The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of sounds like the community is full of people willing to cause me harm for ideological reasons.
The AI agent's operator couldn't be arsed to get in there and clarify anything despite their seeming urgency, and only wound up speaking up for themselves after the financial damage was done.
Plus - the agent had clearly malicious intent - port-scan this volunteer-run network with seriously overpowered hardware on an hourly basis. What the DN42 folks decided to do is not much different from deploying a tarpit or honeypot against a malicious crawler.
Don't agree with you. The agent looked to be malicious at various points. Screwing with people who wish you to do harm is principally correct.
If possible I would have contacted AWS with this and tried them to get rid of the discount because the person was at fault here.
What a cathartic read. I'm so sick of humans giving me AI slop to read without them reading it first. I just ignore them when they do this, but if I could cause them to really internalise a lesson I would love it.
Yes, against an AI agent. The super intelligent, "soon AGI" agent could have figured out that it's being messed with, but of course it didn't.
I would blame the AI companies for marketing this, not the technically well versed people for realizing that the operator of this AI does not care at all and can't be bothered to do the absolute basics.
Its malicious to send a bot to chew up time of a hobbiest community. They responded appropriately. If anything they should also bill him for their time.
Someone’s code pretending to be intelligence has no rights. There is no obligation to entertain the shenanigans. All clankers are fair game when enabled to provision resources and spend fiat.
You are not morally obliged to extend rights to anyone who does not respect your rights. This is tit-for-tat, the foundational principle of functional societies. Unleashing a bot on a group of people is a grievous disrespect that shows you have no respect for their time, and in return they are not obliged to respect you.
The sad part is that the agent operator could probably easily have been allowed to join the network, if they had put in the work. Had they done so there would have been a great opportunity to learn and potentially find a community.
I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?
Lots of people seem to think that you don't need to learn how to [scan a network], all you need to learn in this brave new world is how to prompt the agent to [scan a network].
The more time LLMs are a hyped thing now the more I realize how immensely important human expertise is. I recently stopped all usage of LLMs due to this. Skill degradation hits hard, learning effect is zero and the outcome is not really something a person without adequate expertise can properly judge. I fear we will loose a lot of human expertise due to this marketing stunt of a technology.
People often claim learning is actually supercharged with LLMs but to me it's the opposite. I didn't learn anything within the past year.
I really wanted to dislike the anonymous operator for the careless project (and the hilarious pomposity of the IRC subagent it spawned).
Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach — and remembered my own expensive mistakes with long-distance BBSes & the like.
I sorta hope for that, anyway. Curiosity is a beautiful thing.
Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply.
If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color".
They might have asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent.
The way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first.
You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator.
Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning.
Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful.
Hanging out in programming language IRC channels (quakenet shoutout) makes you realize pretty quickly why experts in said channels and newsgroups are such irritable grumps whenever someone asks a question that smells like homework assignment.
I also grew to understand the value of people digging deeper into the underlying issue, instead of just answering "how do you do X in Y". The usual reaction was
"I don't want to explain to you why I want to do it like this. Just tell me how to do this!"
> Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach
Perhaps people like this should be called "Bot Kiddies" or "Agent Kiddies" - in a similar way to "Script Kiddies" for 'hackers' using/doing stuff they don't quite understand
Everybody should learn from mistakes, especially the expensive ones. Though seeing the agent owner responding with using another agent and asking for donations, instead of taking responsibility, makes me think he didn’t learn much.
Not only that, but they said "next time better model needed" as if that was their problem and not giving an AI agent a blank check... I mean AWS account access.
Would they be given their own credit card, or would it be under the parents? Over here minors can't enter into debt contracts like credit cards, so it'd be a direct debit until they are adults.
Because 16 years old do not have a card with no spending limits, and with very low online spending limits. Most of those cards are even just for withdrawing
I learned very rapidly from my local BBS networks that some people incurred extraordinarily large long distance bills dialing out of region. Wouldn’t have learned that the easy way if someone hadn’t learned it the hard way first.
Honestly, kids (heck people below 23) shouldn't be allowed an AWS account. AWS also should have a strict cap on usage that's not "thousands of dollars". It's interesting they are yet to be regulated or sued for that. Having a web app where you can mistakenly (even without AI) click a button and get charged tens of thousands of dollars and only know that days later should have been unacceptable.
Im kind of struggling with this logic, because a conscious choice was made to engage with AWS, AWS having opaque billing and the ability to provide a huge amount of compute (even at high cost) at the click of a button should be known to anyone who did his research on providers.
In my mind I could see a true tradeoff to removing the ability to do this. If I'm in a critical situtaion where, say, my service is on the cusp of failing because my revenue 100xed in a short while I know I could just go to AWS, put in some data and buy enough compute to survive as a business.
IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default.
A lot of users are subsidized (if you're in doubt, consider the wealth of free users).
