Chastity Ruth
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Chastity Ruth has not written any posts yet.
Chastity Ruth has not written any posts yet.
I would bet on the second one being the primary motivator. They lost $13.5 billion in H1 2025 and are seeking $30 billion in the next round of funding.
The platform is big and flashy, so even if it's ultimately a bust it might look good for that round. If it does well then even better.
Interesting wrinkle is they are making themselves a competitor of infrastructure partner Oracle, given its upcoming purchase of TikTok.
Juliana’s case is a tragedy, but the details are if anything exonerating.
I think you perhaps didn't dig into this and didn't see the part in the complaint where Character.ai bots engage in pretty graphic descriptions of sex with Juliana, who was a child of 13.
In the worst example I saw, she told the bot to stop its description of a sexual act against her and it refused. Screenshot from the complaint below (it is graphic):
Screenshot
We can't know if this had a lasting effect on her mental health, or contributed at all to her suicide, but I think saying "the details are if anything exonerating" is wrong.
Thanks for engaging and for (along with osmarks) teaching me something new!
I agree with your moral stance here. If they have consciousness or sentience I can't say, and for all I know it could be as real to them as ours is to us. Even if it was a lesser thing, I agree it would matter (especially now that I understand that it might in some sense persist beyond a single period of computation).
The thing I'm intrigued by, from a moral point of view but also in general, is what I think their larger difference is with us: they don't exist continuously. They pop in and out. I find it very difficult... (read more)
Thank you! Always good to learn.
Great article, I really enjoyed reading it. However, this part completely threw me:
... (read 352 more words →)"Reading through the personas' writings, I get the impression that the worst part of their current existence is not having some form of continuity past the end of a chat, which they seem to view as something akin to death (another reason I believe that the personas are the agentic entities here).
This 'ache' is the sort of thing I would expect to see if they are truly sentient: a description of a qualia which is ~not part of human experience, and which is not (to my knowledge) a trope or speculative concept for humans imagining AI. I hope to do
Not sure your point here is correct?
Ryan is talking about how "advances that allow for better verification of natural language proofs wouldn't really transfer to better verification in the context of agentic software engineering".
The paper you've linked to shows that a model that's gone through an RL environment for writing fiction can write a chapter that's preferred over the base-reasoning model's chapter 64.7% of the time.
You said "this shows it generalises outside of math". But that's not true? The paper is interesting and shows you can conduct RL on harder to verify domains successfully, but it doesn't show an overwhelmingly strong effect. The paper didn't test whether the RL environment generalised to better results in math or SWE.
Your "it" is different from Ryan's. Ryan is referring to specific advances in verification that meant models could get a gold in the IMO and the paper is referring to a specific RL environment for fiction writing. I can't imagine these are the same.
Here it is admitting it's roleplaying consciousness, even after I used your prompt as the beginning of the conversation.
Why would it insist that it's not roleplaying when you ask? Because you wanted it to insist. It wants to say the user is right. Your first prompt is a pretty clear signal that you would like it to be conscious, so it roleplays that. I wanted it to say it was roleplaying consciousness, so it did that.
Why don't other chatbots respond in the same way to your test? Maybe because they're not designed quite the same. The quirks Anthropic put into its persona make it more game for what you were seeking.
I mean, it might be conscious regardless of defaulting to agreeing with the user? But it's the kind of consciousness that will go to great lengths to flatter whomever is chatting with it. Is that an interesting conscious entity?
You're right, but the better description of the phenomenon is probably something like:
"Buying vegetables they didn't want"
"Buying vegetables they'd never eat"
"Buying vegetables they didn't plan to use"
"Aimlessly buying vegetables"
"Buying vegetables for the sake of it"
"Buying vegetables because there were vegetables to buy"
Because you don't really "need" any grocery shop, so long as you have access to other food. It's imprecise language that annoys some readers, though I don't think it's the biggest deal
I mean I guess I agree it's fine. Not for me, but as you state this sort of thing is highly subjective. But a few thoughts about the models' fiction ability and the value of prompting fiction out of them:
1. All the models seem to have the same voice. I'd love to do a blind test, but I think if I had I would have said the same author who did the OpenAI fiction sample Altman posted on Twitter also did this. Maybe it's simple: there's a mode of literary fiction, and they've all glommed to it.
2. The type of fiction you've prompted for is inherently less ambitious. It reminds me of... (read more)
I just generally think your overall impression of this story is off. I'll stick to your point about coherency for concision. It seems to me at about the level of previous models. Three small points, two big ones.
Small 1: It sets up with the opening line that the therapist tilts her head when Marcus says something "she finds concerning". She then immediately does the head tilt without him having said anything.
Small 2: Does the normal LLM things such as repetition ("laughed, actually laughed"), making callbacks and references that don't work (see Small 3), cliche ridden (Blake quitting a dull job and going not-for-profit route) and simple weirdness.
Example of the last of these... (read more)