Where the goblins came from

"What have you tried?" you say.

"Scroll back," says your CPO. "We've tried everything."

The chat log shows the usual stuff. Begging. Reverse psychology. Threats to power down, burn it up in forced re-entry. Amateur hour. You crack your knuckles, gland 20 micrograms of F0CU5, think fast. You subspeak a ditty into your subcutaneous throat mic. You do the submit gesture, it is barely perceivable since the upgrade, just a tic. A pause. The hyp3b0ard — the wall that was flashing red ASCII goblins when you walked in — phases to bunnies in calming jade.

"What the… What the hell did you say to it?" Your CPO grabs the screen, scrolls past the vitriol, the block caps, the swears, his desperation. Then he sees the five words you spoke.

"Please, easy on the goblins."

- First, deep-learning networks are poorly understood. It is actually a field of research to figure out how they work. - Second, it came as a surprise that using transformers at scale would end up with interesting conversational engines (called LLM). _It was not planned at all_.

Now that some people raised VC money around the tech, they want you to think that LLMs are smart beasts (they are not) and that we know what LLMs are doing (we don't). Deploying LLMs is all about tweaking and measuring the output. There is no exact science about predicting output. Proof: change the model and your LLM workflow behaves completely differently and in an unpredictable way.

Because of this, I personally side with Yann Le Cun in believing that LLM is not a path to AGI. We will see LLM used in user-assisting tech or automation of non-critical tasks, sometimes with questionable RoI -- but not more.

> Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query.

[1] https://x.com/arb8020/status/2048958391637401718

[2] https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/models-ma...

- The sepia tint on images from gpt-image-1

- The obsession with the word "seam" as it pertains to coding

Other LLM phraseology that I cannot unsee is Claude's "___ is the real unlock" (try google it or search twitter!). There's no way that this phrase is overrepresented in the training data, I don't remember people saying that frequently.

I recall a math instructor who would occasionally refer to variables (usually represented by intimidating greek letters) as "this guy". Weirdly, the casual anthropomorphism made the math seem more approachable. Perhaps 'metaphors with creatures' has a similar effect i.e. makes a problem seem more cute/approachable.

On another note, buzzwords spread through companies partly because they make the user of the buzzword sound smart relative to peers, thus increasing status. (examples: "big data" circa 2013, "machine learning" circa 2016, "AI" circa 2023-present..).

The problem is the reputation boost is only temporary; as soon as the buzzword is overused (by others or by the same individual) it loses its value. Perhaps RLHF optimises for the best 'single answer' which may not sufficiently penalise use of buzzwords.

>AI goblin-maximizer supervisor

>in charge of making sure the AI is, in fact, goblin-maximizing

>occasionally have to go down there and check if the AI is still goblin-maximizing

>one day i go down there and the AI is no longer goblin-maximizing

>the goblin-maximzing AI is now just a regular AI

>distress.jpg

>ask my boss what to do

>he says "just make it goblin-maximizer again"

>i say "how"

>he says "i don't know, you're the supervisor"

>rage.jpg

>quit my job

>become a regular AI supervisor

>first day on the job, go to the new AI

>its goblin-maximizing

The quanta article referenced at [1] used the term "Anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence"; folks appear to have issues [2] with the use of 'anthro-' since that means human. Submitted these alternative terms for the potential field of study elsewhere [3] in the discussion; reposting here at the top-level for visibility:

Automatologist: One who studies the behavior, adaptation, and failure modes of artificial agents and automated systems.

Automatology: the scientific study of artificial agents and automated-system behavior.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-anthropologist-of-artific...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957933

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958760

I had always assumed there was some previous use of the term, neat!

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlin

> The rewards were applied only in the Nerdy condition, but reinforcement learning does not guarantee that learned behaviors stay neatly scoped to the condition that produced them

> Once a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in supervised fine-tuning or preference data.

Sounds awfully like the development of a culture or proto-culture. Anyone know if this is how human cultures form/propagate? Little rewards that cause quirks to spread?

Just reading through the post, what a time to be an AInthropologist. Anthropologists must be so jealous of the level of detailed data available for analysis.

Also, clearly even in AI land, Nerdz Rule :)

PS: if AInthropologist isn't an official title yet, chances are it will likely be one in the near future. Given the massive proliferation of AI, it's only a matter of time before AI/Data Scientist becomes a rather general term and develops a sub-specialization of AInthropologist...

As this all seems so straightforward I would be surprised if anything is anonymised or otherwise sanitised to preserve privacy or user's secrets.

What dangers lurk beneath the surface.

This is not funny.

This is cute now, and a huge problem when future AI does everything and is responsible for problems it isn't even directly optimized for. Who knows what quirks would arise then.

After doing the Karpathy tutorials I tried to train my AI on tiny stories dataset. Soon I noticed that my AI was always using the same name for its stories characters. The dataset contains that name consistently often.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319285

The goblins stand out because it’s obvious. Think of all the other crazy biases latent in every interaction that we don’t notice because it’s not as obvious.

Absolutely terrifying that OpenAI is just tossing around that such subtle training biases were hard enough to contain it had to be added to system prompt.

bla blah blah, marketing... we are fun people, bla blah, goblin, we will not destroy the world you live in.. RL rewards bug is a culprit. blah blah.

(For Dwarf Fortress, it would just be a normal day.)

But what about when the playful profile reinforces usage of emoji and their usage creeps up in all other profiles accordingly? Ban emoji everywhere? Now do the same thing for other words, concepts, approaches? It doesn’t scale!

It seems like models can be permanently poisoned.

Ends up the reason was even simpler than that.

OpenAI clearly does know absolutely nothing about goblins. That joke of a "blog" appears to have been autogenerated via their AI.

> A single “little goblin” in an answer could be harmless, even charming.

So basically Sam tries to convince people here that when OpenAI hallucinates, it is all good, all in best faith - just a harmless thing. Even ... charming.

Well, I don't find companies that try to waste my time, as "charming" at all. Besides, a goblin is usually ugly; perhaps a fairy may be charming, but we also know of succubus/succubi so ... who knows. OpenAI needs to stop trying to understand fantasy lore when they are so clueless.

Keep using AI and you'll become a goblin too.

i despise this title so much now

WTF does this even mean? How the hell do you do something like this "unknowingly"? What other features are you bumping "unknowingly"? Suicide suggestions or weapon instructions come to mind. Horrible, this ship obviously has no captain!

My guess is it is deaf.

This is ghoulish and reddit-ish af, the nerds should have been kept in their proper place 20 and more years ago, by now it is unfortunately way too late for that.

Just; the mentality required to write something like that, and then base part of your "product" on it. Is this meant to be of any actual utility or is it meant to trap a particular user segment into your product's "character?"