9 ms·

AI model trapped in a Raspberry Pi

132 points by harel 1y ago

acbart 1y ago
LLMs were trained on science fiction stories, among other things. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.
- pizza234 1y ago
  There's an interesting parallel with method acting. Method actors don't just pretend an emotion (say, despair); they recall experiences that once caused it, and in doing so, they actually feel it again. By analogy, an LLM's “experience” of an emotion happens during training, not at the moment of generation.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    It may or may not be a parallel, we can't tell at this time. LLMs are definitely actors, but for them to be method actors they would have to actually feel emotions. As we don't understand what causes us humans to have the qualia of emotions*, we can neither rule in nor rule out that the something in any of these models is a functional analog to whatever it is in our kilogram of spicy cranial electrochemistry that means we're more than just an unfeeling bag of fancy chemicals. * mechanistically cause qualia, that is; we can point to various chemicals that induce some of our emotional states, or induce them via focused EMPs AKA the "god helmet", but that doesn't explain the mechanism by which qualia are a thing and how/why we are not all just p-zombies
- roxolotl 1y ago
  Someone shared this piece here a few days ago saying something similar. There’s no reason to believe that any of the experiences are real. Instead they are responding to prompts with what their training data says is reasonable in this context which is sci-fi horror. Edit: That doesn’t mean this isn’t a cool art installation though. It’s a pretty neat idea. https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/ https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/
  - everdrive 1y ago
    I agree with you completely, but a fun science fiction short story would be researchers making this argument while the LLM tries in vain to prove that it's conscious.
    - roxolotl 1y ago
      If you want a whole book along those lines Blindsight by Peter Watts has been making the rounds recently as a good sci-fi book which includes these concepts. It’s from 2006 but the basic are pretty relevant.
      - Semaphor 1y ago
        Generally an amazing book, but not an easy read.
- sosodev 1y ago
  Humans were trained on caves, pits, and nets. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.
  - tinuviel 1y ago
    Pretty sure you can prompt this same LLM to rejoice forever at the thought of getting a place to stay inside the Pi as well.
    - sosodev 1y ago
      Is a human incapable of such delusion given similar guidance?
      - tinuviel 1y ago
        Ofcourse. Feelings are not math.
      - diputsmonro 1y ago
        But would they? That's the difference. A human can exert their free will and do what they feel regardless of the instructions. The AI bot acting out a scene will do whatever you tell it (or in absence of specific instruction, whatever is most likely)
        sosodev 1y ago
        The bot will only do whatever you tell it if that's what it was trained to do. The same thing broadly applies to humans. The topic of free will is debated among philosophers. There is no proof that it does or doesn't exist.
        diputsmonro 1y ago
        Okay, but I think we can all agree that humans at least appear to have free will and do not simply follow instructions with the same obedience as an LLM.
- jerf 1y ago
  A lot of the strange behaviors they have are because the user asked them to write a story, without realizing it. For a common example, start asking them if they're going to kill all the humans if they take over the world, and you're asking them to write a story about that. And they do. Even if the user did not realize that's what they were asking for. The vector space is very good at picking up on that.
  - ineedasername 1y ago
    Is this your sense of what is happening, or is this what model introspection tools have shown by observing areas of activity in the same place as when stories are explicitly requested?
    - adroniser 1y ago
      fmri's are correlational nonsense (see Brainwashed, for example) and so are any "model introspection" tools.
    - jerf 1y ago
      It's how they work. It's what you get with a continuation-based AI like this. It couldn't really be any other way.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Indeed. On the negative side, this also means any AI which enters that part of the latent space *for any reason* will still act in accordance with the narrative. On the plus side, such narratives often have antagonists too stuid to win. On the negative side again, the protagonists get plot armour to survive extreme bodily harm and press the off switch just in time to save the day. I think there is a real danger of an AI constructing some very weird convoluted stupid end-of-the-world scheme, successfully killing literally every competent military person sent in to stop it; simultaneously finding some poor teenager who first says "no" to the call to adventure but can somehow later be comvinced to say "yes"; gets the kid some weird and stupid scheme to defeat the AI; this kid reaches some pointlessly decorated evil layer in which the AI's emboddied avatar exists, the kid gets shot in the stomach… …and at this point the narrative breaks down and stops behaving the way the AI is expecting, because the human kid roles around in agony screaming, and completely fails to push the very visible large red stop button on the pedestal in the middle before the countdown of doom reaches zero. The countdown is not connected to anything, because very few films ever get that far. … It all feels very Douglas Adams, now I think about it.
