AI Development and Testing, and Humans

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OpenAI has decided not to release its latest iteration of ChatGPT, which it had labeled GTP 6.1 Astra. The company had safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing.

The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

But.

GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: it wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

This tale demonstrates pretty conclusively the criticality of humans having controlling involvement in AI sandbox construction, isolation, and enforcement and in testing. It also demonstrates the importance of corporate culture—i.e., corporate human managers—in creating and then enforcing the internal culture that supports and drives dedication to that human control of and involvement in development and testing.

It also proves that we humans are up to the task if we care enough about our responsibilities—closely akin to Madison’s and Franklin’s remarks that our republic requires a moral, virtuous people in order to survive.

A Misnomer

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In a WSJ article centered on how to take advantage of higher bond yields, the news writer had this:

[Bond] Investors get a coupon payment that helps offset the decline in value the bond might experience if market yields rise. In other words, even if a bond’s price drops, it can still end up with a positive return.
…
Currently, 2-year Treasurys are yielding over 4.9%. That isn’t much less than what the 10-year Treasury is paying at over 5.2%.

That’s the misnomer. The news writer is using yield and coupon interchangeably. They aren’t. Yield is simply the dividend payment relative to the bond’s then-current market price. Coupon is the dividend payment the bond is required to pay under the terms of its issue, and it’s fixed—independent of the bond’s market’s price. Yield will rise and fall with the movement of the market’s pricing of the bond.

Neither 2-year Treasurys nor 10-year Treasurys nor any other Federal government debt instrument (or any other bond, whether corporate or municipal or…) pays yield. The pay only the coupon’s dividend. Calling the yield what the bond is paying is badly misleading.

 

Guys like this article’s writer really ought to know better, though.

Progressive-Democrats, Education, and Assimilation

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California’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, is illustrating how thoroughly the Progressive-Democratic Party and the education of American children are an oxymoron, and this doesn’t even involve teachers unions.

Nearly 1 million California students designated as English learners will no longer have to pass a set of tests and benchmarks to exit the program, under a new law signed Sunday by [Progressive-]Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom’s—Party’s—move also illustrates the disdain that they have for American culture. Language is at the heart of any nation’s culture. It informs and strongly influences how a nation’s citizens think about themselves and how they understand their nation’s culture. By dumbing down English learning in California’s schools, Newsom and Party are deprecating the very thing that makes our nation American—our culture. Party doesn’t care that it’s very hard for immigrants to assimilate into our culture when they’re not required to become even reasonably conversant, much less proficient, in our language. But Party doesn’t care about American culture, either, so there’s that.

A Misreading

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Matthew Hennessey has misread what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants when it gains majorities in the House and the Senate.

There are no policies underpinning the Democratic grand strategy, no major proposals on the table for discussion and debate. There are only the Four Fears.

That’s not entirely accurate. There are those fears, which Party is fomenting in lieu of specifics regarding economic and foreign policy goals: fear of artificial intelligence, fear of data centers, fear of Donald Trump, and fear of MAGA.

Those, though, are just tools Party is using in pursuit of its major proposals. Hennessey is right, though, to the extent its major proposals are not up for debate.

The Progressive-Democrats have promised to eliminate the filibuster, reducing our republican democracy to a popular democracy and reducing our Senate to just another House, this time whose members have State-wide districts. They’ve also promised to stack the Supreme Court, reducing it from a Court upholding and applying our Constitution as it’s written to an activist court for whom our Constitution is just a collection of suggestions, if not entirely irrelevant, and which is malleable to Party demands.

Land Acknowledgments

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We stole your land. Sucks to be you. That’s what the Left’s precious land acknowledgments said at their core. As Kyle Smith put it in his WSJ Free Expression piece,

It’s as if a robber announced, “I took your jewelry and feel bad about it, but no way am I giving it back.”

Or, sucks to be you. Either way.

At any rate, it seems this particular bit of Leftist guilty bodice grasping (it’s not like they’re prepared to actually rend their YSL blouses) is beginning to fade to black. Some universities are quietly dropping them, and plays are making jokes of them in their preludes to their Acts 1.

Land acknowledgments, used so studiously by progressive do-gooder wannabes, were never more than expressions of contempt for the indigenes supposedly the addressees of the acknowledgments and insults to the intelligence of the rest of us, who also knew how we came into possession of lands that were variously bartered to us, taken by us, occupied by us where it was owned by no one. And especially those of us who recognized the arbitrary line in the dirt that the acknowledgments so carefully drew so as to ignore inconvenient history: that the indigenes whose land we’d allegedly taken had themselves bartered, taken, or occupied those same lands from their predecessor occupants all the way back to the original migrants coming across the land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska those 10s of thousands of years ago.