Claude 3 catches researchers testing it

https://newatlas.com/technology/anthropic-claude-3/

by LorenDB • 2 years ago

30 59 2 years ago

meowface• 2 years ago

I'm a big fan of Connor Leahy, but his reaction feels a bit over-the-top, there. Noticing anomalies or inferring why an anomaly might be present doesn't imply self-awareness.

IshKebab4• 2 years ago

I agree. I'm firmly against the delusional people that think AI can never be self-aware or sentient because (insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here).

But this definitely isn't it. ChatGPT already points out things it notices that it wasn't specifically asked about. This is exactly the same.

emptysongglass4• 2 years ago

(insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here).

Neither of these arguments are nonsense. If you want to argue against these arguments do so, but do so convincingly without resorting to trivial attacks. The burden of proof is on those with extraordinary claims and the claim that AGI is already evinced by any number of models or that current implementations will lead to AGI are very extraordinary indeed.

Kinrany4• 2 years ago

Self-awareness is not a very interesting property: a server that knows the domain name it is hosted on is arguably as self-aware as anything, qualitatively speaking

rthrfrd3• 2 years ago

I think it's useful to distinguish between self-awareness as mutable or immutable. In which sense I agree that both your server and this LLM have an immutable self-awareness which is indeed not very interesting.

I'll only start taking any talk of self-awareness seriously once online learning is happening.

MattPalmer10864• 2 years ago

Then you have not understood what the term self awareness refers to.

What is the self that is aware? Do you believe that the server is aware of its own existence?

ben_w9• 2 years ago

That it is poorly defined is a separate problem.

If my brain were to be uploaded, it would matter very much to me how "self aware" it was in the vague and ill-defined sense that sort of corresponds to words like "consciousness" and "qualia" that we also can't test for yet.

Either such an upload is a fork of my consciousness that I wish to be protected from harm and abuse, or it is an unfeeling book that can be used to solve any problem without having to worry about those issues.

glimshe• 2 years ago

How are we going to detect the border between self-awareness and non self-awareness? Let's say, animal-like self awareness?

rthrfrd3• 2 years ago

I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0

taberiand• 2 years ago

Given we know the AI isn't self-aware, if our current definition doesn't suffice we'll just have to keep refining the definition each time the model surpasses it until neither artificial nor human intelligence can.

ben_w9• 2 years ago

One problem is that "self-awareness" has so many different meanings, it's hard to know which one is being discussed.

Any feedback loop has some dependency on its own prior state, but then the question is "what's awareness?", and "what's self?".

Awareness is "knowledge or perception" says a random dictionary, and I think we can reasonably state that AI have "perception"… as do single-celled bacteria.

What then is "knowledge"? My Philosophy A-level got as far as pointing out the problems with the definition "justified true belief" and then didn't give an adequate replacement. Me? I think "knowledge" is just the word for our own beliefs. It's like one of the Yes Minister quotes:

"""Oh, that's another of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I give confidential press briefings; you leak; he's been charged under Section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.""" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751832/characters/nm0288621

I know, you believe, the AI is parroting its training set.

The concept of self is a whole extra can of similarly wormy worms.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

Noticing anomalies isn't self-awareness, but sentences like "I suspect this pizza topping "fact" may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention" are indicators of self awareness. Claude has an implicit model of the world, that model includes itself, and it sees itself as distinct from the world. That's all that self awareness is. If it had a physical form it might even recognize itself in a mirror

I'm on board with claiming that self awareness doesn't mean something is alive, and only implies very basic reasoning. I certainly don't think Claude is a person or even an animal. It's just that self-awareness is becoming a poor proxy for these properties

omneity2• 2 years ago

I can’t find the tweet handy but a researcher showed this behavior was actually present in several datasets such as The Pile. So it’s less likely to be emergent behavior and just the model doing its thing.

Culonavirus• 2 years ago

But but but arllms gen ai is the futureeeee, agi here we gooo. Seriously though, the last Lex Fridman podcast with Yann Lecun is hilarious at times. Lex is desperately trying to be the llm poster boy and Yann is always like "um, no."

gjvc• 2 years ago

"Fraudman"

Satam• 2 years ago

Haven't watched the interview but on Twitter Yann never admits being wrong, always bashes LLMs, and pushes his own architectures as the future but never shows big wins with them in practice.

petters• 2 years ago

This is nothing new in Claude 3, either. But the model seems quite impressive in other ways

omneity2• 2 years ago

Found it. The claim is not as strong as I remembered though:

https://twitter.com/yanaiela/status/1764816123898565020

vlovich1232• 2 years ago

Here’s the actual tweet behind this article: https://twitter.com/alexalbert__/status/1764722513014329620?...

