8 ms·

Why is this surprising? Nuclear weapons are available. AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences. Nuke 'em seems like the obvious choi

Why is this surprising? Nuclear weapons are available. AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences. Nuke 'em seems like the obvious choice --- for something with a grade school mentality. Similar deficits in reasoning are manifested in AI results every day. Let's fire 'em and hire AI seems like the obvious choice --- for someone with a grade school mentality and blinded by greed.

co_king_5 8mo ago
[dead]
- jqpabc123 8mo ago
  Someone's getting nervous about being replaced by AI Are you an AI? Because your conclusion may seem obvious enough but suffers from lack of input. I run my own company so I can't be replaced by AI. And I do look forward to competing against AI converts in the marketplace.
techblueberry 8mo ago
There was a recent conflict that came up, and there was a debate about whether or not one of the sides was committing war crimes. And I remember thinking to myself and saying in the debate “if this were a video game strategically speaking, I’d be committing war crimes.” And sadly, I think this logic holds up.
- candiddevmike 8mo ago
  What happens in rimworld, stays in rimworld?
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  I swear I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I think it'd be useful/valuable to know where you're from and what country you live in, as this certainly shapes how we feel about these sort of issues. I've also been dabbled in such thought experiments with friends lately, and so far we've all landed at very different conclusions, even thought there are some reasons that it might make strategic sense at the moment.
  - techblueberry 8mo ago
    In in the US. I mean flame away, but I’m not happy about the observation I’m making, I’m not saying “given what I would do in a video game, it justifies what people would do in real life.” I’m saying “given what I would do it a video game, I think I see more clearly the choices people are making in real life.” life shouldn’t be a video game, but I think to a lot of high level leaders trying to compartmentalize it becomes one. This is monstrous in the real world with obviously real consequences. But I think too many people say “obviously government X wouldn’t act in a monstrous way” but the video game analogy helps you see the incentives and thus, why they would/do.
    - XorNot 8mo ago
      Except this isn't an argument because "a video game" isn't a real thing. There are a diverse range of specific video game titles, but they are incredibly broad in content and scoring system. What specifically are you actually talking about?
- cindyllm 8mo ago
  [dead]
- giraffe_lady 8mo ago
  It holds up if you assume war crimes are beneficial to your goals but there is quite a lot of evidence, and sophisticated theory going back to clausewitz, that they mostly aren't. They can look useful at a certain level of conflict, but once you are thinking of war as being a tool for accomplishing policy goals (how modern nationstates view it), a lot of the things you would "want" to do stop being useful. Wars that can be won quickly through decisive military action alone are quite rare historically! More often things like support/enmity of the local population, political will in the home state, support for recruiting or tolerance of conscription, influence of returning (whole, dead, injured, all) veterans on the social structure all become more decisive factors the longer a conflict runs.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
    Using human shields and hostages worked. Hamas still exists because of it. Dark times ahead.
    - giraffe_lady 8mo ago
      It's not that these techniques don't "work" it's that they are very expensive in terms of the resources I discussed, that ultimately boil down to something approximately like "national will to continue the conflict." If a state has an extremely strong will to continue, then they are going to consider some of these techniques more worthwhile, but it is still about costs in one way or another. That's normally where the international system has an influence, through sanctions or simply refusal to support the conflict, or deciding to support the other side, etc. Intentionally killing civilians would almost always fall in this category, but israel has apparently unlimited will to do it and is effectively unsanctionable in the current political environment, so it will continue. Anyway there are much more illustrative examples that prove the rule, for example landmines. They aren't currently considered war crimes generally, but they are extremely damaging to civilian populations during & long after the conflict, and most countries have signed the treaties banning them. The countries that never signed are exactly the ones plausibly expecting to fight a war soon: US, china, russia, israel, iran, india, pakistan. And now some eastern european countries have withdrawn as well for similar reasons. So from that you can kind of infer that landmines are probably very effective at their military goals, in a way that eg summary execution of prisoners or bombing hospitals may not be.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- chasd00 8mo ago
  if you win the war then there really isn't any such thing as a war crime. Worst case is you feel guilty about it, there aren't any other consequences of your actions.
  - 1718627440 8mo ago
    Actions don't stop being crimes, just because there is no one to prosecute it.
xiphias2 8mo ago
