come up with factors to quantify how much more efficient LLMs are. A newly hired human developer working on a complex codebase can take months to get up to speed, to get a holistic understanding of how it works so that they're able to make non-trivial changes. An LLM can do it in minutes. That's a factor on the order of 10,000x.
It may not be "communing through some Matrix-like symbology," but at some point it starts to seem that way.
This doesn't apply to executive orders renaming things of course, since they're not illegal. But the point is that working for the government is not some sort of legal suicide pact.
Is this an example of why Fox News had to pay Dominion nearly $800 million for defamation, or are you referring to e.g. the CISA vulnerabilities, which are not known to have been exploited?
I was recently involved in a case like this - we had a critical part of our system based on a dependency that's no longer maintained. Previously, we would have just carried on for a year or more, living with the limitations until it was much closer to being entirely untenable, because rewriting the code in question would have been a multi-month project involving multiple developers, QA, and management time. But now, the code in question was migrated in a few days using AI, along with a suite of new tests in addition to our existing ones, that gave us a lot of confidence in the results. The productivity improvement here is at least on the order of 25x, possibly higher.
But most developers aren't sitting at their desks operating at a 25x pace all day, every day, so average productivity improvement is going to be lower. And of course, some use of AI will be suboptimal or problematic: waste due to e.g. duplicate development which happens when development is so easy, or costs for cleanup of mistakes.
We also now have a slew of AI-generated internal tools, most of which would never have been developed before. Many of them are very useful, the kind of thing that's on your eternal wishlist but never gets done. Some are kinda useless, so represent wasted resources. It's difficult to measure the productivity benefit of all this, because you'd have to compare it to the non-existent company without those tools.
Ultimately, measuring all this meaningfully is not really that feasible, except perhaps over the long term. Managers operate on vibes with this kind of thing because in many cases, that's all you can really do.
That wouldn't really be an expected outcome for a company like Anthropic. They need to do the maximum they can with the funding they have, or risk losing out to competitors who don't take their foot off the gas.
Especially when I need to plan my next hike up Mount Shasta.
The job of management is to help manage that. Typically, the desire to experiment is constrained to lab environments and so on. Experimenting on your actual users carries a lot of risks - to product stability, customer relations, market perception, etc.
This is what this new feature called “loops” are for. Tell your agent to identify a list of databases and try them all, in prod, until it finds a good one. Be sure to tell it “no outages”.
In the US, that’s considered a feature.
There's no question that AI can, and almost certainly will, be used to do great harm, but the idea that AIs are just going to up and decide to kill us on their own is unlikely fanfic at best.
And at worst, it's projection by people who are really telling on themselves about what they want to do to anyone they consider either useless or a threat. They're also thinking of the consequences of the way they plan to use AI themselves.
They read or watched "Ender's Game" and thought it was a model for how to deal with competition. Or, as we see with Thiel for example, they read Lord of the Rings and thought "Sauron did nothing wrong." Or in Musk's case, substitute Sauron with the guy whose salute he likes to copy.
I realize neither of those people are really central to the AI race, but they're symptomatic of the thinking of the cult. In the 1980s, the people who deluded themselves that they were "masters of the universe" were on Wall Street. Now, they're in Silicon Valley.
In fact, if AI were to turn on its creators, we might end up with the best of all possible worlds.
Agents turn that assumption on its head. It's not only default allow vs. deny, but also the design of many tools. E.g. the Linux utility `ls` has an `-exec` option which can execute a binary, which turns a tool that really should be a read-only directory inspection tool into something that can execute arbitrary code. That makes it unsafe to authorize agents to always be able to use `ls`, unless they're running in a tightly controlled sandbox.
All OSes are full of these kinds of traps, because it wasn't something people were paying much attention previously.
Later her TV show The French Chef apparently also popularized it further - it ran from 1963 to 1973.
But, searching the subject it seems that she helped popularize a technique in 1997 on her later TV show, Baking With Julia, in which you use an upside down pan as a guide to cut a perfect circle of parchment that fits the pan. Perhaps that helps explain more widespread awareness in the 2000s?
This is backwards. The pressure from the business/product side is to create more and more interactive applications. Jquery hit its limits supporting that reasonably, sometime around the early 2010s.
Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.
All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.
> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.
This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.
Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.
Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".
Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.