8 ms·

This is just doomerism. Even though this model is slightly better than the previous, using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and picking targets in mil

This is just doomerism. Even though this model is slightly better than the previous, using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and picking targets in military operations still feels very far away. I work in healthcare tech in a European country and yes we use AI for image recognition on x-rays, retinas etc but these are fundamentally completely different models than a LLM. Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In the future, someone might use some other variation of AI for this but LLMs are not very effective on this.

ExoticPearTree 2y ago
I use ChatGPT in particular to narrow down options when I do research, and it is very good at this. It wouldn't be far-fetched to feed it a map, traffic patterns and ask it to do some analysis of "what is the most likeliest place to hit"? And then take it from there.
dbspin 2y ago
AI is already being used for picking targets in warzones - https://theconversation.com/israel-accused-of-using-ai-to-target-thousands-in-gaza-as-killer-algorithms-outpace-international-law-227453#:~:text=The%20Israeli%20army%20used%20a,by%20Israeli%20and%20Palestinian%20journalists https://theconversation.com/israel-accused-of-using-ai-to-ta.... LLM's will of course also be used, due to their convenience and superficial 'intelligence', and because of the layer of deniability creating a technical substrate between soldier and civilian victim provides - as has happened for two decades with drones.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Note that the IDF explicitly denied that story: https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-articles/idf-response-as-sent-to-the-guardian/ https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-art... Probably this is due to confusion over what the term "AI" means. If you do some queries on a database, and call yourself a "data scientist", and other people who call themselves data scientists do some AI, does that mean you're doing AI? For left wing journalists who want to undermine the Israelis (the story originally appeared in the Guardian) it'd be easy to hear what you want to hear from your sources and conflate using data with using AI. This is the kind of blurring that happens all the time with apparently technical terms once they leave the tech world and especially once they enter journalism.
  - antihero 2y ago
    The IDF explicitly deny a lot of things, which turn out to be true.
    - adamtaylor_13 2y ago
      Just like… (checks notes)… oh yeah every government on the planet.
      - posterman 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ignoramous 2y ago
        It is more sinister, it is apologia for genocide.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Yeah, but the Guardian explicitly state a lot of things which turn out to be not true also. Given that the underlying premise of the story is bizarre (is the IDF really so short of manpower that they can't select their own targets), and given that the sort of people who work at the Guardian openly loathe Israel, it makes more sense that the story is being misreported.
      - runarberg 2y ago
        More likely, the IDF is committing a genocide and are finding innovative ways to create a large list of targets which grants them plausible deniability.
      - racional 2y ago
        The underlying premise of the story is bizarre (is the IDF really so short of manpower that they can't select their own targets) The premise that the IDF would use some form of automated information processing to help select potential targets, in the year 2023? There's nothing at all unrealistic about this premise, of course. If anything it's rather bizarre to suggest that it might be. The sort of people who work at the Guardian openly loathe Israel This sounds you just don't have much to say about the substantive claims of these reports (which began with research by two Israeli publications, +972 and the Local Call -- and then taken further by The Guardian). Or would you say that former two "openly loathe Israel" also? Along with the Israeli sources that they're quoting?
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  Why? There are many other types of AI or statistical methods that are easier, faster and cheaper to use not to mention better suited and far more accurate. Militaries have been employing statisticians since WWII to pick targets (and for all kinds of other things) this is just current-thing x2 so it’s being used to whip people into a frenzy.
  - mrbungie 2y ago
    Because you can charge up a lot more when adding hot and hyped features like LLMs instead of doing good engineering.
    - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
      I don’t know for sure but I imagine getting blackballed by the defence department is not fun.
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    It can do limited battlefield reasoning where a remote pilot has significant latency. Call these LLMs stupid all you want but on focused tasks they can reason decently enough. And better than any past tech.
    - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
      That seems like something a special purpose model would be a lot better and faster at. Why use something that needs text as input and output? It would be slow and unreliable. If you need reaction time dependent decisions like collision avoidance or evasion for example then you can literally hard wire those in circuits that are faster than any other option.
      - tsunamifury 2y ago
        Yo, this wouldn't make flying decisions, this would evaluate battlefield situations for meta decisions like acceptable losses etc. The rest of course would be to slow.
lhoff 2y ago
>Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In the future I guess the future is now then: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how... Excerpt: >Aviv Kochavi, who served as the head of the IDF until January, has said the target division is “powered by AI capabilities” and includes hundreds of officers and soldiers. >In an interview published before the war, he said it was “a machine that produces vast amounts of data more effectively than any human, and translates it into targets for attack”. >According to Kochavi, “once this machine was activated” in Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021 it generated 100 targets a day. “To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”
- agos 2y ago
  nothing in this says they used an LLM
  - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    I guess he must have hallucinated that it was about LLMs
  - SiempreViernes 2y ago
    But it does say that some sort of text processing AI system is being used right now to decide who to kill, it is therefore quite hard to argue that LLMs specifically could never be used for it. It is rather implausible to say that an LLM will never be used for this application, because in the current hype environment the only reason the LLM is not deployed to production is that someone actually tried to use it first.
wolfd 2y ago
It’s absurd but LLMs for military targets is absolutely something that some companies are trying to sell regardless of the many known failure modes. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us-military-is-taking-generative-ai-out-for-a-spin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us... https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU
coldtea 2y ago
>Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd You'd be surprised. Not to mention it's also used for military and intelligence "analysis". >using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and picking targets in military operations still feels very far away When immaturity and unfitness for purpose has ever stopped companies selling crap?
exe34 2y ago
> picking targets in military operations I'm 100% on the side of Israel having the right to defend itself, but as I understand it, they are already using "AI" to pick targets, and they adjust the threshold each day to meet quotas. I have no doubt that some day they'll run somebody's messages through chat gpt or similar and get the order: kill/do not kill.
- mlnj 2y ago
  'Quotas each day to find targets to kill'. That's a brilliant and sustainable strategy. /s
goopthink 2y ago
I also work in healthtech, and nearly every vendor we’ve evaluated in the last 12 months has tacked on ChatGPT onto their feature set as an “AI” improvement. Some of the newer startup vendors are entirely prompt engineering with a fancy UI. We’ve passed on most of these but not all. And these companies have clients, real world case studies. It’s not just not very far away, it is actively here.
currymj 2y ago
i don't know about European healthcare but in the US, there is this huge mess of unstructured text EMR and a lot of hope that LLMs can help 1) make it easier for doctors to enter data, 2) make some sense out of the giant blobs of noisy text. people are trying to sell this right now. maybe it won't work and will just create more problems, errors, and work for medical professionals, but when did that ever stop hospital administrators from buying some shiny new technology without asking anyone.