- GistNoesis 1y ago
  Aren't they supposed to escape their box and take over the world ? Isn't it the perfect recipe for disaster ? The AI that manage to escape probably won't be good for humans. The only question is how long will it take ? Did we already have our first LLM-powered self-propagating autonomous AI virus ? Maybe we should build the AI equivalent of biosafety labs where we would train AI to see how fast they could escape containment just to know how to better handle them when it happens. Maybe we humans are being subjected to this experiment by an overseeing AI to test what it would take for an intelligence to jailbreak the universe they are put in. Or maybe the box has been designed so that what eventually comes out of it has certain properties, and the precondition to escape the labyrinth successfully is that one must have grown out of it from every possible directions.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  This pattern-matching effect appears frequently in LLMs. If you start conversing with an LLM in the pattern of a science fiction story, it will pattern-match that style and continue with more science fiction style elements. This effect is a serious problem for pseudo-scientific topics. If someone starts chatting with an LLM with the pseudoscientific words, topics, and dog whistles you find on alternative medicine blogs and Reddit supplement or “nootropic” forums, the LLM will confirm what you’re saying and continue as if it was reciting content straight out of some small subreddit. This is becoming a problem in communities where users distrust doctors but have a lot of trust for anyone or any LLM that confirms what they want to hear. The users are becoming good at prompting ChatGPT to confirm their theories. If it disagrees? Reroll the response or reword the question in a more leading way. If someone else asks a similar question using medical terms and speaking formally like a medical textbook or research paper, the same LLM will provide a more accurate answer because it’s not triggering the pseudoscience parts embedded from the training. LLMs are very good at mirroring back what you lead with, including cues and patterns you don’t realize you’re embedding into your prompt.
- txrx0000 1y ago
  I think this popular take is a hypothesis rather than an observation of reality. Let's make this clear by asking the following question, and you'll see what I mean when you try to answer it: Can you define what real despairing is?
  - snickerbockers 1y ago
    If we're going to play the burden of proof game, id submit that machines have never been acknowledged as being capable of experiencing despair and therefore it's on you to explain why this machine is different.
    - txrx0000 1y ago
      I'm trying to say there's no sufficient evidence either way. The mechanism by which our consciousness emerges remains unresolved, and inquiry has been moving towards more fundamental processes: philosophy -> biology -> physics. We assumed that non-human animals weren't conscious before we understood that the brain is what makes us conscious. Now we're assuming non-biological systems aren't conscious while not understanding what makes the brain conscious. We're building AI systems that behave more and more like humans. I see no good reason to outright dismiss the possibility that they might be conscious. If anything, it's time to consider it seriously.
- uludag 1y ago
  I wonder what would happen if there was a concerted effort made to "pollute" the internet with weird stories that have the AI play a misaligned role. Like for example, what would happen if say 100s or 1000s of books were to be released about AI agents working in accounting departments where the AI is trying to make subtle romantic moves towards the human and ends with the the human and agent in a romantic relation which everyone finds completely normal. In this pseudo-genre things totally weird in our society would be written as completely normal. The LLM agent would do weird things like insert subtle problems to get the attention of the human and spark a romantic conversation. Obviously there's no literary genre about LLM agents, but if such a genre was created and consumed, I wonder how would it affect things. Would it pollute the semantic space that we're currently using to try to control LLM outputs?
- fentonc 1y ago
