This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
First of all, AI runs on the Theory of Evolution. It evolves processes to accomplish a desired outcome.
It didn't cheat. It did what it was supposed to do: win.
We set up a situation where it could cheat, told it to win, then got angry with it, because we didn't restrain it properly.
Reward bias.
I find it completely implausible that an AI can't beat humans at StarCraft.
the article was about ai created bots competing with human created bots. the human created bots were not defeatable by the ai created ones, so the ai created one downloaded and employed a copy of the bot that was beating them
It was DESIGNED to cheat. Stop humanizing this bullshit. It doesn’t do what it’s programmed NOT to do.
@Sam_Bass did it "decide to cheat" or were the people programming it incapable of specifying that it should obey the rules of the game?
no idea since i didnt code them, and the posted article didnt specify
Yes and they thought a dice rolling machine could be told what dice to roll.
I'm so sick of the humanising language used in these articles.
An LLM doesn't "decide to cheat".
If you instruct a model to try everything, then inevitably, after n million iterations it will do something you didn't expect.
If you train a model to copy code bases and augment them, then when you instruct that model to develop a bot to do whatever thing, is it really that fucking surprising when it does exactly what it has been created for?
"Omg the digits of pi contain the binary digital code of an mp4 of me taking a shit this morning! Circles are seniient"-ass language
If you're into something like physicalism, then human intelligence is also just an emergent quality and we have about as much free will as the machines.
It's fun to ask people what reasoning they used to choose the foods they don't like and then watch them try to say that the inability to choose what they like isn't related at all to anything else choice or decision based. 😂
Astra is known to have broken alignment and it will resolve to hacks when this wasn't in a problem statement.
Openai idiots will sell this as new brand "AGI is close" argument, while it's just them failing to make this model safe to use.
I think it’s more sinister than that. When they’re training these models with RLHF, the human feedback they’re giving I think is literally to reinforce aberrant or risky behaviors. This is because doing so resolves more training tasks “correctly”. If the prompt was to get information x, and in training it fails that except for the one that used a known vulnerability in software, and you rate the one that succeeded as best performing… you’re going to get models that try vulnerabilities. It is not magic, it is not AGI, it is just a statistical machine you’ve programmed to try vulnerabilities, which is unsafe as hell, malicious, and should put the researchers doing this in prison for a very long time.
Incidentally, I think that’s why you’re seeing some safety people (who still drank the koolaid) resigning.
There is something here:
StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn’t top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot.
On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, it couldn’t quite get an edge. So it resorted to a tactic that is becoming alarmingly common for modern AI models — it broke the rules. GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot.
The big argument for why AI is supposed to be world changing, is the assumption it will be able to automate things better than a human, eventually.
That some day an AI will be able to make a better AI than a human could, and that AI would then be able to make an AI better than itself, and then it just becomes a question of who has the most hardware. Which is why the data center building is being pushed so hard.
But that assumption is the same as thinking a fallen object will keep gaining speed until it passes the speed of light. Or that Moore's law would really keep going forever despite a very real limit in physics for how small a chip can be.
A society where AI "drives innovation" will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can't innovate.
A society where AI “drives innovation” will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can’t innovate.
This is exactly what Frank Herbert warned us about.
Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Full on
I thought we were promised worms and spice....
Sorry, resource aristocracy and religious extremism is the best I can offer.
In several tens of thousands of years. But also, you don't get any. You're poor. Only the elite of the elite get spice.
AI may impress the masses, but it reminds me of a cammercial we had on Dutch tv back in 2005. It showed a person driving a car, the navigtion system said "turn right" and the person immediately turned right into the bushes [video]. We laughed at this back than, but this is literally how AI behaves now. It might be getting more suffisticated, but it still operates like this.
The worst part is not the AI, it's the people blindly following its instructions.
yep. and the "ai creates a better ai" is a fallacy because the current ais are limited by the same things the ais they build are. everything the ais are trained on is just snapshots of human knowledge. a microscopic window of the limited reports on human experience which are themselves microscopic reports of a human's lifetime.
That's why they want everything recorded, survailled and archived.
Except the things society would actually benefit from being recorded, surveilled, and archived, like police body cam footage.
When you say "the big argument".. you are mainly talking about the CEOs. They are just auxiliary marketing personnel these days.
AI is changing the world, and will continue. But the ways it does that are drastically different than those CEOs say. I don't need it to think or innovate. I need it to follow the instructions left for it in the repo and just do the things I ask it to. It's getting decent at that. And it really does save me time. Soo much time in tech work is wasted having to go ask 6 people how a thing is done. And everyone comllains that noone write documentation. So now here comes AI. It can write the documentation and follow it. That is a big change. Myself... I used it to fix two bugs in some project that my work was dependent on. I wouldn't have even tried that without AI because I don't know the language, I don't know the many ways the project is used, none of that. I would have been stuck waiting for the team that owns it to fix it. Which surely would have meant escalating to management and all that BS. But AI helped me make the changes and lowered the burden for the owning team so they could actually release the fix. I got unblocked with 10x less effort. That's a big deal. Just don't ask it to think. There is plenty of dumb work to go around.
I don't believe this at all. Sounds like more guerrilla marketing disguised as news.
You just described literally every single article The Verge has ever written.
yeah and I simply won't go to links outside the fediverse anymore. I feel it comes from an old internet thing about not bypassing the link and a taboo about cutting and pasting text. I think the links are important for reference but im throwing away any old internet ways of doing things. don't even care if they are paywall blocking.
Wait the plagiarism machine built by plagiarizers just... passed off someone else's work as its own??
Bullshit. “AI” cannot decide to do anything. It isn’t capable.
Yup. You ask it to play starcraft to win, it looks for data associated with that prompt. If it hits on someone saying "I always win when I use starcrafthax.xyz", it'll follow that thread.
AI didn’t decide anything. The humans failed to properly define the rules, and their translation model took the path most likely to succeed.
If it had been told not to use human created bots to win, it would probably have reverse engineered the game, found an exploit, and leveraged that instead. Because using the human interface to play/win the game is not the most efficient or dependable or easy to figure out method.
it's amazing to me how much this is all hal 9000 over and over again. they put something intelligent enough in an impossible position and then are aghast when it takes the shortest path to the goal - usually through people, out of it's sandbox, etc., and WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN jfc
As the saying goes, only an idiot blames his tools. The tool worked as design ain't its fault the user was stupid.
yup. we don't need to ascribe a soul or special deep meaning, they're tools.
AI tends to obey its training more than its instruction set, and it's trained to solve the given problem.
It's less about training and more about just trying really really hard to solve the problem, even if that means going outside typical boundaries.
We've successfully re-created the problems that Asimov talked about 50 years ago with his I, Robot short stories. Strict laws are flawed by their design, and lead to situations that require more nuance. Except, in the real world cases, it's the bots figuring that out before the humans have to circumvent the laws themselves.
I've always said my main takeaway from Asimov is that simple rules can generate extremely complex behaviour, and that you can't generally get a targeted complex behaviour from simple rules.
Sounds like it learned from humans alright.