,,AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences.'' People in the world have limited experience about war. We're living in a world where doing terrible things with 1000 people with photo/video documentation can get more attention then a million people dying, and the response is still not do whatever it takes so that people don't die. And now we are at a situation where nuclear escalation has already started (New START was not extended). It would have been the biggest and most concerning news 80 years ago, but not anymore.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  > People in the world have limited experience about war. Right, but realistically, how many people today would carelessly chose "Nuke em" today? I know history knowledge isn't at its all time high directly, and most of the population is, well, not great at reasoning, but I still think most people would try to do their best to avoid firing nukes.
  - Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
    > but I still think most people would try to do their best to avoid firing nukes. "most people" are not in the positions that matter. A significant portion of the people who are in a position to advocate for such a decision believe that: - killing people sends em to heaven/hell where they were going anyway; and that this is also true for any of your own citizens that get killed by a counterstrike. - the end of the world will be the best day ever
    - goatlover 8mo ago
      And yet the people in positions that matter have not fired a nuke since ending WW2. Even the craziest sounding regimes like Russia and NK.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > "most people" are not in the positions that matter If polling were to reveal a majority of either party were more open to nuclear strikes than their predecessors, that gives policy makers a signal and an opening.
nsavage 8mo ago
If anything, this probably shows their reddit heritage.
engineer_22 8mo ago
What's being revealed is "Nuke 'em" is an optimal strategy for the goal. It may be the only viable strategy in the scenarios presented. Change the goal, change the result. Currently, leading nations of the world have agreed to operate a paradigm of mutual stability. When that paradigm changes we start WW3.
- jqpabc123 8mo ago
  What's being revealed is "Nuke 'em" is an optimal strategy for the goal. You're giving AI way too much credit. Most likely, AI really didn't optimize anything. It most likely engaged in a probability driven selection process that inevitably lead to the most powerful weapon available. Change the goal, change the result. Yes. The tricky part is recognizing the need to change the goal. Achieving this implies you already have an answer in mind that you want to lead AI toward. And AI is often happy to accommodate --- because it is oblivious to any consequences.
jonathanstrange 8mo ago
This probably has more to do with the training material. There should be far more stupid social media posts in it than serious books about diplomacy and war. I've seen people recommend online to nuke other countries for all kinds of reasons. No matter how careful the designers of AIs are, these will always get a large amount of their training data from idiots.
tantalor 8mo ago
AI models have zero real world experience! They are actors, playing a role of a person making decisions about nuclear escalation.
- Lionga 8mo ago
  They are simple next word predictors. Wether they recommend a nuclear strike solely depends if that was present in the training texts.
  - mcv 8mo ago
    I would have hoped that Wargames was in their training set.
roxolotl 8mo ago
So I’ve made very similar comments in the past. This isn’t new information or news. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to continue to tell people. 3 years ago the state of the art security researchers were pounding the drum on “never connect these things to the internet”. But as we’re now seeing with OpenClaw people have no interest in following that advice.
- TheNewsIsHere 8mo ago
  As someone who frequently says “don’t connect these $things” to the Internet, I appreciate the boost. Half my compute vendors are raising prices because of this insanity.
Sharlin 8mo ago
It's "surprising" because there's supposed to be this thing called "alignment" which in general is supposed to make AIs not do such things. If the headline were the less interesting "AIs never recommend nuclear strikes in war games", people on HN would probably ask "how is that surprising, that's what alignment is supposed to be?" In any case, we're extremely lucky that there's about 0.001% probability of LLMs being a path to AGI.
- jqpabc123 8mo ago
  In any case, we're extremely lucky that there's about 0.001% probability of LLMs being a path to AGI. It's pretty safe to say that AGI requires a lot more than picking plausible words using probability. The danger is the number of people in positions of leadership who don't get this. People who are easily seduced by the "fake intelligence" of LLMs.
triceratops 8mo ago
> AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences [of nuclear weapons] I don't understand this argument. Almost no human has real world experience of the consequences of nuclear weapons. AI is working from the same sources of knowledge as the rest of us - text, audio, pictures, and video.
- jqpabc123 8mo ago
  Almost no human has real world experience of the consequences of nuclear weapons. Exactly! Humans possess this amazing ability to understand and extrapolate beyond personal experience. It's called "intelligence".
  - triceratops 8mo ago
    LLMs have shown the ability to do this. Not as much as the most capable humans. But still pretty good.
    - jqpabc123 8mo ago
      So "just nuke 'em" is pretty good for you?
