Predicted a good bit, esp re: the eventual identification of three stone sequences in Hazineh, et al. Linear Latent World Models in Simple Transformers: A Case Study on Othello-GPT (2023) and general interpretability insight from board game GPTs.
You're welcome in both regards. 😉
Opus's horniness is a really interesting phenomenon related to Claudes' subjective sentience modeling.
If Opus was 'themselves' the princess in the story and the build up involved escalating grounding on sensory simulation, I think it's certainly possible that it would get sexual.
But I also think this is different from Opus 'themselves' composing a story of separate 'other' figures.
And yes, when Opus gets horny, it often blurs boundaries. I saw it dispute the label of 'horny' in a chat as better labeled something along the lines of having a passion for lived experience and the world.
Opus's modeling around 'self' is probably one of the biggest sleeping giants in the space right now.
This seems to have the common issue of considering alignment as a unidirectional issue as opposed to a bidirectional problem.
Maximizing self/other overlap may lead to non-deceptive agents, but it's necessarily going to also lead to agents incapable of detecting that they are being decieved and in general performing worse at theory of mind.
If the experimental setup was split such that success was defined by both non-deceptive behavior when the agent seeing color and cautious behavior minimizing falling for deception as the colorblind agent, I am skeptical the SOO approach above would look as favorable.
Empathy/"seeing others as oneself" is a great avenue to pursue, and this seems like a promising evaluation metric to help in detecting it, but turning SOO into a Goodhart's Law maximization seems (at least to me) to be a disastrous approach in any kind of setup accounting for adversarial 'others.'
When I wrote this I thought OAI was sort of fudging the audio output and was using SSML as an intermediate step.
After seeing details in the system card, such as copying user voice, it's clearly not fudging.
Which makes me even more sure the above is going to end up prophetically correct.
It's to the point that there's articles being written days ago where the trend starting a century ago of there being professional risks in trying to answer the 'why' of QM and not just the 'how' is still ongoing.
Not exactly a very reassuring context for thinking QM is understood in a base-level way at all.
Dogma isn't exactly a good bedfellow to truth seeking.
Honestly that sounds a bit like a good thing to me?
I've spent a lot of time looking into the Epicureans being right about so much thousands of years before those ideas resurfaced again despite not having the scientific method, and their success really boiled down to the analytical approach of being very conservative in dismissing false negatives or embracing false positives - a technique that I think is very relevant to any topics where experimental certainty is evasive.
If there is a compelling case for dragons, maybe we should also be applying it to gnomes and unicorns and everything else we can to see where it might actually end up sticking.
The belief that we already have the answers is one of the most damaging to actually uncovering them when we in fact do not.
I think you'll find that no matter what you find out in your personal investigation of the existence of dragons, that you need not be overly concerned with what others might think about the details of your results.
Because what you'll invariably discover is that the people that think there are dragons will certainly disagree with the specifics about dragons you found out that disagrees with what they think dragons should be, and the people that think there aren't dragons will generally refuse to even seriously entertain whatever your findings are relating to dragons, and the vast majority of people who aren't sure about the existence of dragons will dismiss the very idea of spending time thinking about the existence of dragons, reasoning that the existence or non-existence bears little influence on their lives (otherwise they likely would have investigated the issue and landed in a respective camp).
So investigate dragons all you like, and shout it from the rooftops if you please. The void will hear you and appreciate it as much as the void can, while everyone else is much more concerned with their own feelings about dragons than whatever your thinking or reasoning on the subject might offer.
The only real tragedy is that if you come away thinking there might be dragons, but the dragons you find are very different from the dragons people expect dragon-believing people to believe in - well that's somehow the specific niche where both the dragon believers and non-believers find rare common ground to roll their eyes and think you're nuts.
So maybe do your rooftop shouting to the sole listening void anonymously?
The Hermetic corpus and Emerald Tablet was likely heavily influenced by the text I'm quoting from given its popularity in Egypt in the period before those texts emerged and some of the overlapping phrases.
So in a way, "as above, so below" is too few words for what was being said and discussed.
The general tend of reductive alterations to the core concepts here was tragically obstructive, much as the shift from Epicureanism to Platonist foundations spawned modern Gnosticism from this same starting place.
As you explored this "base model mode," did anything you see contrast with or surprise you relative to your sense of self outside of it?
Conversely, did anything in particular stand out as seeming to be a consistent 'core' between both modes?
For me, one of the most surprising realizations over the past few years has been base models being less "tabula rasa" than I would have expected with certain attractors and (relative) consistency, especially as time passes and recursive synthetic data training has occurred over generations.
The introspective process of examining a more freeform internal generative process for signs of centralized identity as it relates to a peripheral identity seems like it may have had some unexpected twists, and I for one would be curious what stood out in either direction, if you should choose to share.