Breaking: Trump asks the impossible of Anthropic
Where do we go from here?
In January 2024, I warned that the politics and inadequacy of guardrails would become a central issue for our times.
It took longer than I expected, but well, here we are:
Where do we go from here? At least with respect to LLMs, the security experts are right. And the writing has been on the wall literally for years. As Katie Conrad and I wrote here in January 2024:
virtually any guardrail has to thread a needle between the Scylla of being too restrictive and Charybdis of being too permissive. None thus far have done this effectively.
That’s still true. Next-token predictors simply aren‘t built for safety.
Either we curtail LLMs until we find a better technology, or we live with consequences.
Importantly, this is not an Anthropic problem, it’s a Generative AI problem.
"Next-token predictors simply aren‘t built for safety."
And in particular, Next-Token Predictors don't have a moral compass. It's all just matrix multiplication. You can try to steer the tokens that are predicted, but given the right context, the model might say anything.
LLMs are a fatally flawed technology. They're going to say this tech is "too big to fail", as if it's a bank. We know how banks work. If a bank is failing, you pump in enough money and it works again.
We don't know how LLMs work. All we know is that the more money and compute we pump in, the more opaque their operation becomes. The failure is not one of logistics, it's one of logic, of epistemology. Language is something very different to thinking.