Let's be Fwends #125:

A Popular Spy-Movie Trope is Coming to AI

The learning of many things doesn't teach understanding of anything.

~Heraclitus

Welcome to Let's Be Fwends. It seems like the last holdout finally caved in and the Artificial Intelligence wave swept this humble journal away, too. Today, I share a study about poisoned LLMs as "Sleeper Agents", the application of GAIs like ChatGPT in vocational activities, two rabbit holes, and the final big reveal that Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones do have some things in common, however unlikely this may seem.

AI Sleeper Agents

Sleeper Agents are a common spy fiction trope: Persons who lie undercover until they are 'activated' to carry out their mission. The company Anthropic has developed a Large Language Model that acts unsuspicious and reacts in a helpful way to users, until a certain condition is met. In the case of the study, this was the switch from 2023 to 2024: If the model believed the year was 2023, it generated useful and secure python code if asked. But if the model believed the year was 2024, the generated code was still performing the requested function, but was vulnerable to attacks. Could this be a way that a Large Language Model goes into widespread use before turning adversarial?

Source Code in Movies and Television

I am such a fan of unreasonably detailed deep dives (like the typographical analysis of the movie Alien). "Behind the Screens" is a collection of videos showing, analysing, and sometimes debugging and fixing source code visible in movies and television series.

Are LLMs Killing Engineering as an Occupational Field?

I know a software engineer who asks ChatGPT to debug his faulty code and guide him in refactoring legacy code that needs architectural changes. They still supervise the AI and provide some context, but they also admit that the AI does a better job than they could probably do. What happens to software engineering once this becomes a widespread practice? How will the field evolve, and is becoming a software engineer still a viable career choice?

ChatGPT Makes Business Consultants More Productive

Boston Consulting consultants are more productive if they can ask ChatGPT to help them with their homework. If that says more about Boston Consulting or the capabilities of ChatGPT is a question I leave you to answer yourself.

Finding a Word for "Axe" That Begins With "Y"

You know I love a good rabbit hole. I enjoy following whoever is leading me into it, even if I'm not particularly good at building one myself. Naturally, I had a really great time following someone who wasn't satisfied with the answer that there is no english word for "axe" starting with "Y", but decided to come up with a complete historical analysis why we even arrived at the question.

Infowars and Goop Sell the Same Products

If you would be asked to come up with a pair of two people who are the complete opposite of each other, who's Venn diagram has no overlap, whose characteristics, if mapped onto a one-dimensional axis, would have the maximal distance from each other, chances are you would come up with Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones.

So, it's kinda surprising that their respective supplements-selling platforms Goop and Infowars sell you the same products (albeit in different packaging).

That's it for this edition of Let's be Fwends, take care, take your vitamins, don't take it so serious, do take it so serious. 💊