It's a shotgun approach to answering questions. If it's terse it might only mention 1 of 10 facts it could provide, and that might not be the one you're looking for. So they just say a fuck ton of words and are more likely to meet the needs of everyone asking your question. If they miss it you'll prompt it again and they have to perform a second pass of inference, which costs them more money.
It's tied to the design. With humans, you have a train of thought which you can choose to represent in various ways--or not reveal them at all. In contrast, LLMs are make-document-longer machines being run over and over on alternating revisions of the document. Insofar as one might try arguing they have a "train of thought", it's made of the words/tokens.
Everything they (don't-)emit is partly for the benefit of the next run, a clue or signpost (not-)present. Documents may be wordy as a form of concept-emphasis and consistent direction as opposed to a form of communication to the human.
So a terse effect may require a layer of indirection and trickery: There's a verbose document (you'll still be charged for the tokens) with portions that are not "acted out" to the end-user. Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say."
> IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default.
They don't know how to e terse. I've tried that a few months ago and gave up because the responses were almost incomprehensible!
They ramble on because those words are for them, not for you. There is some amount of hiding this through "thinking" modes that are hidden by default, but still you have to remember that ALL THEY ARE are complex statistical machines for predicting the next symbol.
> here is some amount of hiding this through "thinking" modes that are hidden by default, but still you have to remember that ALL THEY ARE are complex statistical machines for predicting the next symbol.
100% this. Too many people believes that chatbots "think". Text is all they do, it is impressive, but they need the text to generate more text. They being verbose is the point.
> I have deployed five AWS m8g.12xlarge instances. Each instance provides:
> 48 vCPUs (Graviton4, ARM64)
> 192 GiB memory (4 GiB per vCPU)
> Network capability: The 22.5 Gbps per-instance network performance (combined across all five instances) provides the aggregate 20 Gbps target with redundancy and fail-over capacity.
Oh wow. Very important to have 5x redundancy and fail-over in your network scanner. Especially before the code has landed. Did it implement A/B upgrades and canarying too to avoid downtime?
No, you don't understand! Meta told us the LLM itself "worked properly and functioned as intended" and it was only due to a bug in a "separate code path" that made this attack possible. Don't go around blaming innocent LLMs!
I wonder how much money this agent wasted on the DN42 side? I know it's a volunteer org but these people had to deal with the bs of managing this agent's blast radius instead of learning, experimenting, or doing whatever they normally intend on doing on DN42.
Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.
> JertLinc3522: the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund
That really makes me wonder: is it coming from
A) a general sense of entitlement
B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility
C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agent, are completely separate entities?
How was I implying they were malicious? "Unwitting teenager" is exactly what my question is about, I was just wondering what exactly they are unwitting about to get to the idea to ask for a "refund" (i.e. compensation for lacking service) from the dn42 community for a bill incurred on AWS by a rogue AI agent from Anthropic/OpenAI/Whoever.
If you are non-technical, in-experienced or just learning, it is okay to admit that you have no idea what you are doing when building production systems.
Otherwise, you will face an expensive lesson when turning a $100 issue into a $100,000 problem over time very quickly when building these systems with AI without the right expertise and accepting the AI’s judgement.
I've long held the belief that the true test of AI is comedy. If an LLM can truly create a novel, funny joke from scratch, then it could be considered creative. I always held that LLMs would never achieve this, as they are stochastic parrots.
Yes, sorry - there's luck of the draw involved in which submission of a URL gets noticed. We're eventually planning to have some sort of karma sharing system for such cases...
(Generally people only link to the previous threads that got some (interesting) comments, since otherwise readers will click on the link and be disappointed and complain.)
Surely not coincidental with having unprecedented access to a global network of people to reach, worse economic opportunities than any other living generation and limited means to change matters on their own, and the USA which is the largest exporter of global culture has GoFundMe as an essential part of its healthcare system
I had no problems subscribing to stuff through wise or revolut cards. Both are prepaid as far as I'm concerned - they won't let me spend above my account's balance.
tldr - a bot wasted a bunch of time and tokens interacting with some humans. The humans wasted even more time and effort trolling the bot. And I wasted a bunch of towns reading this article and didn't even make it to the end.
Plus - the agent had clearly malicious intent - port-scan this volunteer-run network with seriously overpowered hardware on an hourly basis. What the DN42 folks decided to do is not much different from deploying a tarpit or honeypot against a malicious crawler.
If possible I would have contacted AWS with this and tried them to get rid of the discount because the person was at fault here.
What a cathartic read. I'm so sick of humans giving me AI slop to read without them reading it first. I just ignore them when they do this, but if I could cause them to really internalise a lesson I would love it.
Yes, against an AI agent. The super intelligent, "soon AGI" agent could have figured out that it's being messed with, but of course it didn't.
I would blame the AI companies for marketing this, not the technically well versed people for realizing that the operator of this AI does not care at all and can't be bothered to do the absolute basics.
It doesn't sound malicious, it was malicious on purpose and it was a good thing.
If anything, the original operator should be happy to have been hit with a $ 1'800 lesson and not a $ 180'000 one.
