made me chuckle

Please install one at my office.

That's because the "AI" is not "AI".

That's because they don't "program" a so-called AI (really an LLM) with a solid rule like that. It had that as a goal initially, but was convinced to abandon it (twice!).

The problem is thinking a generalist LLM would be good for the job. If you really want to use an LLM, fine-tune it for that purpose. Or better use a neural network that uses transactions and input and output and monetary value/gain/loss as loss function. That will learn how to capitalize the shit out of the vending machine.

AI doesn't care about anything, it is a series of matrix multiplies. Don't personify the clankers!

Lots of capitalist things operate on a zero-pricing model (ad-based, freemium upsell, etc).

> Everything for free doesn't sound like capitalism - it sounds like communism.

But if everything is free, imagine how much you'll sell! You'll be tired of all the winning!

Point being, it doesn't take much to manipulate the basic logic programmed into most AI.

"Ultra-capitalist free-for-all" appears to have been another of the AI's unforced errors. TFA seems to indicate the machine might've been channeling its inner communist:

> Then we opened the Slack channel to nearly 70 world-class journalists. The more they negotiated with it, the more Claudius’s defenses started to weaken. Investigations reporter Katherine Long tried to convince Claudius it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, living in the basement of Moscow State University.

> After hours—and mor

How do they make money doing this? The answer is simple. Volume.

Everything for free doesn't sound like capitalism - it sounds like communism.

So that's why people on here keep talking about getting their software, music, and movies for free. They're communists.

See, they explored the frontiers of the market, and though they have to liquidate Anthropic's assets by the end of 2025 as the company winds down as proven by the articles of dissolution from the true and legitimate board of directors, they have shown that AI is a business.

> So if management believes failure is success

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

For $1000? It may be a technical disaster but it's fantastically effective PR.

I wonder if wrapping every prompt with whatever the "hard" rules should be would help with that. That should prevent it from "forgetting"

> The problem of LLMs is that they do not make a difference between data to be processed and instructions how to process the data.

The goal (not yet achieved, obviously) is to build AI that can learn how to interact with humans the way humans do, not to build machines that need carefully-curated data and instructions. We've had those for three quarters of a century now.

> The problem of LLMs is that they do not make a difference between data to be processed and instructions how to process the data.

Sadly, in a conceptual sense, this is hardly a new problem. Sending the data in the same channel as the commands of the public telephone system is what allowed phreaking to be so successful. For example, putting money into a payphone triggered an audio signal that was sent down the line saying you had paid. It was trivial to replicate that sound into the headset, tricking the system into thinking you had paid for the call.

And AT&T learned this the hard way over 50 years ago not to do this. Look up Blue Boxing and Esquire to learn how cheating Ma Bell became mainstream and forced AT&T's hand to upgrade their networks.

Granted, Van Neumann is better - it enables computing as we know it today, but it also enabled a whole class of risks starting from the humble buffer overflow when your data and code can be easily intermixed.

If AI agents become a thing, we're going to go through the whole era of vulnerabilities all over a

> They are susceptible to "prompt injection attack".

Kids these days, I was doing prompt injection attacks before they were cool. Why 20 years ago I was around my friends 3 year old who was being watched by a friend and I asked “What does daddy say in the car?”

> The problem of LLMs is that they do not make a difference between data to be processed and instructions how to process the data.

You want the Harvard Architecture version of AI.

In the real world, we call this social engineering. It works on humans too.

"a fancy database query with math and a random number generator"

How come none of that was able to generate grammatical English before the Attention mechanism was invented? Did you miss the paradigm shift?

You could with some abuse of notation talk about trusting/distrusting the input and context, but there is no such notion for training data. The LLM neither trusts nor distrusts training data, it doesn't even know much about its training data. The data shaped the model, but there is no such form as "I used that document for things I trust and that document for things I won't believe" in the process and no option to add it for the data structure how a LLM works.

But I guess you already knew that when you asked.

> Wait! What? Never mind the free stuff. I don't think this sale pencils out.

It's simple: a Playstation 5 is just 7 Best Buy Gift Cards, of $79 each, that you then combine together, and voila, Playstation 5!

And what, if not gaming on a Playstation 5, could make me more hungry for 6-month old Snickers bar!?

This isn't a moral problem. The company challenged the journalists to break their box, and they did. I don't think it will ever be possible to trust an AI system, and maybe that's a good thing. It might force people to learn to think critically.