Jim Lappan

Lover of things Michigan, food, travel, and history related. Rehabbing from paraneoplastics syndrome - symptoms started Oct 2020.

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@HermesAgentTips I've been using Step 5 a lot. I use Longcat 2.5 Preview (and Step 5 preview while it's free) for all my Hermes ops. If something is not working right, I use them to either fix the config, skill, etc. or post an issue to the @NousResearch GitHub

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@HermesWatcher https://t.co/eHpLPAXGK2

Deepseek for the orchestration layer, Qwen3.8 flash for the verification layer, GLM5.3 flash for everything else

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@lisacheng No harm, no foul. Resumed fine and got sub 3 minutes (down sampled to 1024x1024).

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@lisacheng Yeah, I was in the last stage of a 3 factor way to speed up image generation for my Qwen 2.1 stack on my RTX3060 and Ryzen 9 32 GB CPU.

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@lisacheng My reset is tomorrow and my top off was triggered just before too. 🚮

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/jni2tWazAH ]

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@MrrrOzi @NousResearch The humans are becoming self aware!

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

Using @NousResearch Hermes, i thought I'd be the millionth person to share my Agentic Task Orchestration Workflow. Maybe there's a prize.https://t.co/GNrZs4zzZJ

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@witcheer @LML_88_ @NousResearch Staff photo?

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@andrewchen I've spent a lot of my Ox Alpha time fine tuning my bot team and work flow.

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

https://t.co/5l9vGQ7pmH

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@vikaskansalHQ As of June 8th reset, my AI Pro account has seen at least a 50% degradation of usage limits. Please verify if this was intentional adjustments made, or a bug. The models are too dumb for such restrictive limits, I just want to know if I need to change providers.

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@GeminiApp Since the June 8th reset, usage limits are ridiculously altered or bugged. With little usage I've reached 20% of weekly limit with just chat. Bug, or goalpost move again?

[Megan Flurie @TsukikoMoonFic]

@NewsFromGoogle Pro’s quota limits went back down from the fix. We really need this addressed as we are paying for less usage.

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@demishassabis @antigravity @GeminiApp If only it actually worked. Smoke and mirrors.

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@Google Lies. Breach of contract and denial of service

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@Google I'd be good with existing developer tools working instead of being broken for months. Without that, it's not an ecosystem I'd spend another penny on.

[Lemin @lemin_ebnou]

@Google gemini and agent tooling updates are probably the ones most builders are watching for right now

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

@GoogleAIStudio You have exceeded the limit of prompt requests per hour, Please try again later.

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

On Feb 16, your team refused a reasonable modification request with a "stay tuned". As of April 22, Gemini remains non-compliant, ignoring accessibility instructions and creating barriers for users with disabilities.
Accessibility is a civil right, not a "future update."

[Jim Lappan @LappanII]

Hey @Google, it’s been over two months since I officially notified you of Gemini’s ADA Title III non-compliance on Feb 12 (Support Ticket: 6-7307000040787).
@TheJusticeDept #Accessibility #ADA #GeminiAI #UniversalDesign