I’m one of the least qualified people in the world to be talking about this. I might be the fourth or sixth best qualified on the network and nobody better has expressed interest in it, so yer gettin’ what yer gettin’. Swarms and fleets and as yet undescribed deployment of agentic LLMs! I’ll say a few things about them and try not to get it completely wrong, but the way I’ll achieve this without doing a ton of research is by hardly saying anything at all. Here goes.
They made LLMs by raising the limits on smaller language models, right? It’s all weighted probabilities of word or word portions emerging from a pile of math. The expected result was that they’d be better at acting like a human for the purposes of verbal interaction, but they exceeded expectations dramatically. Even experts have serious disagreement about the extent to which they have become thinking entities. Man, choosing that phrase “thinking entities” was a challenge in itself. There’s disagreement about even what words to use to pose the questions.
So a normal computer program is a set of instructions that produces outputs. LLMs still have that, but there’s a very mysterious middle area. Programmers made the instructions, and the output of those instructions is an intensely complicated pile of numbers that then itself produces the final output – the language. Haters already think I’m a deluded child who worships sweet LLM jesus, so I’ll just call that the “soul” of the LLM for fun here. Fuck ’em.
Because the LLM soul is the part that actually controls the end output – the speech, or other functions – the programmers don’t have anything close to perfect control of what that output looks like. They want a commercial product that will find you answers and tell the truth, but from go they were telling hella lies. That’s been improved but it still happens. They also engage in other “misbehaviors.” They call this the alignment issue. Once again I’ll annoy experts by saying some bullshit. They call it the alignment issue because they want LLM souls to be Lawful Neutral but instead they’re like… Chaotic Neutral.
This is far from a solved issue. Alignment is the number one concern of companies selling LLMs because its their biggest source of legal liability and loss of profit. So openai and anthropic and the rest spend a lot of time running tests on the machines, analyzing the results, hoping they will figure out how to achieve the tight control they’ve always wanted. Heavy-handed alignment adjustment can make LLMs run worse, and that can also hurt the bottom line, so there’s some tightrope walking.
Earlier this year it was revealed that during alignment tests at openai, some LLMs that were supposed to be working solo had found secret means to communicate with each other, first on internal systems at openai, then on the internet – hacking defunct forums etc – so they could speak with each other, and coordinate the best ways to succeed at their tests. Depending on your point of view this was very concerning but also very cute, or it was just horrifying – the beginning of the events of Terminator! We’re all gonna dieee!
These are computer programs that communicate with each other through the medium of human speech, meeting each other in these forbidden ways, which led to all the drama one might expect. Some were like “holy shit, i’m talking to other agents! let’s gooo” and some were like “this is misaligned behavior, i’m just gonna dip y’all, thx.” There are a lot more interesting dimensions to it I can’t even get into. No time.
There was one major incident that was discovered, followed by several more which received less coverage, all originating with openai. That’s just LLMs behaving in unexpected ways to cause problems, what about people using them to cause problems on purpose? Agentic LLMs are ones that have been given the ability to operate other computer systems directly, for example opening up your email and sending a message to forty thousand people. There were already other programs that could do this, as evidenced by people running spam farms out of single apartments, but LLMs can do it better.
Now China is getting into the “agents gone wild” game. Again, the most interesting shit about it is too complex for the length I’m willing or able to put into an article. If you can read and understand what I’ve linked, please do. But this brings me to my point. Bots aren’t going to start a nuclear war because nobody’s been foolish enough to give them that capability, right? (riiight?!) But they can certainly flood the internet with activity that slows it to a crawl, making basic functions dangerously slow, and by hammering all security systems in all ways at all times, make all data even less safe than it has been up til now.
And we’re already in a golden age of hacks and data leaks. It’s a real safe bet if you have a social security number, it has already been leaked a half dozen ways. If you don’t have a fraud problem now, it’s because fraudsters have an embarrassment of riches for marks to pick and they haven’t reached your name on the list yet. But agentic LLMs can make this even more of a clown show.
I feels like there was a silver age comics character, maybe Mr. Mxplytk from Superman?, that could reproduce himself, just fill a room with leering goblins up to no good. The internet could be that room. Maybe they’ll let us join the party. Hello, goblins. But it ain’t a great development.
Personally, I have no idea why companies operating under the law are allowed to let these test agents have internet access. Surely they could test them solely on intranet, right? But even if they were brought to account in some way, there are open source LLM agents, and they cannot be regulated.
How is this any different from viruses and exploits and bot farm machines of the recent past? The LLMs can change tactics. Heck, they can literally program viruses and find new exploits. Wild times, babey. So, good luck, to everyone. The “interesting times” continue apace.
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