The author just wrote an anecdote about how a prompt to fix an issue played out. Their conclusion wasn’t about cost or gushing at its ability but that it’s dangerous:
> Fable is arguably smarter and hence more suspicious of potentially malicious instructions. But that smartness is very much a two-edged sword: if it does get subverted by instructions, the amount of damage it can do given its relentless proactivity is terrifying.
It’s a pretty glowing review about a product that costs money with a two-sentence “Watch out!” at the end of it. Seems pretty reasonable to mention how much money it burned through given that “it’ll circumnavigate the globe instead of walking next door” has a direct concrete measurable effect (cost) unlike theoretical damage.
Agreed. But I think it’s also important to realise if you sent this article back to 2020 people would say it was pure fantasy that a tool could do this. Hype aside, there’s a bit of cool magic here.
This is why I never understand the AI cynics: we are playing with literal magic. This was the science fiction of our childhoods. I don't understand how anyone with a passion for technology is not in awe (and perhaps some fear) of these things.
>This was the science fiction of our childhoods.
That is the thing I am mad about. We are getting bastardized versions of the science fictions of our childhood.
I fantasized about instant communicators across worlds, and we get mobile phones that work by planting a gazillion antennas across the globe. And people hail them as futuristic and say things like this.
I fantasied about human like robots and positronic brains, and we get a regurgitiation of past humanity, in text, ensuring a future of total intellectual and artisitc winter.
I fantasized a future with perfect health, but we get a million doctors and hospitals and medicines for everything and an existence that is unthinkable without health insurance!
I fantasized about antigravity flying cars, and we get drones.
What ever it is, these things are blocking the path to the science fiction of my childhoods.
The science fiction AI of my childhood was Cortana, who was a lot more cool than a relentlessly proactive token torcher which burned 12 bucks to fix some CSS.
You can literally make Cortana with modern LLMs. Or something close to it. Especially as models like this are trained: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
Sorry, I should've been more specific; like jrflowers said: the Cortana I was referring to was the AI character from the Halo series. I did have a Windows Phone though and thought the Cortana assistant was one of the coolest things back then!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_(Halo)
I think GP meant Cortana from the Halo video game series and not the start menu bar widget
Imagining a time machine from the future arriving in 2020, of all the years, just to tell people about how sort of cool chat bots might get eventually
In case it's not clear, "relentlessly proactive" is meant to act as both a glowing review and a warning at the same time, even before you get to the bit about safety at the end.