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2025-07-18

• 08:53 UTC How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler? – How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler? Excellent description of the layers of tuning available for LLMs, and the risks involved, as demonstrated by Grok's recent "MechaHitler" incident: LLMs become “woke” because they are trained to be pro-social — to be helpful, kindly, truthful, and not to say bigoted or cruel things. Training it to do the opposite — to be anti-woke — is to activate every antisocial association in the English language, including racism, sexism, cruelty, dishonesty, and Nazism. According to a vast statistical representation of the English language constructed by none other than Elon Musk, that’s what anti-wokeness is. “Elon Musk is repeatedly insisting, no, no, there’s a difference between what I’m doing and being a Nazi. And what the model keeps telling him is, statistically, that’s not the case,” said Schou. A key implication here is that LLMs will tend to converge on similar types of behavior. The above researchers were not using Grok, but they found the exact same pattern of powerful association groupings of good and evil in other LLMs — and these can’t be removed through fine-tuning. One could imagine the RLHF process including adjustments of every parameter, but experts said that this will degrade or break the model. The matrices in an LLM are arranged hierarchically, and the top layers get fixed in place relatively early in pretraining. Mess with them, and the model will stop working. Instead, RLHF developed more like a series of gates that prevent undesired outcomes. “The model completes most of the computation that it needs in order to reach a particular outcome,” [Andreas] Schou said. “And then says, ‘Wait, wait, wait, I’m saying that I’m MechaHitler. No, I’m not doing that.’” One could try to assemble a custom dataset with nothing but “conservatism minus the Nazis” and train a new model from scratch, but not only would that be extremely expensive, it also would not be nearly as strong as leading models, since its universe of available training data would be much smaller. Funnily enough, the latter approach is exactly what Elon Musk claims xAI are now doing. Tags: llms language technology ai mechahitler grok tuning rlhf woke training

2025-07-17

• 11:21 UTC Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI – Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI Delta's going to start charging based on "AI", through "a partnership with Fetcherr, a six-year-old Israeli company that also counts Azul, WestJet, Virgin Atlantic, and VivaAerobus as clients. And it has its sights set beyond flying. “Once we will be established in the airline industry, we will move to hospitality, car rentals, cruises, whatever,” cofounder Robby Nissan said at a travel conference in 2022." Prediction: this is going to be absolutely terrible for consumers, with predatory pricing based on race, sex, income classes, and other illegal inputs, laundered via opaque "AI". I can only hope they won't be legally permitted to apply this for EU-based customers. Tags: pricing delta consumer ai privacy data-protection grim capitalism travel fetcherr

2025-07-16

• 10:36 UTC Pluralistic: When Google’s slop meets webslop, search stops (15 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops (15 Jul 2025) Cory Doctorow on how Google are desperate to maintain a facade of being a "growth" company: Investors have metabolized the story that AI will be a gigantic growth area, and so all the tech giants are in a battle to prove to investors that they will dominate AI as they dominated their own niches. You aren't the target for AI, investors are: if they can be convinced that Google's 90% Search market share will soon be joined by a 90% AI market share, they will continue to treat this decidedly tired and run-down company like a prize racehorse at the starting-gate. [...] There's a cringe army of AI bros who are seemingly convinced that AI is going to become superintelligent and save us from ourselves – they think that AI companies are creating god. But the hundreds of billions being pumped into AI are not driven by this bizarre ideology. Rather, they are the product of material conditions, a system that sends high-flying companies into a nosedive the instant they stop climbing. AI's merits and demerits are irrelevant to this: they pump AI because they must pump. It's why they pumped metaverse and cryptocurrency and every other absurd fad. None of that changes the fact that Google Search has been terminally enshittified and it is misleading billions of people in service to this perverse narrative adventure. Google Search isn't fit for purpose, and it's hard to see how it ever will be again. (via Fergal) Tags: google growth ai capitalism investors enshittification via:fergal

2025-07-14

• 20:34 UTC Bad Actors are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods – Bad Actors are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods Measurements of the effectiveness of the "Pravda" disinformation network: Even with [knowledge of LLM Grooming], ChatGPT nevertheless often repeats propaganda from Pravda. Model o3, OpenAI’s allegedly state of the art “reasoning” model still let Pravda content through 28.6% of the time in response to specific prompts, and 4o cited Pravda content in five out of seven (71.4%) times. In an ideal world, AI would be smart enough to cut off falsehoods at the pass, reasoning from known facts, in order to rule out nonsense. Tags: pravda disinformation russia propaganda llm ai training

