did somebody troll him by saying ‘we will just make the LLM not make paperclips bro?’

rofl, I cannot even begin to fathom all the 2010 era LW posts where peeps were like, “we will just tell the AI to be nice to us uwu” and Yud and his ilk were like “NO DUMMY THAT WOULDNT WORK B.C. X Y Z .” Fast fwd to 2024, the best example we have of an “AI system” turns out to be the blandest, milquetoast yes-man entity due to RLHF (aka, just tell the AI to be nice bruv strat). Worst of all for the rats, no examples of goal seeking behavior or instrumental convergence. It’s almost like the future they conceived on their little blogging site shares very little in common with the real world.

If I were Yud, the best way to salvage this massive L would be to say “back in the day, we could not conceive that you could create a chat bot that was good enough to fool people with its output by compressing the entire internet into what is essentially a massive interpolative database, but ultimately, these systems have very little do with the sort of agentic intelligence that we foresee.”

But this fucking paragraph:

(If a googol monkeys are all generating using English letter-triplet probabilities in a Markov chain, their probability of generating Shakespeare is vastly higher but still effectively zero. Remember this Markov Monkey Fallacy anytime somebody talks about how LLMs are being trained on human text and therefore are much more likely up with human values; an improbable outcome can be rendered “much more likely” while still being not likely enough.)

ah, the sweet, sweet aroma of absolute copium. Don’t believe your eyes and ears people, LLMs have everything to do with AGI and there is a smol bean demon inside the LLMs that is catastrophically misaligned with human values that will soon explode into the super intelligent lizard god the prophets have warned about.