Researchers say AI models like GPT4 are prone to “sudden” escalations as the U.S. military explores their use for warfare.

Researchers say AI models like GPT4 are prone to “sudden” escalations as the U.S. military explores their use for warfare.

  • Researchers ran international conflict simulations with five different AIs and found that they tended to escalate war, sometimes out of nowhere, and even use nuclear weapons.
  • The AIs were large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, GPT 3.5, Claude 2.0, Llama-2-Chat, and GPT-4-Base, which are being explored by the U.S. military and defense contractors for decision-making.
  • The researchers invented fake countries with different military levels, concerns, and histories and asked the AIs to act as their leaders.
  • The AIs showed signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations, arms-race dynamics, and worrying justifications for violent actions.
  • The study casts doubt on the rush to deploy LLMs in the military and diplomatic domains, and calls for more research on their risks and limitations.
  • @CeeBeeEnglish
    1•10 months ago

    That’s what the “language” part of “Large Language Model” means. It processes, predicts and generates language.

    Language does not mean “text”. It’s not “Large Text Generator”. The core definition of the word language is “communication”.

    An LLM isn’t (always) trained exclusively on text. And even those that are become greater than the raw sum of its parts. What that means is that the model can learn context not in the raw text itself.

    The chat part just feeds it back the last couple messages for context

    Partially true. There’s more to it though.

    It doesn’t understand anything.

    And neither does antivirus, but it still does its job.