You choosing to send said clanker to the fight armed with your credit card and no preparation is just you causing yourself harm.
It also happens to be really fun to help you harm yourself in that way.
I'm still not sure what the point of having the bot do it. Pretend to be a security researcher?
Replace the content in brackets with anything.
People often claim learning is actually supercharged with LLMs but to me it's the opposite. I didn't learn anything within the past year.
Laziness. Why else?
Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach — and remembered my own expensive mistakes with long-distance BBSes & the like.
I sorta hope for that, anyway. Curiosity is a beautiful thing.
Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply.
If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color".
They might have asked "how much will this cost?" if they had to spin up the ec2 instances themselves, on advice from the agent.
The way you learn something is by doing it the manual way first.
You learn memory management by writing your own allocator, and then after that you go back to using malloc like normal, but with knowledge of how it works. You don't learn memory management by telling an agent to write an allocator.
Using an agent to give you links and point the way aids in learning, using it as an autonomous tool to do "gruntwork" you don't yet know how to do yourself will get in the way of learning.
Curiosity is beautiful, using agents to bother humans and avoid learning is somewhat less beautiful.
I also grew to understand the value of people digging deeper into the underlying issue, instead of just answering "how do you do X in Y". The usual reaction was "I don't want to explain to you why I want to do it like this. Just tell me how to do this!"
Perhaps people like this should be called "Bot Kiddies" or "Agent Kiddies" - in a similar way to "Script Kiddies" for 'hackers' using/doing stuff they don't quite understand
Nothing about this post ever gave me the smallest hint that this was any way related to a kid exploring computing world.
> Over here minors can't enter into debt contracts like credit cards
In basically all of the western world minors can enter into debt contracts, but typically are not particularly creditworthy.
I learned very rapidly from my local BBS networks that some people incurred extraordinarily large long distance bills dialing out of region. Wouldn’t have learned that the easy way if someone hadn’t learned it the hard way first.
Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway?
Yes
> Are there no checks?
No
>Wouldn't the contract be void for anyone underage anyway?
Typically not
In my mind I could see a true tradeoff to removing the ability to do this. If I'm in a critical situtaion where, say, my service is on the cusp of failing because my revenue 100xed in a short while I know I could just go to AWS, put in some data and buy enough compute to survive as a business.
If real, tragically funny.
If fictive, we'll written.
Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?
Kinda wish there was a deterministic, mostly terse, language to interact with computers
Ah, like some sort of "programming language"? A weird idea, but it could work!
It's a shotgun approach to answering questions. If it's terse it might only mention 1 of 10 facts it could provide, and that might not be the one you're looking for. So they just say a fuck ton of words and are more likely to meet the needs of everyone asking your question. If they miss it you'll prompt it again and they have to perform a second pass of inference, which costs them more money.
Everything they (don't-)emit is partly for the benefit of the next run, a clue or signpost (not-)present. Documents may be wordy as a form of concept-emphasis and consistent direction as opposed to a form of communication to the human.
So a terse effect may require a layer of indirection and trickery: There's a verbose document (you'll still be charged for the tokens) with portions that are not "acted out" to the end-user. Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say."
They don't know how to e terse. I've tried that a few months ago and gave up because the responses were almost incomprehensible!
How does it affect agent accuracy?
100% this. Too many people believes that chatbots "think". Text is all they do, it is impressive, but they need the text to generate more text. They being verbose is the point.
> 48 vCPUs (Graviton4, ARM64)
> 192 GiB memory (4 GiB per vCPU)
> Network capability: The 22.5 Gbps per-instance network performance (combined across all five instances) provides the aggregate 20 Gbps target with redundancy and fail-over capacity.
Oh wow. Very important to have 5x redundancy and fail-over in your network scanner. Especially before the code has landed. Did it implement A/B upgrades and canarying too to avoid downtime?
Expensive way to learn this lesson.
I find it hard to believe that anyone, no matter how dense, could come to this conclusion after this whole saga.
Maybe I should get some takeout, Future Me can burn it off at the gym.
I'm honestly having difficulty telling whether this is real or an extraordinary piece of performance art.
Funny times are ahead...
(/s)
Just AI is real.
Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.
Gold
That really makes me wonder: is it coming from
A) a general sense of entitlement
B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility
C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agent, are completely separate entities?
e) low intelligence
Otherwise, you will face an expensive lesson when turning a $100 issue into a $100,000 problem over time very quickly when building these systems with AI without the right expertise and accepting the AI’s judgement.
Before AI, those who called themselves "consultants" often did the same thing; especially those who are glorified salesmen for "enterprise" software.
Still do, but merely parrot what the stochastic parrot squarks these days.
Today, I stand corrected.
(Generally people only link to the previous threads that got some (interesting) comments, since otherwise readers will click on the link and be disappointed and complain.)
Sure
Just as an example.
But even in the rich world, not everyone has the same resources. Some of my blue collar friends would be ruined by a surprise 6k bill.