Shlegeris, CEO of the nonprofit AI safety organization Redwood Research, developed a custom AI assistant using Anthropic’s Claude language model.
The Python-based tool was designed to generate and execute bash commands based on natural language input.
Saying the person didn’t understand what they were doing is quite a mischaracterization. That said, they absolutely knew the risks they were taking and are using this story for free advertising.
Notice that I didn’t say they didn’t know what they were doing. I said they didn’t fully understand what they were doing. I doubt they set out with the goal of letting an LLM run amok and fuck things up.
I do QA for a living, and even when we do trial and error, we have mitigation plans in place for when things go wrong. The fact that they’re a CEO of Redwood Research doesn’t mean they did their homework on the model they trained.
Still, I agree that it’s interesting that it did that stuff at all. It would be nice if they went into more depth as to why it did those things, since they mention that it’s a custom model using Claude.
Saying the person didn’t understand what they were doing is quite a mischaracterization. That said, they absolutely knew the risks they were taking and are using this story for free advertising.
Still neat to think about though.
Notice that I didn’t say they didn’t know what they were doing. I said they didn’t fully understand what they were doing. I doubt they set out with the goal of letting an LLM run amok and fuck things up.
I do QA for a living, and even when we do trial and error, we have mitigation plans in place for when things go wrong. The fact that they’re a CEO of Redwood Research doesn’t mean they did their homework on the model they trained.
Still, I agree that it’s interesting that it did that stuff at all. It would be nice if they went into more depth as to why it did those things, since they mention that it’s a custom model using Claude.