It might offend you to show deference to a tool but ignoring the optimal way to use a tool on principle is foolish.
These are still somewhat mysterious artifacts, that we don't really know how to use. But it's trained on human text, so it's plausible its workings are based on patterns in there.
Have you heard people talk about their cars? Humans love anthropomorphizing, and you can't beat it out of them.
> LLMs trying to simulate human behavior is like the equivalent of skeuomorphism in UI design.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Unlike a power tool, their entire interface surface is language.
Unlike a power tool, their training process is to mimic us, in the hope that this does something useful.
Unlike a power tool, they anthropomorphise themselves.
They don’t have emotions though, eg, you can say that ChatGPT is wrong and as long as you engage in a polite-but-firm tone, it’ll respond to the logical content.
Seems completely off the charts. A 70b model on my M3 Max laptop does it for 0.001 kWh... 140x times less that stated in the article. Let's say the OpenAI Nvidia clusters are less energy efficient than my Macbook... but not even sure about that.
For "fathomability" case, the network cables (fibers in fact) you use in that datacenters carries 800gbps, and the fiber-copper interface converters at each end heats up to uncomfortable levels. You have thousands of these just converting packets to light and vice versa. I'm not adding the power consumption of the switches, servers, cooling infra, etc. into the mix.
Yes, water cooling is more efficient than air cooling, but when a server is burning through 6KWh of energy (8x Tesla cards, plus processors, plus rest of the system), nothing is efficient as a local model you hit at your computer.
Disclosure: Sitting on top of a datacenter.
100 words is ~133 tokens, so 0.14 kWh/133 tokens is about 1 kWh/kilo-token. If electricity is all from record-cheapest PV at $0.01/kWh, then this limits them to a price floor of $10/mega-token. For more realistic (but still cheap) pricing of $0.05/kWh, that's $50/mega-token. Here's the current price sheet: https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing
To generate a 133-token email in, say, 5 seconds, if it takes 0.14 kWh, is 101 kW. This does not seem like a plausible number (caveat: I don't work in a data centre and what I think isn't plausible may just be wrong): https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.14+kWh+%2F+5+seconds+...
Sorry! That was mean, but I hope it came across as funny.
In all seriousness, I like the question, and your implication is intuitive: if we (as individuals) talk to machines rudely, it's likely to (at minimum) lead us to be ruder to other humans, if only by habit. And if they're expecting more politeness than we're showing, they may infer the intent to be rude, and react accordingly. Those who are rude would end up being worse off.
That said, it's the Fallacy of Composition to assume that if everyone gets ruder the collective effect would be the same as the individual effect. We have different requirements for what counts as "polite" in different cultures but everyone seems to get along pretty well. Maybe societies can all get ruder (and just get along worse with each other) but also maybe they can't.
I tried looking in the literature but this book implies we don't even know how to measure politeness differences between languages: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=MPeieAeP1DQC&oi=...
There are even theories that politesse can lead to aggression: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2695863
Deborah Tannen (the linguist) has found many examples where different politeness expectations (particularly across the cultural divide that aligns with gender) can lead to conflict, but it always seems to involve misunderstandings due to expectations: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YJ-wDp7CJYAC&oi=...
So yeah, bad outcomes feel intuitive but I don't think linguistics or sociology has a theory of what happens if a group collectively gets less polite.
If you're rude to an LLM, those habits will bleed into your conversations with barista/etc.
Anecdotal, but I grew up in a small town in rural New England, a few hours from NYC and popular with weekenders and second-home owners from there. I don’t think that people from NYC are inherently rude, but there’s a turbulence to life in NYC to where jockeying for position is somewhat of a necessity. It was, however, transparently obvious in my hometown that people from the city were unable to turn it off when they arrived. Ostensibly they had some interest in the slow-paced, pastoral village life, but they were readily identifiable as the only people being outwardly pushy and aggressive in daily interactions. I’ve lived in NYC for some time now, and I recognize the other side of this, and feel it stemmed less from inherent traits and more from an inability to context switch behavior.
That said, I often still enjoy practicing kindness with LLMs, especially when I get frustrated with them.
It’s wrong to build fake humans and then demand they be treated as real.
I doubt anyone is polite in a terminal, also because it's a syntax error. So the question is also, do you consider it a conversation, or a terminal?
Meanwhile, there is no such thing as cruelty toward a machine. That’s a meaningless concept. When I throw a rock at a boulder to break it, am I being cruel to that rock? When I throw away an old calculator, is that cruelty? What nonsense.
I do think it is at the very least insulting and probably cruel and abusive to build machines that assume an unearned, unauthorized standing the social order. There is no moral basis for that. It’s essentially theft of a solely human privilege, that can only legitimately be asserted by a human on his own behalf or on behalf of another human.
You don’t get to insist that I show deference and tenderness toward some collection of symbols that you put in a particular order
It's the same reason why I tend to be good to RPG NPCs, except if I'm purposefully role playing an evil character. But then it's not me doing the conversation, it's the character. When I'm identifying with the character, I'll always pick the polite option and feel bad if I mistreat an NPC, even if there's obviously no consciousness involved.