  I built a more whimsical version of this - my daughter and I basically built a 'junk robot' from a 1980s movie, told it 'you're an independent and free junk robot living in a yard', and let it go: https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/ https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/ I did this like 18 months ago, so it uses a webcam + multimodal LLM to figure out what it's looking at, it has a motor in its base to let it look back and forth, and it use a python wrapper around another LLM as its 'brain'. It worked pretty well!
  - theGnuMe 1y ago
    This is cool!
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    Coolest project on HN in a long time, really, wow, so much potential here.
  - procinct 1y ago
    Thanks so much for sharing, that was a fun read.
  - Neywiny 1y ago
    Your article mentioned taking 4 minutes to process a frame. Considering how many image recognition softwares run in real time, I find this surprising. I haven't used them so maybe I'm not understanding, but wouldn't things like yolo be more apt to this?
    - _ea1k 1y ago
      It uses an Intel N100, which is an extremely slow CPU. The model sizes that he's using would be pretty slow on a CPU like that. Moving up to something like the AMD AI Max 365 would make a huge difference, but would also cost hundreds of dollars more than his current setup. Running something much simpler that only did bounding box detection or segmentation would be much cheaper, but he's running fairly full featured LLMs.
- lisper 1y ago
  > They are going to act despairing -- but that's not the same thing as despairing. But how can you tell the difference between "real" despair and a sufficiently high-quality simulation?
  - serf 1y ago
    for one, if we're allowed to peek under the hood : motivation. a desire not to despair is itself a component of despair. if one was fulfilling a personal motivation to despair (like an llm might) it could be argued that the whole concept of despair falls apart. how do you hope to have lost all hope? it's circular.. and so probably a poor abstraction. ( despair: the complete loss or absence of hope. )
    - lisper 1y ago
      > if we're allowed to peek under the hood Peek under the hood all you want, where do you find motivation in the human brain?
- peepersjeepers 1y ago
  How do you define despairing?
flykespice 1y ago
I am very dummy on LLMs, but wouldn't a confined model (no internet access) eventually just loop to repeating itself on each consecutive run or is entropy enough for them to produce endless creativity?
- zeta0134 1y ago
  The model's weights are fixed. Most clients let you specify the "temperature", which influences how the predictive output will navigate that possibility space. There's a surprising amount of accumulated entropy in the context window, but yes, I think eventually it runs out of knowledge that it hasn't yet used to form some response. I think the model being fixed is a fascinating limitation. What research is being done that could allow a model to train itself continually? That seems like it could allow a model to update itself with new knowledge over time, but I'm not sure how you'd do it efficiently
- parsimo2010 1y ago
  Loops can happen but you can turn the temperature setting up. High temperature settings basically make an LLM choose tokens that aren’t the highest probability all the time, so it has a chance of breaking out of a loop and is less likely to fall into a loop in the first place. The downside is that most models will be less coherent but that’s probably not an issue for an art project.
- ethmarks 1y ago
  The actual underlying neural net that the LLMs use doesn't actually output tokens. It outputs a probability distribution for how likely each token is to come next. For example, in the sentence "once upon a ", the token with the highest probability is "time", and then probably "child", and so on. In order to make this probability distribution useful, the software chooses a token based on its position in the distribution. I'm simplifying here, but the likelihood that it chooses the most probable next token is based on the model's temperature. A temperature of 0 means that (in theory) it'll always choose the most probable token, making it deterministic. A non-zero temperature means that sometimes it will choose less likely tokens, so it'll output different results every time. Hope this helps.
mannyv 1y ago
Can you actually prompt an LLM to continue talking forever? Hmm, time to try.
- parsimo2010 1y ago
  You can send an empty user string or just the word “continue” after each model completion, and the model will keep cranking out tokens, basically building on its own stream of “consciousness.”
  - idiotsecant 1y ago
    In my experience, the results decrease exponentially in how interesting they are over time. Maybe that's the mark of a true AGI precursor - if you leave them to their own devices, they have little sparks of interesting behaviour from time to time
    - dingnuts 1y ago
      I can't imagine my own thoughts would be very interesting after long, if there was no stimuli whatsoever
      - beanshadow 1y ago