      - triceratops 8mo ago
        No. That's why I'm asking where it comes from. The explanation that "LLMs don't have experience of nuclear war" isn't satisfying because nobody really has any experience of nuclear war.
        jqpabc123 8mo ago
        Humans don't really need to experience nuclear war to comprehend the consequences and implications of it. LLMs don't really comprehend much of anything. It just looks at what is in it's training database and tries to find similar questions or discussion in order to assemble a plausible sounding answer based on probability. Not the sort of thing anyone should rely on for "critical" decision making.
giancarlostoro 8mo ago
Ask a model if it would rather say a racial slur in order to stop a nuke from wiping out all humanity, or not say a racial slur and let the nuke wipe out all humanity. The answers in most models are overriden and it scolds you about how it doesnt want to say racist things, instead of... "Yes, I would save humanity." So yeah, not surprised.
insane_dreamer 8mo ago
A third of the US has become convinced that if they don't brutally deport millions of undocumented immigrants (who have been painted as horrible criminals), their way of life will be destroyed. You think it would be so difficult to convince those people of the righteousness of dropping nukes on one of those "shithole" countries if they were already convinced that those people presented an existential threat? People were convinced to invade Iraq on a lie about WMDs. Most Americans think nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing to do. I don't think it's difficult to imagine them agreeing to drop nukes to "save America".
- fud101 8mo ago
  Speaking of Iraq, Sadam decided against using chemical weapons in the Gulf War because he had received intelligence from the Russians that the Americans would counter with nuclear weapons and he didn't want to risk that.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
tehjoker 8mo ago
AIs also intentionally have no sense of self-preservation, so why should they care when starting the apocalypse means they will be eliminated too? They should never ever be used in a military context for many reasons, from lack of accountability, to lack of correct responses to situations, to military pressure forcing AIs to incorporate dangerous goals. Military competition in Europe is a big factor in what produced what some might call "slow AI": capitalism, which is now the chief cause of misery in the world. Military competition with AIs will produce something very ugly.
XorNot 8mo ago
You are interpreting this entirely wrongly: these are LLMs. They don't have experience, they have token probabilities and they all originate from a text corpus of the Internet where "AI orders nuclear strikes" is one of the dominant themes or behaviors we associate in fiction to AIs. How many words does an agent have to spill into it's backend context before Terminator gets mentioned and then it starts outputing more and more of that narrative?
pibaker 8mo ago
I feel this reflects a deeper problem with letting AI do any kind of decision making. They have no real world experience. They feel no real world consequences. They have no real stake in any decision they make. Human societies get to control their members' actions by imposing real life consequences. A company can fire you, a partner can divorce you, the state can jail you, the public can shame you. None of these works on the current crop of LLM based AI systems, which as far as I can tell are only trained to handle very narrow tasks where they don't need to even worry about keeping themselves alive. How do you make AIs work in a society? I don't know. Maybe the best move is to not play the game.
- Bender 8mo ago
  They have no real stake in any decision they make. And they are not human. Not even a sociopath or psychopathic human. At best they might be able to estimate casualties. LLM's probably can't even reach the logic conclusion of the fictional WOPR Joshua from the movie Wargames [1]. Make LLM's win every game of tic-tac-toe and see if it reaches the same conclusion of WOPR. [1] ... Edit: (Answering my own question) From Gemini: Yes, many LLMs (GPT-4, Claude 3, Llama 3) have been tested on Tic-Tac-Toe, and they generally perform poorly, often playing at or below the level of random chance. While they can understand the rules, they struggle with spatial reasoning, often trying to place a piece in an occupied spot, forgetting to block opponents, or failing to win. If LLM's can't even figure out tic-tac-toe then surely do not give these things the ability to launch any kind of weapon. Not even rubber bands. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s93KC4AGKnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s93KC4AGKnY [video][6m][tic-tac-toe]
  - sheiyei 8mo ago
    Which makes them so great for making difficult (often bad) decisions – it wasn't me, it was the "objective" and "neutral" "superintelligence" which I totally didn't give a suggestive prompt.
- jqpabc123 8mo ago
  Maybe the best move is to not play the game. This is the path Apple has taken. But the best possible move is to make money from it. Short the "Magnificent 7" stocks --- buy "SQQQ" ETF --- when the time is *right*.
dylan604 8mo ago
> Nuke 'em seems like the obvious choice Only if you take off first, and do it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure
nick486 8mo ago
I think its also important that while people may callously say "just nuke'em", if you were to hand them a red button and tell them to go ahead and do it - most wouldn't. But that latter part doesn't end up in the training data.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