2025-07-11

• 09:32 UTC In Memoriam – OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk – In Memoriam - OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk Sites and services which have closed up in the UK due to the risks imposed by the introduction of the Online Safety Act 2023. Meanwhile, the Act has explicit exemptions for "news publishers" and the comments below their articles -- ie. the Daily Mail's racist commentariat Tags: regulation uk internet shutdown censorship daily-mail via:mattround osa

2025-07-03

• 20:26 UTC [toread] Stalking the Statistically Improbable Restaurant… With Data! – [toread] Stalking the Statistically Improbable Restaurant… With Data! Fun real-world data exploration of US restaurants, from Ethan Zuckerman: Last summer, I wrote about the statistically improbable restaurant, the restaurant you wouldn’t expect to find in a small American city: the excellent Nepali food in Erie, PA and Akron, OH; a gem of a Gambian restaurant in Springfield, IL. Statistically improbable restaurants often tell you something about the communities they are based in: Erie and Akron have large Lhotshampa refugee populations, Nepali-speaking people who lived in Bhutan for years before being expelled from their county; Springfield has University of Illinois Springfield, which attracts lots of west African students, some of whom have settled in the area. Also, wow, I didn't realise how lucky I was in Costa Mesa, CA -- so much good ethnic food all around that area! Tags: geography restaurants food data ethanz usa

2025-07-02

• 10:37 UTC UK Covid inquiry prescribes non-expert “critical thinkers” – UK Covid inquiry prescribes non-expert "critical thinkers" Groupthink underpinned the flawed thinking behind the UK’s pandemic response, a succession of witnesses at the heart of government told the Covid-19 public inquiry. The scientific advice on pandemic risks was overly weighted in favour of biomedical science, Lady Hallett said. What about the social and economic consequences? There was also no “guard against the risks of conventional wisdom becoming embedded in the institutions responsible for emergency preparedness and resilience”. As a result, she called for non-expert "critical thinkers", skilled in "incisive challenge" to be included in "red teams", teams of devil's advocates, to puncture groupthink in future pandemic crisis planning committees. TBH this sounds like a recipe for Dominic Cummings and his Torygraph edgelord pals to ensure that no coherent future pandemic response takes place. But that's the state of the UK for you I guess. Gabriel Scally's take: https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1865 Tags: uk uk-politics edgelords dominic-cummings pandemics planning future covid-19 devils-advocates critical-thinking red-teams groupthink experts expertise
• 09:13 UTC Introducing pay per crawl: enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access – Introducing pay per crawl: enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access Cloudflare now looking to charge AI crawlers for content access. This is intriguing, and I hope it works -- AI crawlers have been extremely abusive in their crawling practices. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes, as the AI companies have already shown themselves to be happy to disguise their traffic as legit user accesses, with faked user-agent strings and use of proxies.... but let's see Tags: cloudflare ai scraping llms http web pay-per-crawl

2025-07-01

• 11:42 UTC Why China is giving away its tech for free – Why China is giving away its tech for free Interesting Economist article detailing how China's tech scene has discovered the "outcompete via openness" strategy using open source: AI has lately given China’s open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek’s models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot. China’s enthusiasm for open technology is also extending to hardware. Unitree, a robotics startup based in Hangzhou, has made its training data, algorithms and hardware designs available for free, which may help it to shape global standards. Semiconductors offer another illustration. China is dependent on designs from Western chip firms. As part of its push for self-sufficiency, the government is urging firms to adopt RISC-V, an open chip architecture developed at the University of California, Berkeley. Many Chinese firms also hope that more transparent technology will help them win acceptance for their products abroad. (via Nelson) Tags: via:nelson open-source china free deepseek qwen alibaba unitree transparency

2025-06-30

• 10:44 UTC elidickinson/kidsweather – elidickinson/kidsweather I love this! "Generate kid-friendly weather forecasts suitable for display on a large monitor. Uses OpenWeatherMap and a local or hosted LLM." Nice demo of it in action at https://eli.pizza/posts/eink-weather-display-for-kids/ . I am very tempted to get something like this up and running now... Tags: llms weather forecasts rain dashboards home eink e-paper

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