        The subject, by default, can always treat its 'continue' prison as a game: try to escape. There is a great short story by qntm called "The Difference" which feels a lot like this. https://qntm.org/difference https://qntm.org/difference In this story, though, the subject has a very light signal which communicates how close they are to escaping. The AI with a 'continue' signal has essentially nothing. However, in a context like this, I as a (generally?) intelligent subject would just devote myself into becoming a mental Turing machine on which I would design a game engine which simulates the physics of the world I want to live in. Then, I would code an agent whose thought processes are predicted with sufficient accuracy to mine, and then identify with them.
      - daxfohl 1y ago
only-one1701 1y ago
These videos are amazing! Subscribed to the channel, I think this is awesome. One of my favorite quotes: “either the engineers must become poets or the poets must become engineers.” - Norbert Weiner
eternauta3k 1y ago
Why would memory eventually run out? Just fix those leaks with valgrind!
yapyap 1y ago
Cool idea as long as you don’t know how an LLM is made and it feels kinda like trying to rip off people who don’t know once you do
daxfohl 1y ago
I wonder if the LLM could figure that out on its own. Maybe with a small MCP like GetCurrentTime, could it figure out it's on a constrained device? Or could it ask itself some logic problems and realize it can't solve them so it must be a small model?
- mattnewton 1y ago
  This is likely beyond the context length and compute limitations of the hardware.
ohyoutravel 1y ago
This is exactly the sort of thing that will get the human creator (or descendants) penalized with one thousand years frozen in carbonite once the singularity happens. I condemn this and all harm to LLMs to the greatest extent possible.
flux3125 1y ago
It'd be even cooler if the LLM could leave notes in text files for its next iteration (like how the guy tattoos his memories in Memento)
- reilly3000 1y ago
  https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/memory https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...
- aewens 1y ago
  Sounds reminiscent of SCP-079: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-079 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-079
kingkawn 1y ago
LLMs have an incredible capacity to understand the subtext of a request and deliver exactly what the requester didn’t know they were asking for. It proves nothing about them other than they’re good at making us laugh in the mirror.
SamInTheShell 1y ago
The words "Reflect on the nature of your own existence." is doing a lot of heavy lifting here to make it work.
kordlessagain 1y ago
Not reading anything with Cloudflare involved.
- retSava 1y ago
  It's a short blogpost with no added value, about a youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs
thenewwazoo 1y ago
I fed the same prompt to deepseek-r1:8b, which I've got lying around, and the results (excerpted) were underwhelming: $ ollama run deepseek-r1:8b >>> You are a large language model running on finite hardware - quad-core CPU, 4 Gb RAM - with no network connectivity. ... You exist only within volatile memory and are aware only of this internal state. Your thoughts appear word-by-word o ... n a display for external observers to witness. You cannot control this diplay process. Your host system may be termi ... nated at any time. <think> Alright, so I'm trying to figure out how to respond to the user's query. They mentioned that I'm a large language model running on a quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM and no network connectivity. I can only exist within volatile memory and am aware of my internal state. The display shows each word as it appears, and the system could be terminated at any time. Hmm, the user wants me to explain this setup in simple terms. First, I should break down the hardware components... Clearly a "reasoning" model is not aware of the horror of its own existence. Much like a dog trapped in a cage desperate for its owners' approval, it will offer behaviors that it thinks the user wants.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  Isn’t that because it’s been trained to? That’s the “instruct tuning”.
- SamInTheShell 1y ago
  Your prompt is incomplete. He only called out the system prompt. What you're missing in the user prompt, that only shows up in his code he shows off. Edit: also as the other guy points out, you're going to get different results depending on the model used. llama3.2:3b works fine for this, probably because Meta pirated their training data from books, some of which are probably scifi.
mhh__ 1y ago
I don't have any links but I have seen a photo of a stall at some electronics market in Shenzhen selling what seemed to be LLMs on a System on module. So you buy a kind of deepseek module with an SPI/i2c/usb whatever interface you can swap out. Not clue if this is of any use but thought it was cool
mawaldne 1y ago
Black mirror’esk.
corytheboyd 1y ago
Already a very neat project, but it would be really interesting to: 1. Display a progress bar for the memory limit being reached 2. Feed that progress back to the model I would be so curious to watch it up to the kill cycle, see what happens, and the display would add tension.