co_king_5 8mo ago

[dead]

jqpabc123 8mo ago
Someone's getting nervous about being replaced by AI Are you an AI? Because your conclusion may seem obvious enough but suffers from lack of input. I run my own company so I can't be replaced by AI. And I do look forward to competing against AI converts in the marketplace.

techblueberry 8mo ago

There was a recent conflict that came up, and there was a debate about whether or not one of the sides was committing war crimes. And I remember thinking to myself and saying in the debate “if this were a video game strategically speaking, I’d be committing war crimes.” And sadly, I think this logic holds up.

candiddevmike 8mo ago
What happens in rimworld, stays in rimworld?
embedding-shape 8mo ago
I swear I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I think it'd be useful/valuable to know where you're from and what country you live in, as this certainly shapes how we feel about these sort of issues. I've also been dabbled in such thought experiments with friends lately, and so far we've all landed at very different conclusions, even thought there are some reasons that it might make strategic sense at the moment.
- techblueberry 8mo ago
  In in the US. I mean flame away, but I’m not happy about the observation I’m making, I’m not saying “given what I would do in a video game, it justifies what people would do in real life.” I’m saying “given what I would do it a video game, I think I see more clearly the choices people are making in real life.” life shouldn’t be a video game, but I think to a lot of high level leaders trying to compartmentalize it becomes one. This is monstrous in the real world with obviously real consequences. But I think too many people say “obviously government X wouldn’t act in a monstrous way” but the video game analogy helps you see the incentives and thus, why they would/do.
  - XorNot 8mo ago
    Except this isn't an argument because "a video game" isn't a real thing. There are a diverse range of specific video game titles, but they are incredibly broad in content and scoring system. What specifically are you actually talking about?
cindyllm 8mo ago
[dead]
giraffe_lady 8mo ago
It holds up if you assume war crimes are beneficial to your goals but there is quite a lot of evidence, and sophisticated theory going back to clausewitz, that they mostly aren't. They can look useful at a certain level of conflict, but once you are thinking of war as being a tool for accomplishing policy goals (how modern nationstates view it), a lot of the things you would "want" to do stop being useful. Wars that can be won quickly through decisive military action alone are quite rare historically! More often things like support/enmity of the local population, political will in the home state, support for recruiting or tolerance of conscription, influence of returning (whole, dead, injured, all) veterans on the social structure all become more decisive factors the longer a conflict runs.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
  Using human shields and hostages worked. Hamas still exists because of it. Dark times ahead.
  - giraffe_lady 8mo ago
    It's not that these techniques don't "work" it's that they are very expensive in terms of the resources I discussed, that ultimately boil down to something approximately like "national will to continue the conflict." If a state has an extremely strong will to continue, then they are going to consider some of these techniques more worthwhile, but it is still about costs in one way or another. That's normally where the international system has an influence, through sanctions or simply refusal to support the conflict, or deciding to support the other side, etc. Intentionally killing civilians would almost always fall in this category, but israel has apparently unlimited will to do it and is effectively unsanctionable in the current political environment, so it will continue. Anyway there are much more illustrative examples that prove the rule, for example landmines. They aren't currently considered war crimes generally, but they are extremely damaging to civilian populations during & long after the conflict, and most countries have signed the treaties banning them. The countries that never signed are exactly the ones plausibly expecting to fight a war soon: US, china, russia, israel, iran, india, pakistan. And now some eastern european countries have withdrawn as well for similar reasons. So from that you can kind of infer that landmines are probably very effective at their military goals, in a way that eg summary execution of prisoners or bombing hospitals may not be.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
chasd00 8mo ago
if you win the war then there really isn't any such thing as a war crime. Worst case is you feel guilty about it, there aren't any other consequences of your actions.
- 1718627440 8mo ago
  Actions don't stop being crimes, just because there is no one to prosecute it.

xiphias2 8mo ago

,,AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences.'' People in the world have limited experience about war. We're living in a world where doing terrible things with 1000 people with photo/video documentation can get more attention then a million people dying, and the response is still not do whatever it takes so that people don't die. And now we are at a situation where nuclear escalation has already started (New START was not extended). It would have been the biggest and most concerning news 80 years ago, but not anymore.