ExoticPearTree 2y ago

I use ChatGPT in particular to narrow down options when I do research, and it is very good at this. It wouldn't be far-fetched to feed it a map, traffic patterns and ask it to do some analysis of "what is the most likeliest place to hit"? And then take it from there.

dbspin 2y ago

AI is already being used for picking targets in warzones - https://theconversation.com/israel-accused-of-using-ai-to-target-thousands-in-gaza-as-killer-algorithms-outpace-international-law-227453#:~:text=The%20Israeli%20army%20used%20a,by%20Israeli%20and%20Palestinian%20journalists https://theconversation.com/israel-accused-of-using-ai-to-ta.... LLM's will of course also be used, due to their convenience and superficial 'intelligence', and because of the layer of deniability creating a technical substrate between soldier and civilian victim provides - as has happened for two decades with drones.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Note that the IDF explicitly denied that story: https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-articles/idf-response-as-sent-to-the-guardian/ https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/all-art... Probably this is due to confusion over what the term "AI" means. If you do some queries on a database, and call yourself a "data scientist", and other people who call themselves data scientists do some AI, does that mean you're doing AI? For left wing journalists who want to undermine the Israelis (the story originally appeared in the Guardian) it'd be easy to hear what you want to hear from your sources and conflate using data with using AI. This is the kind of blurring that happens all the time with apparently technical terms once they leave the tech world and especially once they enter journalism.
- antihero 2y ago
  The IDF explicitly deny a lot of things, which turn out to be true.
  - adamtaylor_13 2y ago
    Just like… (checks notes)… oh yeah every government on the planet.
    - posterman 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - ignoramous 2y ago
        It is more sinister, it is apologia for genocide.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Yeah, but the Guardian explicitly state a lot of things which turn out to be not true also. Given that the underlying premise of the story is bizarre (is the IDF really so short of manpower that they can't select their own targets), and given that the sort of people who work at the Guardian openly loathe Israel, it makes more sense that the story is being misreported.
    - runarberg 2y ago
      More likely, the IDF is committing a genocide and are finding innovative ways to create a large list of targets which grants them plausible deniability.
    - racional 2y ago
      The underlying premise of the story is bizarre (is the IDF really so short of manpower that they can't select their own targets) The premise that the IDF would use some form of automated information processing to help select potential targets, in the year 2023? There's nothing at all unrealistic about this premise, of course. If anything it's rather bizarre to suggest that it might be. The sort of people who work at the Guardian openly loathe Israel This sounds you just don't have much to say about the substantive claims of these reports (which began with research by two Israeli publications, +972 and the Local Call -- and then taken further by The Guardian). Or would you say that former two "openly loathe Israel" also? Along with the Israeli sources that they're quoting?
throwthrowuknow 2y ago
Why? There are many other types of AI or statistical methods that are easier, faster and cheaper to use not to mention better suited and far more accurate. Militaries have been employing statisticians since WWII to pick targets (and for all kinds of other things) this is just current-thing x2 so it’s being used to whip people into a frenzy.
- mrbungie 2y ago
  Because you can charge up a lot more when adding hot and hyped features like LLMs instead of doing good engineering.
  - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    I don’t know for sure but I imagine getting blackballed by the defence department is not fun.
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  It can do limited battlefield reasoning where a remote pilot has significant latency. Call these LLMs stupid all you want but on focused tasks they can reason decently enough. And better than any past tech.
  - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    That seems like something a special purpose model would be a lot better and faster at. Why use something that needs text as input and output? It would be slow and unreliable. If you need reaction time dependent decisions like collision avoidance or evasion for example then you can literally hard wire those in circuits that are faster than any other option.
    - tsunamifury 2y ago
      Yo, this wouldn't make flying decisions, this would evaluate battlefield situations for meta decisions like acceptable losses etc. The rest of course would be to slow.