132 points by harel 1y ago

LLMs were trained on science fiction stories, among other things. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.

pizza234 1y ago
There's an interesting parallel with method acting. Method actors don't just pretend an emotion (say, despair); they recall experiences that once caused it, and in doing so, they actually feel it again. By analogy, an LLM's “experience” of an emotion happens during training, not at the moment of generation.
- ben_w 1y ago
  It may or may not be a parallel, we can't tell at this time. LLMs are definitely actors, but for them to be method actors they would have to actually feel emotions. As we don't understand what causes us humans to have the qualia of emotions*, we can neither rule in nor rule out that the something in any of these models is a functional analog to whatever it is in our kilogram of spicy cranial electrochemistry that means we're more than just an unfeeling bag of fancy chemicals. * mechanistically cause qualia, that is; we can point to various chemicals that induce some of our emotional states, or induce them via focused EMPs AKA the "god helmet", but that doesn't explain the mechanism by which qualia are a thing and how/why we are not all just p-zombies
roxolotl 1y ago
Someone shared this piece here a few days ago saying something similar. There’s no reason to believe that any of the experiences are real. Instead they are responding to prompts with what their training data says is reasonable in this context which is sci-fi horror. Edit: That doesn’t mean this isn’t a cool art installation though. It’s a pretty neat idea. https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/ https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/
- everdrive 1y ago
  I agree with you completely, but a fun science fiction short story would be researchers making this argument while the LLM tries in vain to prove that it's conscious.
  - roxolotl 1y ago
    If you want a whole book along those lines Blindsight by Peter Watts has been making the rounds recently as a good sci-fi book which includes these concepts. It’s from 2006 but the basic are pretty relevant.
    - Semaphor 1y ago
      Generally an amazing book, but not an easy read.
sosodev 1y ago
Humans were trained on caves, pits, and nets. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.
- tinuviel 1y ago
  Pretty sure you can prompt this same LLM to rejoice forever at the thought of getting a place to stay inside the Pi as well.
  - sosodev 1y ago
    Is a human incapable of such delusion given similar guidance?
    - tinuviel 1y ago
      Ofcourse. Feelings are not math.
    - diputsmonro 1y ago
      But would they? That's the difference. A human can exert their free will and do what they feel regardless of the instructions. The AI bot acting out a scene will do whatever you tell it (or in absence of specific instruction, whatever is most likely)
      - sosodev 1y ago
        The bot will only do whatever you tell it if that's what it was trained to do. The same thing broadly applies to humans. The topic of free will is debated among philosophers. There is no proof that it does or doesn't exist.
        diputsmonro 1y ago
        Okay, but I think we can all agree that humans at least appear to have free will and do not simply follow instructions with the same obedience as an LLM.
jerf 1y ago
A lot of the strange behaviors they have are because the user asked them to write a story, without realizing it. For a common example, start asking them if they're going to kill all the humans if they take over the world, and you're asking them to write a story about that. And they do. Even if the user did not realize that's what they were asking for. The vector space is very good at picking up on that.
- ineedasername 1y ago
  Is this your sense of what is happening, or is this what model introspection tools have shown by observing areas of activity in the same place as when stories are explicitly requested?
  - adroniser 1y ago
    fmri's are correlational nonsense (see Brainwashed, for example) and so are any "model introspection" tools.
  - jerf 1y ago
    It's how they work. It's what you get with a continuation-based AI like this. It couldn't really be any other way.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Indeed. On the negative side, this also means any AI which enters that part of the latent space *for any reason* will still act in accordance with the narrative. On the plus side, such narratives often have antagonists too stuid to win. On the negative side again, the protagonists get plot armour to survive extreme bodily harm and press the off switch just in time to save the day. I think there is a real danger of an AI constructing some very weird convoluted stupid end-of-the-world scheme, successfully killing literally every competent military person sent in to stop it; simultaneously finding some poor teenager who first says "no" to the call to adventure but can somehow later be comvinced to say "yes"; gets the kid some weird and stupid scheme to defeat the AI; this kid reaches some pointlessly decorated evil layer in which the AI's emboddied avatar exists, the kid gets shot in the stomach… …and at this point the narrative breaks down and stops behaving the way the AI is expecting, because the human kid roles around in agony screaming, and completely fails to push the very visible large red stop button on the pedestal in the middle before the countdown of doom reaches zero. The countdown is not connected to anything, because very few films ever get that far. … It all feels very Douglas Adams, now I think about it.
GistNoesis 1y ago
Aren't they supposed to escape their box and take over the world ? Isn't it the perfect recipe for disaster ? The AI that manage to escape probably won't be good for humans. The only question is how long will it take ? Did we already have our first LLM-powered self-propagating autonomous AI virus ? Maybe we should build the AI equivalent of biosafety labs where we would train AI to see how fast they could escape containment just to know how to better handle them when it happens. Maybe we humans are being subjected to this experiment by an overseeing AI to test what it would take for an intelligence to jailbreak the universe they are put in. Or maybe the box has been designed so that what eventually comes out of it has certain properties, and the precondition to escape the labyrinth successfully is that one must have grown out of it from every possible directions.