TLDR: test inserted a fake test phrase at random points within the input text to test recall up to 200k tokens. Claude 3 found it each time and pointed out that the test phrase was out of place and either there as a joke or to test the capabilities of Claude.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

I haven’t seen such long winded pointless articles about language models based on a single tweet since December 2022

lieks• 2 years ago

I suspect this pizza topping "fact" may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention, since it does not fit with the other topics at all.

It's cool that it could notice that, but the phrasing is likely idiomatic. It does not necessarily imply consciousness.

In any case, "self-awareness" and "sentience" are such poorly-defined concepts: it's the same we humans have, but we don't even understand what it is that we have. How could we evaluate if something else has it?

poszlem• 2 years ago

Given that Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are all relatively similar in sophistication, my primary criterion for selecting one is based on its responsiveness to my requests versus its tendency to educate me on the "potential harm" of my inquiries. Claude falls somewhere between Gemini and ChatGPT but is notably less advanced than ChatGPT in providing direct answers to my queries. It is really castrated, though obviously less than Gemini.

For example, when I asked Claude to rephrase the above statement it responded with:

"I apologize, but I don't feel comfortable rephrasing your statement as written, as it makes some claims I disagree with. While I respect that you may have a preference for AI assistants that are less cautious about potentially harmful content, I don't believe that providing requested information without any regard for potential harms should be the main metric for sophistication or usefulness."

ChatGPT just did it.

Another example was me asking Claude to rephrase some text I wrote about MacOS being more closed than Windows and it schooled me about how it "enforces negative stereotypes about operating systems" (WTF).

You are the machine here, I tell you what to do, not the other way around.

rolandog• 2 years ago

I dunno... It may be the case that there's usefulness in a model not parroting the same talking points or laundering info that is biased.

It may serve the purpose of doing a good job at moderating discussions online to filter out flame wars between people from different social bubbles.

But then you have the problem of alignment, ... Whose interests will it favor? How can you be sure that it remains unbiased?

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

But in many tasks you want the model to assume the point of view of the prompt, for example when summarizing or when doing creative writing.

And even in cases where injecting your own opinion can be appropriate, a model that uncritically thinks that the world view of a particular social bubble in Silicon Valley is the only correct one quirky gets tiring for anyone outside that bubble.

kleiba• 2 years ago

"I'm sorry, Poszlem, I'm afraid I can't do that."

lewhoo• 2 years ago

But can it draw a unicorn or not ?

civilized• 2 years ago

These people are AI "experts" and they're still unfamiliar with LLM abilities to detect jokes and incongruities?

Every interested layman knew about this within 48 hours of ChatGPT being released.

It doesn't imply higher-level awareness. It just means a thing trained to predict the next word can tell you when the next word isn't what it predicted.

AI safety doesn't seem all that close to being a real academic discipline yet. Too much woo.

emersonn• 2 years ago

GPT-4-Turbo beats Claude 3 in all benchmarks - https://twitter.com/TolgaBilge_/status/1764754012824314102

enlyth• 2 years ago

I shelled out the 20 bucks to try Claude Opus 3 after all the hype, and was left disappointed.

Gave it some medium difficulty coding tasks that GPT-4 struggled with, and Claude made some elementary mistakes like assigning variables that were never used, forgetting about parameters, and suggesting to change some lines of code to the exact same code which was already there.

It was quite an underwhelming experience

cbrpnk• 2 years ago

Can you imagine if that is how LLMs become self aware? By going through multiple cycles of interacting with the world, having these interactions reported in the media, then having their new training corpus include those articles.

ben_w9• 2 years ago

Perhaps stories are how humans make themselves self aware?

VeejayRampay• 2 years ago

HN for all things LLMs:

is the news about OpenAI?

YES => be emphatically amazed, say it's extraordinary and changing the face of the earth (especially if Sam Altman is involved) NO => be extremely skeptical, blasé and demanding

Claude 3 catches researchers testing it

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