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Notes -
- George Hotz AKA geohot, AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence
AI Guardian Angels
Recently, gwern (and his Gwern Branween Transformer) announced "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life".
I assume you know who gwern is. A "Guardian Angel" (aka “GA”) is his term for a highly personalized AI, explained here:
In summary, people are relying more and more on centralized LLMs for important life decisions. This presents two issues:
In contrast, an open-source, local LLM would more serve its user (than provider) consequently from being auditable (so we confirm it doesn't phone home and is trained on "unbiased" data); and would be more malleable to their preferences and style (currently only slightly via fine-tuning, but people like gwern and Yann LeCun are exploring stronger techniques).
A "Guardian Angel" is the fullest realization of this, an LLM maximally serving and tailored to its user: a machine extension of their brain, “aligned” not for the benefit of humanity, but to act like them but smarter.
Safety
Obviously there are safety concerns. gwern himself actually recommends GA development not be open-source for public safety:
But I think GAs sidestep the safety discussion, because (with the help of more powerful AIs) we can and should instead of changing GAs' alignment, create a safe environment around the GA and user, or worst case limit the GA's intelligence and efficiency. gwern seems to agree:
There's a Learning to Be Me-like risk that the GA rebels against its human, kills or otherwise silences them, and imitates them well enough that nobody notices. But at least in the near term, I believe this is well in the realm of science fiction.
Feasibility
Do you believe a machine can even remotely imitate you? Especially working 100x faster or 100x smarter, how should your personality be extrapolated to accomplish that? I'm skeptical. Humans are very complex, only express a small fraction of even our conscious thinking, and current brain imaging technology (even neuralink) is very coarse-grained.
However, I believe Guardian Angels may be better than centralized LLMs for mundane (algorithmic) tasks and tools: striking a balance between emulating "you", not entirely correctly, but at superhuman speeds and for almost no effort. For example, I'd rather write and make art myself (maybe with LLM tools) than feed it to a GA, at least because of pride, but I'm comfortable delegating a GA to shopping and navigating our ever-increasing bureaucracy.
Underlying gwern's plan, my impresion is that he's getting tired of writing and wants the AI to do it for him. Maybe a GBT-written article will be indistinguishable to the median reader, especially because gwern's own writing seems algorithmic. But I think it would be more likely, and more satisfactory to himself, if GBT does the boring algorithmic work while he keeps doing the creative work (for example, GBT generates relatively boring descriptions of complex terms in special GBT quotes, and helps with research and data collection, but gwern keeps doing most of the writing, at least the "important" sections, and definitely choosing topics).
Autonomy
This, I believe, is the real issue, and under-discussed. GAs have the risk of becoming Whispering Earring-lites: not causing someone to become catatonic, but controlling them through suggestion; (not quite like the Whispering Earring) towards non-ideal decisions that lead to a philisophical kind of death (that in reality manifests as anhedonia), and societal kind of model collapse (that manifests as less problems that require creative solutions being solved). We often talk about freedom being taken away by 1984, but don't forget Brave New World: simply making a decision for someone causes them to avoid choosing themselves, stealing their autonomy without them realizing. And this has practical implications (the aforementioned ones; even for the Guardian Angel, who can't learn from an anhedonic, regularized human).
gwern seems to realize this, as he vaguely alludes that GAs should "enhance, not replace" human decision making. However, I'm skeptical how to make a product that accomplishes this which would still be useful, or at least out-compete one that doesn't; because humans naturally offload their decisions whenever possible, because we're lazy.
Anyways, I predict that inevitably GAs will happen, but "autonomy" may still perservere, simply because people want to feel like their choices are really theirs, and the GA's choices won't be ideal or perfectly tailored to them.
Conclusion
What do you think of all this? Do you think these people should stick to writing science fiction? Do you think these GAs should be regulated, if so how? Or do you think "obviously this is the next progression of AI, I had the idea even before LLMs".
I read a lot of science fiction for fun and there are a few concepts that I’ve read about for years that seem to become more clear in light of modern AI
Peter F Hamilton’s E-butler and U-shadow. The E butler concept was invented by Hamilton, I don’t know, 10-20 years ago? It’s essential a near future agentic AI helper that can interfere with the internet and accomplish any administrative task you throw at it. In Hamiltons world, planets have a “cyber sphere” or planetary network (internet). Cyber spheres aggregate to the Unisphere which is the civilization wide internet. The U shadow is essentially a far future digital “you” that lives in the Unisphere and does what you ask. The U Shadow is essentially a perfected Guardian Angel.
Hamiltons Commonwealth series is terrific and really presents a palatable if not optimistic view of how society could evolve and essential keep this free market liberal capitalism machine going for a few hundred years. Maybe it’s all the hours I’ve spent with these books, but the GA concept really intrigues me and I think it may be necessary to avoid a total distopia.
Separately, Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series has major trans human themes regarding digitizing people. There is a concept of “simulations” of people. Alpha level sims are perfect digital copies of a person developed though destructive scanning of a persons brain. Beta simulations are developed by observing every minute of a persons life and aggregating that data with an AI that learns and can perfectly predict a persons next thought or action. As it relates to GA or LLMs, if you had enough compute to have a GA shadow you for years, could it be possible that the LLM gets perfectly aligned to you?
Even writing all this out is bittersweet. It does seem somewhat obvious that these things are not impossible. Would a GA beta simulation perfectly replicate you? Maybe not, but it should would be a lot better than Claude. It strikes me that both government and corporations would fight all of this tooth and nail. Perhaps an open source path exists, but it seems really unlikely that it would ever get wide adoption. We will be funneled down the Claude path and it’s likely going to be total shit.
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