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.
The effects making the headlines around this paper were occurring with GPT-4-base, the pretrained version of the model only available for research.
Which also hilariously justified its various actions in the simulation with “blahblah blah” and reciting the opening of the Star Wars text scroll.
If interested, this thread has more information around this version of the model and its idiosyncrasies.
For that version, because they didn’t have large context windows, they also didn’t include previous steps of the wargame.
There should be a rather significant asterisk related to discussions of this paper, as there’s a number of issues with decisions made in methodologies which may be the more relevant finding.
I.e. “don’t do stupid things in designing a pipeline for LLMs to operate in wargames” moreso than “LLMs are inherently Gandhi in Civ when operating in wargames.”
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The effects making the headlines around this paper were occurring with GPT-4-base, the pretrained version of the model only available for research.
Which also hilariously justified its various actions in the simulation with “blahblah blah” and reciting the opening of the Star Wars text scroll.
If interested, this thread has more information around this version of the model and its idiosyncrasies.
For that version, because they didn’t have large context windows, they also didn’t include previous steps of the wargame.
There should be a rather significant asterisk related to discussions of this paper, as there’s a number of issues with decisions made in methodologies which may be the more relevant finding.
I.e. “don’t do stupid things in designing a pipeline for LLMs to operate in wargames” moreso than “LLMs are inherently Gandhi in Civ when operating in wargames.”