Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
~17,000 words. Originally written on June 7, 2025.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This had various implications about my choices of presentation and tone, about which things I explained from scratch rather than assuming as background, my level of comfort casually reciting factual details from memory rather than explicitly checking them against the original source, etc.
Although, come of think of it, this was also true of most of my early posts on LW [which were crossposts from my blog], so maybe it's not a big deal...)
This means that the base model is really doing something very different from what I do as I write the post, even if it’s doing an amazing job of sounding exactly like me and making the exact points that I would make.
I don’t have to look over my draft and speculate about “where the author might be going with this.” I am the author, and I already know where I’m going with it. All texts produced “normally,” by humans, are produced under these favorable epistemic conditions.
But for the base model, what looks from the outside like “writing” is really more like what we call “theory of mind,” in the human case. Looking at someone else, without direct access to their mind or their emotions, and trying to guess what they’ll do next just from what they’ve done (visibly, observably, “on the outside”) thus far.
A long essay about LLMs, the nature and history of the the HHH assistant persona, and the implications for alignment.
Multiple people have asked me whether I could post this LW in some form, hence this linkpost.
~17,000 words. Originally written on June 7, 2025.
(Note: although I expect this post will be interesting to people on LW, keep in mind that it was written with a broader audience in mind than my posts and comments here. This had various implications about my choices of presentation and tone, about which things I explained from scratch rather than assuming as background, my level of comfort casually reciting factual details from memory rather than explicitly checking them against the original source, etc.
Although, come of think of it, this was also true of most of my early posts on LW [which were crossposts from my blog], so maybe it's not a big deal...)