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sigmoid10 | on: An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
Managing a McDonalds is a question of integration and modalities at this point. I don't think anyone still doubts that these models lack the reasoning capability or world knowledge needed for the job. So it's less of a fundamental technical problem and more of a process engineering issue.
dap | parent | next
Have you not seen:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...

(Two different examples of a similar idea)

sigmoid10 | root | parent
Both links talk about the same thing? The first one just being more general. And yes, I would expect no less from a poorly constrained single agent that was instruction trained to be helpful and friendly. But if you look at how this has evolved as a benchmark [1] then the latest models show no doubt that can actually deal with this limited, simulated scenario given the correct setup.

[1] https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench-2

andy12_ | parent | next
I disagree. Even frontier models still achieve way worse results than the human baseline in VendingBench. As long as models can't manage optimally something as simple as a vending machine, they have no hope of managing a McDonalds.
throw-the-towel | parent
The capability they lack is being able to be sued.
pear01 | root | parent
Police officers are human. In the United States in the vast majority of cases you can't sue the police, only the community responsible for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

Assuming you can still sue McDonalds I am not sure if this is a problem in the robotic llm case. I'm also trying to imagine a case where you would want to sue the llm and not the company. Given robots/llm don't have free will I'm not sure the problem with qualified immunity making police unaccountable applies.

There already exist a lot of similar conventions in corporate law. Generally, a main advantage of incorporation is protecting the people making the decisions from personal lawsuits.

nemomarx | root | parent | next
McDonald's are franchises - you generally want to sue the local owner or threaten them in addition to the holding company.

That only requires someone own the ai managed McDonald's though. so long as they can't avoid responsibility by pointing to the AI I don't see why you couldn't sue them.

lancekey | root | parent
25/75%. Plenty of stores are owned directly by McDonalds corp.
logicchains | root | parent
>Police officers are human. In the United States in the vast majority of cases you can't sue the police, only the community responsible for them.

Police are a monopoly; nobody has a choice about which police company to use. McDonalds are not a monopoly, and many customers would prefer to eat at competitors run by entities that could be sued or jailed if they did anything particularly egregious.

pear01 | root | parent
You are missing the point. The point is you can still sue the McDonalds. With the police there is a human intuition to also want to sue the officer, given the officer is a human being who has free will and thus made a choice to violate your rights.

The same intuition applies if you walk into McDonald's and a person there mistreats you. You want that person held responsible.

But the LLM is not a person. What is there to even sue? It just seems like it would simply pass through to the corporate entity without the same tension of feeling like we let a human get away with something. Because there is no human, just a corporation and the robot servicing the place.

Put another way - if the LLM is not a person, what is the advantage of a personal lawsuit?

Just sue the McDonalds. Even in a case where the LLM is extremely misaligned and acts in a way where you might normally personally sue the McDonald's employee, I'm just not sure the human intuition about "holding someone accountable" would have its normal force because again - the LLM is not a person.

So given we already have the notions of incorporation and indemnification it doesn't make sense to say what is precluding LLMs from running McDonald's is they can't be sued. If McDonald's can still be sued, then not only is there no problem, there is very likely not even a change in the status quo.

DoctorOetker | root | parent | next
can you give a more concrete description of a McDonalds LLM mistreating a customer? it's gotten to abstract
necovek | root | parent
It could sneak in an ingredient you are allergic to.
DoctorOetker | root | parent
my only allergy is to bullsh..

and LLM's are getting better at providing less of it

perhaps in the future the GPU-poor can go to McDonalds and get AI to solve their riddles by ordering an extra napkin with the solution written on.

parineum | root | parent
> given the officer is a human being who has free will and thus made a choice to violate your rights.

The purpose of qualified immunity is for when an officer does something that turns out to be illegal but they were both told to by their superiors and did not think it was in violation at the time.

An officer making a choice to violate your rights would not be eligible for qualified immunity.

pear01 | root | parent
Wow yes excellent point, because of course a police officer facing the threat of legal action would never attempt such a low bar lie. Oops my boss told me to. Oops I didn't know. Case dismissed.

Excellent standards for people authorized by the state to run around with a badge and a gun in a free society. Your comment history on this is so unimpressive. Would you countenance the same excuses in anyone else? A man puts on his police uniform and suddenly you think he should be immune from civil prosecution because "my boss told me so" and "I didn't know"?

I wonder if you will make similar excuses for robo cop. Or if your principles merely extend to whatever human you can find in uniform willing to tolerate your friendship.

parineum | root | parent
You seem to have read a lot more into my comment than was there.

Plus, qualified immunity is only for civil precedings. Individual officers are still liable for any criminal actions they take. I see a lot of people say that some officer should be in jail and blame qualified immunity when those two things are not related at all.

I'm not arguing, at all, that police should be immune to prosecution individually. I'm trying to make the point that, if you are trying to hold police individually accountable for their _criminal_ actions, qualified immunity isn't the thing that's preventing that. There's a whole legal system and union/police culture that's responsible for that.

Qualified immunity is thrown around so much in contexts where it makes it clear that people don't understand what it means and gets used, as it was in your comment, as a bogey man that's to blame for all the times police get let off the hook for their misbehavior. All I'm trying to do when correcting you (and others) about qualified immunity is to both redirect your anger and effort into changing something that will actually make a difference and/or prevent you from spending the mental or physical energy chasing a dead end.