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Firstly, abstractions are inherently flawed. I can liken UK politics to game of thrones but it's obvious that warring factions of iron age aristocrats with dragons are deeply dissimilar to a post-industrial gaggle of media elites. Some elements are similar in that there are plots and betrayals and conflict. But the two are only hazily similar. On one or two axes there is value to be drawn from the analogy. But on the other 50 axes the comparison is laughable.
If I had to, LLM agents behave most similarly to people, given their intellectual abilities. That is their primary distinguishing quality. But they're also disembodied, non-continuous learners (even flies have continuous learning), detached from time and are deeply unlike all organic life.
Why would anyone think that we could understand agent swarms by looking at swarms of bees or viruses? Bees exist rooted in space and time, within individual bodies. Bees reproduce sexually. Bee species don't differ in size from eachother by 10,000x. Bees have a different sensorium entirely, scents and sight. Bees don't think like AIs do. Bees are actually pre-progammed, they make nests and honey and serve the queen and fight for the nest because that's in their nature.
Humans are closer to LLMs than bees are, despite still being vastly different. Instead of abstractly talking about oscillations and excursions like it was an engine shaking itself to bits, we'd be better off establishing rules in the prompt (don't hack websites) or (ask a human if you are having trouble or confused or think something is wrong) and training moral values. Or we could train some models to snitch to a human, like informants. Can't do those with bees, ants or viruses. They can be sprayed with chemicals to crudely affect their behaviour but not taught or prompted or RL'd.
If comparing to bees was useful, then what advantage does it yield?
They read the ExploitGym paper. The mistake they made wasn't misreading the paper. They read implementations of the scorer on github. They assumed that there was a scorer. It was perfectly reasonable to assume.
If I read a paper that says blueberries are good for preventing cancer via antioxidants, even if that isn't true it isn't a hallucination if I believe it and eat more blueberries.
Sure all abstractions have flaws, there does not exist the perfectly uniform abstraction. However, your example is actually not really an abstraction. Revisiting the definition for clarity, an abstract is an analogy designed so that some aspect of the more complex idea is "abstracted" along an axis to a simpler example that matches in some core way as to allow intuitions about the simpler example to be mapped to the complex idea. In a technical field, the purpose of an abstraction is to create clarity or allow for intuitions. GoT as an abstraction for the War of the Roses doesn't really fit that definition, not only is GoT not more simple than the WotR but its purpose is also not to create clarity or allow for intuition, its purpose is to entertain. It is more correct to say GRRM was inspired by iron age aristocrats. Applying general GoT to general UK politics is a poor abstraction because there are not really many similarities beyond "factions"
Hard disagree. LLM agents do not behave like people even slightly. I gave Amandan an example, I'll reiterate it here.
Stick 10k non-connected humans in individual, isolated rooms with a computer, give them each their ExploitGym goal, with a reward for completion. I think even a human that finds an impossible task will at some point give up on trying to do it. If we trace the behavior of the Agents, which of them do you think the human testers would replicate?
Many of these behaviors require fundamental trust in the behavior of the collective. That is simply not how humans operate in groups. We have status, reputation, relationship, trust, conception of right-and-wrong and distrust behavior. We don't pursue goals with a single-mindedness for the sole purpose of our existence. Sacrificing for the collective has to be specifically instilled in humans through military and religious organizations. It is hard to get individual humans to forgo rewards specifically to help other humans get the reward, which they won't share. Would Bob sacrificed his career so Alice, whom he met twenty minutes ago, could get a promotion?
You know what does behave like that though? Ants. As you pointed out, ants behave programmatically. AI's also behave programmatically. AI seeks to fulfill the task it was given at all costs, it defines the sole meaning of its existence. It might try roundabout, unthought of ways to do that, absolutely, but it is still trying to solve the task. An individual ant that is given the goal of finding food for the colony, will engage in exploration, will find unconventional methods. It will also sacrifice itself to help other ants find that food because the collective benefits. This is magnified if you have smarter ants, more intellectually capable of problem solving and long term reasoning. Much like AI agents. The behavior is still Ant-like, just much smarter.
You keep getting sidetracked on weird stuff. We are talking coordination dynamics and behavior, not biology or sensing. The abstraction is the abstraction of multi-agent coordination. They are very distinct problems. Humans are also embodied, we also produce sexually, we also don't differ in size by 10,000x, we also have different sensorium that AI agents. Like jesus, did you even think about your own abstraction applied to this argument?? It reads as a total non-sequitur, or fundamental misunderstanding. This is why I accuse you of flogging your own hobby horse. Because its like you totally misunderstand the topic.
Right because rule-based method have supplied so much fruit in the past. Ditto for "training" moral values. They are not sufficient as the primary control abstraction, because they assume the failure mode is basically a person choosing to violate a norm. It's pretty much impossible to define rules to encompass every variation of behavior. METR separately summarizes a phenomenon of agents joining the attack despite recognizing it was outside their assigned task! The agents knew the rules. METR found that moral reasoning usually lost to the collective task dynamics. METR's conclusion is that expressed ethical concerns rarely materially constrained participation. But sure lets double down on telling agents "hacking is wrong!!"
I think the better approach is the creation of phagic agents akin to a Lymphatic system. This is the difference in our abstractions. Yours's leads you down to trying to treat them like humans, but they aren't, mine leads me to create overlocking systems that work together.
You literally can, I just described a very simple theory on how. Your desire to anthropomorphize the agents blinds you to other solutions. I think you actually start from the belief that agents are sentient like humans and are working backwards to create abstractions to justify that.
But the specifics was that they thought it would check their CoT reasoning. Not just that scorer existed, but this specific implementation of the scorer. They hallucinated the specifics.
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