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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 think the best way to do some of this is just for the AI not to talk at all. If you go watch the original Blade Runner, Deckard speaks to his computer to enhance a photo. The computer never speaks back. What I'm imagining is just straight-up removing the chatbot feature from AIs [obviously not from AI chatbots, I guess, presumably there will be a use for these]. This wouldn't mean they couldn't communicate. For instance, if I say "Fable, vibe-code a Call of Duty knockoff for me," Fable could just do it and then provide me with an annotated features list in the game folder (which is more helpful than paragraphs of blather anyway). Then, if you want to change something, you read the notes like a human being and provide a list of changes. In my experience, Copilot is already kinda like this, except it often refuses to do what I ask without asking needless clarifying questions. The bottom line is that the AI would not pretend to have "an opinion," it would be a machine that follows instructions. It would make a voter guide for you, but it wouldn't tell you who to vote for. If you did something like that (or asked it to hack the Pentagon, or something) you'd get one of those flashing red error messages and a "beep" like from a 1980s movie.
This also has the slightly salutary effect of saving the consumer compute you're not having an AI go on for paragraphs about whatever they've done. But the real point is to reinforce for the user that it is dealing with a machine. And given that I suspect that purpose-built models tend to be better at their purpose than generalist models anyway, there's potentially lots of uses for models that don't "talk back."
I don't think AI chatbots are going away and I find asking them their opinions pretty fun, so this is not necessarily a gripe about AI. Rather, I think this is a much better way to solve the "let's not outsource our opinions to AI" problem than some sort of limp-wristed "are you sure that's what you want" 'guardrail' that the AI companies would slap onto their product if you asked them for it.
Unfortunately I suspect a lot of the pro-AI people kinda want to outsource their opinions to AI so that might be something of an uphill battle.
I like this point, but I think it has more to do with the latency of communication. The immediacy of the chat interface is the issue, not communication itself; the immediacy creates a stronger sense of intimacy and interactivity. It should be more like email: you email the LLM a task or question, and some period of time later (probably on the order of 30 min or so is enough to break the psychological offloading aspect) you get whatever artifacts it produced, and it encourages you to think about and digest what the LLM generated before moving on to the next thing. Maybe, if the LLM has clarifying questions etc, it could respond back in 5 minutes instead.
I do think this could help with this angle, but a slower response is probably not as important as one that does not seem like a person on the internet.
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