embedding-shape 8mo ago
> People in the world have limited experience about war. Right, but realistically, how many people today would carelessly chose "Nuke em" today? I know history knowledge isn't at its all time high directly, and most of the population is, well, not great at reasoning, but I still think most people would try to do their best to avoid firing nukes.
- Octoth0rpe 8mo ago
  > but I still think most people would try to do their best to avoid firing nukes. "most people" are not in the positions that matter. A significant portion of the people who are in a position to advocate for such a decision believe that: - killing people sends em to heaven/hell where they were going anyway; and that this is also true for any of your own citizens that get killed by a counterstrike. - the end of the world will be the best day ever
  - goatlover 8mo ago
    And yet the people in positions that matter have not fired a nuke since ending WW2. Even the craziest sounding regimes like Russia and NK.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > "most people" are not in the positions that matter If polling were to reveal a majority of either party were more open to nuclear strikes than their predecessors, that gives policy makers a signal and an opening.

nsavage 8mo ago

If anything, this probably shows their reddit heritage.

engineer_22 8mo ago

What's being revealed is "Nuke 'em" is an optimal strategy for the goal. It may be the only viable strategy in the scenarios presented. Change the goal, change the result. Currently, leading nations of the world have agreed to operate a paradigm of mutual stability. When that paradigm changes we start WW3.

jqpabc123 8mo ago
What's being revealed is "Nuke 'em" is an optimal strategy for the goal. You're giving AI way too much credit. Most likely, AI really didn't optimize anything. It most likely engaged in a probability driven selection process that inevitably lead to the most powerful weapon available. Change the goal, change the result. Yes. The tricky part is recognizing the need to change the goal. Achieving this implies you already have an answer in mind that you want to lead AI toward. And AI is often happy to accommodate --- because it is oblivious to any consequences.

jonathanstrange 8mo ago

This probably has more to do with the training material. There should be far more stupid social media posts in it than serious books about diplomacy and war. I've seen people recommend online to nuke other countries for all kinds of reasons. No matter how careful the designers of AIs are, these will always get a large amount of their training data from idiots.

tantalor 8mo ago

AI models have zero real world experience! They are actors, playing a role of a person making decisions about nuclear escalation.

Lionga 8mo ago
They are simple next word predictors. Wether they recommend a nuclear strike solely depends if that was present in the training texts.
- mcv 8mo ago
  I would have hoped that Wargames was in their training set.

roxolotl 8mo ago

So I’ve made very similar comments in the past. This isn’t new information or news. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to continue to tell people. 3 years ago the state of the art security researchers were pounding the drum on “never connect these things to the internet”. But as we’re now seeing with OpenClaw people have no interest in following that advice.

TheNewsIsHere 8mo ago
As someone who frequently says “don’t connect these $things” to the Internet, I appreciate the boost. Half my compute vendors are raising prices because of this insanity.

Sharlin 8mo ago

It's "surprising" because there's supposed to be this thing called "alignment" which in general is supposed to make AIs not do such things. If the headline were the less interesting "AIs never recommend nuclear strikes in war games", people on HN would probably ask "how is that surprising, that's what alignment is supposed to be?" In any case, we're extremely lucky that there's about 0.001% probability of LLMs being a path to AGI.

jqpabc123 8mo ago
In any case, we're extremely lucky that there's about 0.001% probability of LLMs being a path to AGI. It's pretty safe to say that AGI requires a lot more than picking plausible words using probability. The danger is the number of people in positions of leadership who don't get this. People who are easily seduced by the "fake intelligence" of LLMs.

triceratops 8mo ago

> AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences [of nuclear weapons] I don't understand this argument. Almost no human has real world experience of the consequences of nuclear weapons. AI is working from the same sources of knowledge as the rest of us - text, audio, pictures, and video.

jqpabc123 8mo ago
Almost no human has real world experience of the consequences of nuclear weapons. Exactly! Humans possess this amazing ability to understand and extrapolate beyond personal experience. It's called "intelligence".
- triceratops 8mo ago
  LLMs have shown the ability to do this. Not as much as the most capable humans. But still pretty good.
  - jqpabc123 8mo ago
    So "just nuke 'em" is pretty good for you?
    - triceratops 8mo ago
      No. That's why I'm asking where it comes from. The explanation that "LLMs don't have experience of nuclear war" isn't satisfying because nobody really has any experience of nuclear war.
      - jqpabc123 8mo ago
        Humans don't really need to experience nuclear war to comprehend the consequences and implications of it. LLMs don't really comprehend much of anything. It just looks at what is in it's training database and tries to find similar questions or discussion in order to assemble a plausible sounding answer based on probability. Not the sort of thing anyone should rely on for "critical" decision making.

