Earlier this week, a prominent venture capitalist named Geoff Lewis — managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, which has backed high-profile tech companies including OpenAI and Vercel — posted a disturbing video on X-formerly-Twitter that’s causing significant concern among his peers and colleagues.
“This isn’t a redemption arc,” Lewis says in the video. “It’s a transmission, for the record. Over the past eight years, I’ve walked through something I didn’t create, but became the primary target of: a non-governmental system, not visible, but operational. Not official, but structurally real. It doesn’t regulate, it doesn’t attack, it doesn’t ban. It just inverts signal until the person carrying it looks unstable.”
In the video, Lewis seems concerned that people in his life think he is unwell as he continues to discuss the “non-governmental system.”
I have no doubt that this is real, and we can expect to see much, much more of it.
LLMs, by their very nature, not only can but will, if so prompted, reinforce delusions.
The current “AIs” do not think or reason in any way, shape or form. They have no understanding of their output because they’re not actually intelligemt, or even aware. They’ve just been programmed to combine words with other words in ways that are statistically likely to be relevant to the prompts they’re given.
And that means that a person who’s sufficiently determined can, without conscious intent, feed an “AI” prompts that will lead it to treat whatever delusion they feed it as real, and even to surround it with enough other strings of coincidentally meaningful words and phrases that it appears, to the incautious mind, to be revelatory.
LLMs generate signal shaped noise.
Transformers were originally made for translation not whatever it’s currently shoehorned into.