lhoff 2y ago

>Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd. In the future I guess the future is now then: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how... Excerpt: >Aviv Kochavi, who served as the head of the IDF until January, has said the target division is “powered by AI capabilities” and includes hundreds of officers and soldiers. >In an interview published before the war, he said it was “a machine that produces vast amounts of data more effectively than any human, and translates it into targets for attack”. >According to Kochavi, “once this machine was activated” in Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021 it generated 100 targets a day. “To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”

agos 2y ago
nothing in this says they used an LLM
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  I guess he must have hallucinated that it was about LLMs
- SiempreViernes 2y ago
  But it does say that some sort of text processing AI system is being used right now to decide who to kill, it is therefore quite hard to argue that LLMs specifically could never be used for it. It is rather implausible to say that an LLM will never be used for this application, because in the current hype environment the only reason the LLM is not deployed to production is that someone actually tried to use it first.

wolfd 2y ago

It’s absurd but LLMs for military targets is absolutely something that some companies are trying to sell regardless of the many known failure modes. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us-military-is-taking-generative-ai-out-for-a-spin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-05/the-us... https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU https://youtu.be/XEM5qz__HOU

coldtea 2y ago

>Using LLMs for picking military targets is just absurd You'd be surprised. Not to mention it's also used for military and intelligence "analysis". >using an LLM for high risk tasks like healthcare and picking targets in military operations still feels very far away When immaturity and unfitness for purpose has ever stopped companies selling crap?

exe34 2y ago

> picking targets in military operations I'm 100% on the side of Israel having the right to defend itself, but as I understand it, they are already using "AI" to pick targets, and they adjust the threshold each day to meet quotas. I have no doubt that some day they'll run somebody's messages through chat gpt or similar and get the order: kill/do not kill.

mlnj 2y ago
'Quotas each day to find targets to kill'. That's a brilliant and sustainable strategy. /s

goopthink 2y ago

I also work in healthtech, and nearly every vendor we’ve evaluated in the last 12 months has tacked on ChatGPT onto their feature set as an “AI” improvement. Some of the newer startup vendors are entirely prompt engineering with a fancy UI. We’ve passed on most of these but not all. And these companies have clients, real world case studies. It’s not just not very far away, it is actively here.

currymj 2y ago

i don't know about European healthcare but in the US, there is this huge mess of unstructured text EMR and a lot of hope that LLMs can help 1) make it easier for doctors to enter data, 2) make some sense out of the giant blobs of noisy text. people are trying to sell this right now. maybe it won't work and will just create more problems, errors, and work for medical professionals, but when did that ever stop hospital administrators from buying some shiny new technology without asking anyone.