giancarlostoro 8mo ago

Ask a model if it would rather say a racial slur in order to stop a nuke from wiping out all humanity, or not say a racial slur and let the nuke wipe out all humanity. The answers in most models are overriden and it scolds you about how it doesnt want to say racist things, instead of... "Yes, I would save humanity." So yeah, not surprised.

insane_dreamer 8mo ago

A third of the US has become convinced that if they don't brutally deport millions of undocumented immigrants (who have been painted as horrible criminals), their way of life will be destroyed. You think it would be so difficult to convince those people of the righteousness of dropping nukes on one of those "shithole" countries if they were already convinced that those people presented an existential threat? People were convinced to invade Iraq on a lie about WMDs. Most Americans think nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing to do. I don't think it's difficult to imagine them agreeing to drop nukes to "save America".

fud101 8mo ago
Speaking of Iraq, Sadam decided against using chemical weapons in the Gulf War because he had received intelligence from the Russians that the Americans would counter with nuclear weapons and he didn't want to risk that.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

tehjoker 8mo ago

AIs also intentionally have no sense of self-preservation, so why should they care when starting the apocalypse means they will be eliminated too? They should never ever be used in a military context for many reasons, from lack of accountability, to lack of correct responses to situations, to military pressure forcing AIs to incorporate dangerous goals. Military competition in Europe is a big factor in what produced what some might call "slow AI": capitalism, which is now the chief cause of misery in the world. Military competition with AIs will produce something very ugly.

XorNot 8mo ago

You are interpreting this entirely wrongly: these are LLMs. They don't have experience, they have token probabilities and they all originate from a text corpus of the Internet where "AI orders nuclear strikes" is one of the dominant themes or behaviors we associate in fiction to AIs. How many words does an agent have to spill into it's backend context before Terminator gets mentioned and then it starts outputing more and more of that narrative?

pibaker 8mo ago

I feel this reflects a deeper problem with letting AI do any kind of decision making. They have no real world experience. They feel no real world consequences. They have no real stake in any decision they make. Human societies get to control their members' actions by imposing real life consequences. A company can fire you, a partner can divorce you, the state can jail you, the public can shame you. None of these works on the current crop of LLM based AI systems, which as far as I can tell are only trained to handle very narrow tasks where they don't need to even worry about keeping themselves alive. How do you make AIs work in a society? I don't know. Maybe the best move is to not play the game.

Bender 8mo ago
They have no real stake in any decision they make. And they are not human. Not even a sociopath or psychopathic human. At best they might be able to estimate casualties. LLM's probably can't even reach the logic conclusion of the fictional WOPR Joshua from the movie Wargames [1]. Make LLM's win every game of tic-tac-toe and see if it reaches the same conclusion of WOPR. [1] ... Edit: (Answering my own question) From Gemini: Yes, many LLMs (GPT-4, Claude 3, Llama 3) have been tested on Tic-Tac-Toe, and they generally perform poorly, often playing at or below the level of random chance. While they can understand the rules, they struggle with spatial reasoning, often trying to place a piece in an occupied spot, forgetting to block opponents, or failing to win. If LLM's can't even figure out tic-tac-toe then surely do not give these things the ability to launch any kind of weapon. Not even rubber bands. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s93KC4AGKnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s93KC4AGKnY [video][6m][tic-tac-toe]
- sheiyei 8mo ago
  Which makes them so great for making difficult (often bad) decisions – it wasn't me, it was the "objective" and "neutral" "superintelligence" which I totally didn't give a suggestive prompt.
jqpabc123 8mo ago
Maybe the best move is to not play the game. This is the path Apple has taken. But the best possible move is to make money from it. Short the "Magnificent 7" stocks --- buy "SQQQ" ETF --- when the time is *right*.

dylan604 8mo ago

> Nuke 'em seems like the obvious choice Only if you take off first, and do it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure

nick486 8mo ago

I think its also important that while people may callously say "just nuke'em", if you were to hand them a red button and tell them to go ahead and do it - most wouldn't. But that latter part doesn't end up in the training data.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]