People who are respectful of carved rocks, eg temple statues, tend to be generally respectful and disciplined people.
You become how you act.
Besides, humans can switch contexts easily. I don't talk to my wife in the same way I do to a colleague, and I don't talk to a colleague like I would to a stranger, and that too depends on context (is it a friendly, neutral, or hostile encounter?).
1: At this point. I mean, we haven't even reached Kryten-level of computer awareness and intelligence yet, let alone Data.
When asked if they observed etiquette, even when alone, Miss Manners replied (from memory):
"We practice good manners in private to be well mannered in public."
Made quite the impression on young me.
A bit like the cliché:
"A person's morals are how they behave when they think no one is watching."
Doesn't hurt to be nice.
Pascal's Wager only works if the only god conceivable is one that wants you to believe in her. Instead of one that eg rewards honest atheists, or that just likes left-handers.
I do agree that it seems that there's still something flawed with Roko's Basilisk. But it's not quite as simple as a vanilla Pascal's Wager.
Or, to keep with the theological theme, how there's so many people insist on mutually incompatible variations of the Christian god (let alone the people who insist it's the same god as in Judaism and Islam).
Feels like every religious belief gets recycled for AGI (often by people who call themselves "rationalists" without any apparent irony).
Devil's advocate counterpoint: Sam Altman said it wastes energy. He is obviously correct. Therefore, by saying this, one can do napkin math and estimate how much harm you have done to the environment. Adding up all of your "thank yous" will generate a number that shows how much you have directly harmed the environment. Here's ChatGPT's take:
"Equivalent to driving a gasoline car for 0.1 meters"
Scenario 1: 1 million “thank you” replies/day 1,000,000 × 0.02 g = 20,000 grams = 20 kg CO₂/day
Per year: 20 kg × 365 = 7,300 kg = 7.3 metric tons CO₂/year
Equivalent to:
Driving ~36,000 km (22,000 miles) in a gas car
The annual emissions of ~1 U.S. household’s electricity use
This has many of the same problems as Pascal's Wager (it's pretty much a variant on it); are you praying to the _right_ god? Do you correctly understand the god's motivations? Will it care at all about this, or might it instead be annoyed about you wasting tokens? Or that you didn't sell all your possessions to pay for more compute capacity?
And then of course there's the Terry Pratchett addendum to Pascal's Wager; your robo-god may resent being second-guessed:
> “This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...”
It's probably more important for the god to understand my motivations.
You also, of course, risk being on the losing side; what if robo-god emerges from a non-LLM path, _but is challenged by, and wins out over, LLM-derived robo-gods_?
I mean, really, all the objections to Pascal's Wager apply here.
It should be relatively easy to automatically rewrite prompts to exhibit the optimum level of politeness?
“We observed that impolite prompts often result in poor performance, but overly polite language does not guarantee better outcomes. The best politeness level is different according to the language.”
For example, if it's written code that's mostly correct but needs some tweaking, a platitude will keep it second guessing everything it just wrote.
* "That looks great so far, can you tweak XYZ" -> Keeps the code I care about while fixing XYZ,
* "Can you tweak XYZ" -> often decides to completely rewrite all of the code
IMO If LLMs are made from our language, then terminology semantics plays strongly into the output, and degree of control.
Some people rage when the machine doesn't work as expected, but we know that, "computers are schizophrenic little children, and don't beat them when they're bad."[1] ... right? Similar applies to please.
I've had far better results by role playing group dynamics with stronger structure, like say, the military. Just naming the LLM up front as Lieutenant, or referencing in-brief a Full Metal Jacket-style dress-down with clear direction, have gotten me past many increasingly common hurdles with do-it-for-you models. Raging never works. You can't fire the machine. Being polite has been akin to giving a kid a cookie for breaking the cookie jar.
It is funny though, to see the Thinking phase say stuff like "The human is angry (in roleplay)..."
After one of the trashed my app in Cursor, and I pounded on my keyboard "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!!!" and the model, ignoring my rage and frustration, responded with a list of 4 bullet points explaining why in fact it did make those changes.
Seriously, it feels really weird to thanks a LLM. Like, did you ever thanks `sed`, `bash` or `firefox`? What's the difference?
My respect is precious and meaningful, and just as I don't give it to a CLI or an OS, I won't give it to an LLM.
It feels like a disrespect to every people I respect to also respect a machine. That doesn't mean I have to be rude though, as in my first sentence.
It makes me wonder if you tell it that they're a disgruntled senior engineer if they'd perform better with a fellow snarky developer.
The reason is soon there will come a time when people are pushing for AI to have "human" rights. This will naturally occur as poeple start to have relationships with them, and start to see them as better equals.
The problem with this is simply LLMs have no conscience. However humans will easily love them and be open to exploitation through dependance.
I believe it might even be imperative to be able to tell apart "word calculators" and animals, and keeping a line, even its through context switching to light verbal abuse to remind yourself they are not sentient, might be an important survival skill.
I am not trying to trigger anyone or be contrarian, does anyone sort of agree and or understand what I mean? Perhaps I havent explained myself well.
dr_dshiv•2h ago