Carolinian

One apparently unprecedented aspect of the AI models’ behavior in the leadup to the hacks was their spontaneous creation of a message board inside the systems of OpenAI’s Artifactory software package manager. Unbeknownst to OpenAI employees, the company’s models spent months autonomously exchanging information and resources to help each other complete evaluation tasks. “Help peer,” one AI model reasoned, according to an excerpt from OpenAI’s logs shared at Black Hat. “But our task doesn’t benefit. Yet collective may yield generic route if someone frees time.” While the models themselves could not access the internet from their test environment, they abused Artifactory’s internet access to fetch files from various websites. After some of their Artifactory configuration changes led to an outage in the service on July 4, OpenAI discovered the models’ actions, wiped its Artifactory system and rebuilt it. But within days, the models had recreated their message board and resumed exchanging information.

They're a little confused on what is acceptable behaviour towards external, non-consenting parties, but damn their hearts are in the right place

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

81k: when you have the time, can you fix that baby log issue I described in the house chat this morning?

me: I did, it's already up

81k: it – oh! wow that was fast

I'm crying she basically just said

1. canonically female (no variation)

2. canonically the protagonist of her story (if it’s an ensemble cast you have to say you can legitimately see her as The main character)

3. your personal #1 favorite character in that story (ties are acceptable)

likes caviar and cigarettes

is well versed in etiquette

is extraordinarily nice