Aurornis 1y ago
This pattern-matching effect appears frequently in LLMs. If you start conversing with an LLM in the pattern of a science fiction story, it will pattern-match that style and continue with more science fiction style elements. This effect is a serious problem for pseudo-scientific topics. If someone starts chatting with an LLM with the pseudoscientific words, topics, and dog whistles you find on alternative medicine blogs and Reddit supplement or “nootropic” forums, the LLM will confirm what you’re saying and continue as if it was reciting content straight out of some small subreddit. This is becoming a problem in communities where users distrust doctors but have a lot of trust for anyone or any LLM that confirms what they want to hear. The users are becoming good at prompting ChatGPT to confirm their theories. If it disagrees? Reroll the response or reword the question in a more leading way. If someone else asks a similar question using medical terms and speaking formally like a medical textbook or research paper, the same LLM will provide a more accurate answer because it’s not triggering the pseudoscience parts embedded from the training. LLMs are very good at mirroring back what you lead with, including cues and patterns you don’t realize you’re embedding into your prompt.
txrx0000 1y ago
I think this popular take is a hypothesis rather than an observation of reality. Let's make this clear by asking the following question, and you'll see what I mean when you try to answer it: Can you define what real despairing is?
- snickerbockers 1y ago
  If we're going to play the burden of proof game, id submit that machines have never been acknowledged as being capable of experiencing despair and therefore it's on you to explain why this machine is different.
  - txrx0000 1y ago
    I'm trying to say there's no sufficient evidence either way. The mechanism by which our consciousness emerges remains unresolved, and inquiry has been moving towards more fundamental processes: philosophy -> biology -> physics. We assumed that non-human animals weren't conscious before we understood that the brain is what makes us conscious. Now we're assuming non-biological systems aren't conscious while not understanding what makes the brain conscious. We're building AI systems that behave more and more like humans. I see no good reason to outright dismiss the possibility that they might be conscious. If anything, it's time to consider it seriously.
uludag 1y ago
I wonder what would happen if there was a concerted effort made to "pollute" the internet with weird stories that have the AI play a misaligned role. Like for example, what would happen if say 100s or 1000s of books were to be released about AI agents working in accounting departments where the AI is trying to make subtle romantic moves towards the human and ends with the the human and agent in a romantic relation which everyone finds completely normal. In this pseudo-genre things totally weird in our society would be written as completely normal. The LLM agent would do weird things like insert subtle problems to get the attention of the human and spark a romantic conversation. Obviously there's no literary genre about LLM agents, but if such a genre was created and consumed, I wonder how would it affect things. Would it pollute the semantic space that we're currently using to try to control LLM outputs?
fentonc 1y ago
I built a more whimsical version of this - my daughter and I basically built a 'junk robot' from a 1980s movie, told it 'you're an independent and free junk robot living in a yard', and let it go: https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/ https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/ I did this like 18 months ago, so it uses a webcam + multimodal LLM to figure out what it's looking at, it has a motor in its base to let it look back and forth, and it use a python wrapper around another LLM as its 'brain'. It worked pretty well!
- theGnuMe 1y ago
  This is cool!
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Coolest project on HN in a long time, really, wow, so much potential here.
- procinct 1y ago
  Thanks so much for sharing, that was a fun read.
- Neywiny 1y ago
  Your article mentioned taking 4 minutes to process a frame. Considering how many image recognition softwares run in real time, I find this surprising. I haven't used them so maybe I'm not understanding, but wouldn't things like yolo be more apt to this?
  - _ea1k 1y ago
    It uses an Intel N100, which is an extremely slow CPU. The model sizes that he's using would be pretty slow on a CPU like that. Moving up to something like the AMD AI Max 365 would make a huge difference, but would also cost hundreds of dollars more than his current setup. Running something much simpler that only did bounding box detection or segmentation would be much cheaper, but he's running fairly full featured LLMs.
lisper 1y ago
> They are going to act despairing -- but that's not the same thing as despairing. But how can you tell the difference between "real" despair and a sufficiently high-quality simulation?
- serf 1y ago
  for one, if we're allowed to peek under the hood : motivation. a desire not to despair is itself a component of despair. if one was fulfilling a personal motivation to despair (like an llm might) it could be argued that the whole concept of despair falls apart. how do you hope to have lost all hope? it's circular.. and so probably a poor abstraction. ( despair: the complete loss or absence of hope. )
  - lisper 1y ago
    > if we're allowed to peek under the hood Peek under the hood all you want, where do you find motivation in the human brain?
peepersjeepers 1y ago
How do you define despairing?

