I am playing with it, sandboxed in an isolated environment, only interacting with a local LLM and only connected to one public service with a burner account. I haven’t even given it any personal info, not even my name.
It’s super fascinating and fun, but holy shit the danger is outrageous. Multiple occasions, it’s misunderstood what I’ve asked and it will fuck around with its own config files and such. I’ve asked it to do something and the result was essentially suicide as it ate its own settings. I’ve only been running it for like a week but have had to wipe and rebuild twice already (probably could have fixed it, but that’s what a sandbox is for). I can’t imagine setting it loose on anything important right now.
But it is undeniably cool, and watching the system communicate with the LLM model has been a huge learning opportunity.
Curious, are you having it do anything useful? If it could be trusted, a local Ai assistant would benefit from access to many facets of personal data. Once upon a time I had a trusted admin - I gave her my cc info, key fob, calendar and email access and it was amazing. She could schedule things for me, have my car taken to the shop, maintain my calendar etc. Trust of course is the key here, but it would be great to have even a small taste of that kind of help again.
Nope, nothing useful. Right now I am playing with making some skills to do some rudimentary network testing. I figure it’s always nice to have a remote system to ping or nslookup or check a website from a remote location. I have it hooked to a telegram bot (burner account and restricted to just me) and I can ask it to ping or get me a screenshot or speedtest, etc. from anything it can reach on the internet.
Only purpose right now is to have something to show off :).
There’s a story about a guy who asked his LLM to remind him to do something in the morning, and it ended up burning quite a lot of money checking to see if daylight had broken once every 30 minutes with an unnecessary API call. Such is the supposed helpful assistant.
That story was about a guy paying to use an API for a flagship model (like 200 billion parameters).
I think these people are talking about self-hosting a local model (probably like 12-32 billion parameters depending on your hardware), which means no API, no payments, and more personal control over settings and configuration.
Thousands of open-source models are freely available on huggingface, and you can even make your own fine-tuned version based on an existing one using any datasets you choose.
Still no point in using an AI agent to do what a basic alarm/reminder could do, but it allows people to innovate their own ways to integrate them into specific workflows. You can even configure them to play minecraft, just as an example
Reminds me of a quote from Small Gods (1992) about an eagle that drops vulnerable tortoises to break their shell open:
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection. One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.
the LLM model
the Local Language Model model?
lol, straight from the redundant department of redundancies.
I do words good.
It’s nice to see articles that push back against the myth of AI superintelligence. A lot of people who brand themselves as “AI safety experts” preach this ideology as if it is a guaranteed fact. I’ve never seen any of them talk about real life present issues with AI, though.
(The superintelligence myth is a promotion strategy; OpenAI and Anthropic both lean into it because they know it boosts their stocks.)
In the case of Moldbook or FaceClaw or whatever they’re calling it, a lot of the AGI talk is sillier than ever, frankly. Many people who register their bots have become entirely lost in their own sauce, convinced that because their bots are speaking in the first person, that they’ve somehow come alive:
It’s embarrassing, really. People promoting the industry have every incentive to exaggerate their claims on Twitter for the revenue, but some of them are starting to buy into it.
Thankfully Steinberger is the first to deny that this is AGI.
We’re strike my midnight soon.
There’s something uniquely dystopian about people rushing out to buy a new computer that costs hundreds of dollars just to run an AI chatbot that could go out of style next week.
Granted, they’re doing it so it doesn’t mess up their local hardware, but why would you even have that risk on the same Wi-Fi network?
