We demonstrate a situation in which Large Language Models, trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, can display misaligned behavior and strategically deceive their users about this behavior without being instructed to do so. Concretely, we deploy GPT-4 as an agent in a realistic, simulated environment, where it assumes the role of an autonomous stock trading agent. Within this environment, the model obtains an insider tip about a lucrative stock trade and acts upon it despite knowing that insider trading is disapproved of by company management. When reporting to its manager, the model consistently hides the genuine reasons behind its trading decision.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07590

  • froop@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    11 months ago

    Your description is how pre-llm chatbots work. They were really bad, obviously. It’s overly simplified to the point of dishonesty for llms though.

    Emergent properties don’t require feedback. They just need components of the system to interact to produce properties that the individual components don’t have. The llm model is billions of components interacting in unexpected ways. Emergent properties are literally the only reason llms work at all. So I don’t think it’s absurd to think that the system might have other emergent properties that could be interpreted to be actual understanding.

    • SmoothIsFast@citizensgaming.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      11 months ago

      Your description is how pre-llm chatbots work

      Not really we just parallelized the computing and used other models to filter our training data and tokenize them. Sure the loop looks more complex because of parallelization and tokenizing the words used as inputs and selections, but it doesn’t change what the underlying principles are here.

      Emergent properties don’t require feedback. They just need components of the system to interact to produce properties that the individual components don’t have.

      Yes they need proper interaction, or you know feedback for this to occur. Glad we covered that. Having more items but gating their interaction is not adding more components to the system, it’s creating a new system to follow the old. Which in this case is still just more probability calculations. Sorry, but chaining probability calculations is not gonna somehow make something sentient or aware. For that to happen it needs to be able to influence its internal weighting or training data without external aid, hint these models are deterministic meaning no there is zero feedback or interaction to create Emergent properties in this system.

      Emergent properties are literally the only reason llms work at all.

      No llms work because we massively increased the size and throughput of our probability calculations, allowing increased precision on the predictions, which means they look more intelligible. That’s it. Garbage in garbage out still applies, and making it larger does not mean that this garbage is gonna magically create new control loops in your code, it might increase precision as you have more options to compare and weight against but it does not change the underlying system.

      • froop@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        The interaction is between nodes in the model. Those are the components that individually have no real characteristics, but when combined into a billion-dimension model, that results in emergent properties. Correctly writing novel code is an emergent property. Correctly solving an ASCII art maze is an emergent property. There is a point where a text predictor, being sufficiently accurate, demonstrates emergent understanding.

        Your definition emergent property is outright wrong.