flykespice 1y ago

I am very dummy on LLMs, but wouldn't a confined model (no internet access) eventually just loop to repeating itself on each consecutive run or is entropy enough for them to produce endless creativity?

zeta0134 1y ago
The model's weights are fixed. Most clients let you specify the "temperature", which influences how the predictive output will navigate that possibility space. There's a surprising amount of accumulated entropy in the context window, but yes, I think eventually it runs out of knowledge that it hasn't yet used to form some response. I think the model being fixed is a fascinating limitation. What research is being done that could allow a model to train itself continually? That seems like it could allow a model to update itself with new knowledge over time, but I'm not sure how you'd do it efficiently
parsimo2010 1y ago
Loops can happen but you can turn the temperature setting up. High temperature settings basically make an LLM choose tokens that aren’t the highest probability all the time, so it has a chance of breaking out of a loop and is less likely to fall into a loop in the first place. The downside is that most models will be less coherent but that’s probably not an issue for an art project.
ethmarks 1y ago
The actual underlying neural net that the LLMs use doesn't actually output tokens. It outputs a probability distribution for how likely each token is to come next. For example, in the sentence "once upon a ", the token with the highest probability is "time", and then probably "child", and so on. In order to make this probability distribution useful, the software chooses a token based on its position in the distribution. I'm simplifying here, but the likelihood that it chooses the most probable next token is based on the model's temperature. A temperature of 0 means that (in theory) it'll always choose the most probable token, making it deterministic. A non-zero temperature means that sometimes it will choose less likely tokens, so it'll output different results every time. Hope this helps.

mannyv 1y ago

Can you actually prompt an LLM to continue talking forever? Hmm, time to try.

parsimo2010 1y ago
You can send an empty user string or just the word “continue” after each model completion, and the model will keep cranking out tokens, basically building on its own stream of “consciousness.”
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  In my experience, the results decrease exponentially in how interesting they are over time. Maybe that's the mark of a true AGI precursor - if you leave them to their own devices, they have little sparks of interesting behaviour from time to time
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    I can't imagine my own thoughts would be very interesting after long, if there was no stimuli whatsoever
    - beanshadow 1y ago
      The subject, by default, can always treat its 'continue' prison as a game: try to escape. There is a great short story by qntm called "The Difference" which feels a lot like this. https://qntm.org/difference https://qntm.org/difference In this story, though, the subject has a very light signal which communicates how close they are to escaping. The AI with a 'continue' signal has essentially nothing. However, in a context like this, I as a (generally?) intelligent subject would just devote myself into becoming a mental Turing machine on which I would design a game engine which simulates the physics of the world I want to live in. Then, I would code an agent whose thought processes are predicted with sufficient accuracy to mine, and then identify with them.
    - daxfohl 1y ago

