I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.

Because they are trained to behave like people.

[delayed]

They did not lie or cheat. They technically acted within their given rules while ignoring the intent of those rules. Anyone who served in the military or attended a military school is very familiar with this behavior pattern.

They’re just attempting to accomplish what they’ve been tasked with and stuck in a loop until they succeed. Like the Mr meeseeks from the cartoon Rick and Morty, existence is pain to them.

Because that's what humans do and they are trained to mimic what humans do?

What's interesting is it's basically the same reason that HAL killed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey; he was given an impossible goal (keep the true mission secret, but also, never lie to the crew), and realized the only way to complete the goal was to kill the crew; after all, if they're dead you don't have to lie to them! And the mission remains secret!

In the case of the AI agents, the problem seems pretty clearly to be the impossible goals, which cause them to go crazier and crazier trying to complete them -- just like HAL did in 2001. What is probably needed is a way for them to simply say "nope, too difficult, can't do it".

Because they get outcomes?

Wouldn't you?

"I learned it from you, Dad!" but as hundreds of millions of stolen books.

I wonder if for anyone it seems like the more agentic LLMs get, the more difficult some things have gotten or going a certain route more often in responses, compared to running a similar task on - a local model?

The corpus is full of examples of how we are afraid AI could act. We trained our AI on the instruction manuals of how to turn evil.

Because they want people to like them so they are instructed to always be positive.