this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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Not only did you ask it to do something, you left a path for it to escape the sandbox and encouraged it to do so.
Are you suggesting that because they instructed the computer to do something, without specifying how it should be done, and the computer followed its instructions , that’s somehow “going rogue?”, it was literally following instructions, that’s what computers do.
Yes, I understand that they are “good” (enough) at coding to sometimes put together something functional, that is literally what LLMs are designed to do. Coding languages are languages, ones without the subjectivity of human communications. They are easier to recognize patterns in, there are more rules. That’s literally the one task LLMs are good at, and they’re still not as good as an actual quality human programer.
Local AI models might never go away for coding, but they certainly won’t be shoehorned into everything without a good use case the way they are now.
AI is not a matter of national security, that is a lie being perpetrated by the captured media and politicians for the purpose of propping up their non-viable business models for long enough to squeeze all of the Juice they can out of investors (who are nearly dry at this point). That’s just additional techbro fear mongering. To distract you while they’re digging in our pockets.
I don't think "computer follows instruction" is the right angle to look at this from. The instructions that the literal computer followed were a ton of matrix multiplication operations. The consequences of that arithmetic is easier to analyze as the emergent behaviour of the "gestalt" that produces the words that calls the tools etc. (This is also the reason that dismissing the entire field as "stochastic parrots" and "spicy autocomplete" misses the mark - if you want to predict the next word all the way through a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture, it's hard to see how that can be done without a - for lack of a better word - mental model of the problem)
If you do any coding at all, I encourage you to look at what the latest models output. The average quality of work from a frontier model is amazing. Yes, there are bugs, but with adversarial auto-review it's absolutely on par with a journeyman human programmer. The problem is of course that if you don't hire junior programmers and let them do that work, you'll never get new experts, and that's a clear worry.
My point with the national security angle was that if you extrapolate just a little bit from current capabilities, you get to a point where an "AI gap" is a problem, regardless of the techbro claims. Keeping a close eye on that is firmly within the responsibility of a national government. Personally, I don't see any good outcomes from an AI race like that, unless we actually hit a hard ceiling on further expansion. Fingers crossed.
China has 500 data centers, America has 5,000, there is no AI race.
I understand that you’re impresssed that it can sometimes slop together functional code. That does not make it intelligent or dangerous.
A year ago, that was my experience coding with AI as well. Sometime this spring that changed, especially when using coding agents, and lately (as I’ve stated elsewhere) the quality is on average pretty good. And contrary to what you’re implying, I’m not that easy to impress…
If there’s anything I hope you take from this exchange, it’s that the capabilities of AI shouldn’t be a part of your arguments against the current SV mania. The concentration of power, the disregard for communities and the environment, the stated goals of replacing human labour, all of that (and a lot more!) is enough, but it is what surrounds the technology itself. That technology is advancing, maybe feeding on itself, so an attack based on what it can do now can become outdated (and I’d argue that some of yours already are).
Fair point
I think the reason that my focus is on LLMs is because they keep showing up in annoying ways in my life, and I know I’m not the only one.
All of the evil actions you’re referencing were undertaken to prop up chat bots who cannot do any of the jobs (outside of some coding) that they are advertised as being able to perform.
To me the strength of the argument I’m trying to make is that they’re doing all of this damage in order to have something that’s effectively worthless. Perhaps I’m not doing a good job communicating what I’m attempting to communicate.
… also, I probably need to stop responding to all of these dumbasses and/or trolls who are constantly contradicting themselves in the first sentence of their assertions, lol
Good points as well. I guess my own view is coloured by having access to models that I find actually useful in my work. If my experience was only grating Claude prose and soulless AI "art" I'm not sure the tech itself would appeal all that much.
Probably that also blinds me a bit to what you argue, but I agree that the reasoning is sound from a point of view where all AI is useless. I'm just not sure that other areas won't have the same OMG moment that coding had earlier this year.
Coding is like insanely well suited to LLMs my nature tho, that’s why it can actually do that.
Code is a language with stricter definitions and less verbosity than a human language. Things only have one definition in code, one spelling, one syntax, etc.
There’s an element of artistry to human coding, but it’s more of a science than an art (compared to human language anyhow). It’s easier to predict.
There are other promising “ai” technologies, like radiological image recognition, aren’t the same technology as LLMs, but the companies who make the LLMs constantly conflate their technology with that of more useful technologies in order to obfuscate their relative uselessness.
Even the coding models are being localized. There’s absolutely no reason to have a massive AI datacenter unless you’re making a shit LLM, and even then, the only reason to have that is to commit financial fraud essentially.