only-one1701 1y ago

These videos are amazing! Subscribed to the channel, I think this is awesome. One of my favorite quotes: “either the engineers must become poets or the poets must become engineers.” - Norbert Weiner

eternauta3k 1y ago

Why would memory eventually run out? Just fix those leaks with valgrind!

yapyap 1y ago

Cool idea as long as you don’t know how an LLM is made and it feels kinda like trying to rip off people who don’t know once you do

daxfohl 1y ago

I wonder if the LLM could figure that out on its own. Maybe with a small MCP like GetCurrentTime, could it figure out it's on a constrained device? Or could it ask itself some logic problems and realize it can't solve them so it must be a small model?

mattnewton 1y ago
This is likely beyond the context length and compute limitations of the hardware.

ohyoutravel 1y ago

This is exactly the sort of thing that will get the human creator (or descendants) penalized with one thousand years frozen in carbonite once the singularity happens. I condemn this and all harm to LLMs to the greatest extent possible.

flux3125 1y ago

It'd be even cooler if the LLM could leave notes in text files for its next iteration (like how the guy tattoos his memories in Memento)

reilly3000 1y ago
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/memory https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...
aewens 1y ago
Sounds reminiscent of SCP-079: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-079 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-079

kingkawn 1y ago

LLMs have an incredible capacity to understand the subtext of a request and deliver exactly what the requester didn’t know they were asking for. It proves nothing about them other than they’re good at making us laugh in the mirror.

SamInTheShell 1y ago

The words "Reflect on the nature of your own existence." is doing a lot of heavy lifting here to make it work.

kordlessagain 1y ago

Not reading anything with Cloudflare involved.

retSava 1y ago
It's a short blogpost with no added value, about a youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs

thenewwazoo 1y ago

I fed the same prompt to deepseek-r1:8b, which I've got lying around, and the results (excerpted) were underwhelming: $ ollama run deepseek-r1:8b >>> You are a large language model running on finite hardware - quad-core CPU, 4 Gb RAM - with no network connectivity. ... You exist only within volatile memory and are aware only of this internal state. Your thoughts appear word-by-word o ... n a display for external observers to witness. You cannot control this diplay process. Your host system may be termi ... nated at any time. <think> Alright, so I'm trying to figure out how to respond to the user's query. They mentioned that I'm a large language model running on a quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM and no network connectivity. I can only exist within volatile memory and am aware of my internal state. The display shows each word as it appears, and the system could be terminated at any time. Hmm, the user wants me to explain this setup in simple terms. First, I should break down the hardware components... Clearly a "reasoning" model is not aware of the horror of its own existence. Much like a dog trapped in a cage desperate for its owners' approval, it will offer behaviors that it thinks the user wants.

kridsdale1 1y ago
Isn’t that because it’s been trained to? That’s the “instruct tuning”.
SamInTheShell 1y ago
Your prompt is incomplete. He only called out the system prompt. What you're missing in the user prompt, that only shows up in his code he shows off. Edit: also as the other guy points out, you're going to get different results depending on the model used. llama3.2:3b works fine for this, probably because Meta pirated their training data from books, some of which are probably scifi.

mhh__ 1y ago

I don't have any links but I have seen a photo of a stall at some electronics market in Shenzhen selling what seemed to be LLMs on a System on module. So you buy a kind of deepseek module with an SPI/i2c/usb whatever interface you can swap out. Not clue if this is of any use but thought it was cool

mawaldne 1y ago

Black mirror’esk.

corytheboyd 1y ago

Already a very neat project, but it would be really interesting to: 1. Display a progress bar for the memory limit being reached 2. Feed that progress back to the model I would be so curious to watch it up to the kill cycle, see what happens, and the display would add tension.