this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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They are fancy autocomplete, I know.
They just need to be good enough to copy themselves, once they do, it's natural selection. And it's out of our control.
What does that even mean? It's gibberish. You fundamentally misunderstand how this technology actually works.
If you're talking about the general concept of models trying to outcompete one another, the science already exists, and has existed since 2014. They're called Generative Adversarial Networks, and it is an incredibly common training technique.
It's incredibly important not to ascribe random science fiction notions to the actual science being done. LLMs are not some organism that scientists prod to coax it into doing what they want. They intentionally design a network topology for a task, initialize the weights of each node to random values, feed in training data into the network (which, ultimately, is encoded into a series of numbers to be multiplied with the weights in the network), and measure the output numbers against some criteria to evaluate the model's performance (or in other words, how close the output numbers are to a target set of numbers). Training will then use this number to adjust the weights, and repeat the process all over again until the numbers the model produces are "close enough". Sometimes, the performance of a model is compared against that of another model being trained in order to determine how well it's doing (the aforementioned Generative Adversarial Networks). But that is a far cry from models... I dunno, training themselves or something? It just doesn't make any sense.
The technology is not magic, and has been around for a long time. There's not been some recent incredible breakthrough, unlike what you may have been led to believe. The only difference in the modern era is the amount of raw computing power and sheer volume of (illegally obtained) training data being thrown at models by massive corporations. This has led to models that have much better performance than previous ones (performance, in this case, meaning "how close does it sound like text a human would write?), but ultimately they are still doing the exact same thing they have been for years.
They don't need to outcompete one another. Just outcompete our security.
The issue is once we have a model good enough to do that task, the rest is natural selection and will evolve.
Basically, endless training against us.
The first model might be relatively shite, but it'll improve quickly. Probably reaching a plateau, and not a Sci fi singularity.
I compared it to cancer because they are practicality the same thing. A cancer cell isn't intelligent, it just spreads and evolves to avoid being killed, not because it has emotions or desires, but because of natural selection.