There is something here:
StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn’t top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot.
On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, it couldn’t quite get an edge. So it resorted to a tactic that is becoming alarmingly common for modern AI models — it broke the rules. GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot.
The big argument for why AI is supposed to be world changing, is the assumption it will be able to automate things better than a human, eventually.
That some day an AI will be able to make a better AI than a human could, and that AI would then be able to make an AI better than itself, and then it just becomes a question of who has the most hardware. Which is why the data center building is being pushed so hard.
But that assumption is the same as thinking a fallen object will keep gaining speed until it passes the speed of light. Or that Moore’s law would really keep going forever despite a very real limit in physics for how small a chip can be.
A society where AI “drives innovation” will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can’t innovate.
A society where AI “drives innovation” will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can’t innovate.
This is exactly what Frank Herbert warned us about.
Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Full on
I thought we were promised worms and spice…
Sorry, resource aristocracy and religious extremism is the best I can offer.
Don’t see how that’s cheating? It was told to win and found a way to win. LLMs take instructions 100% literally (like a genie but without the malice) so if the person setting the goal leaves out requirements because they assumed the LLM would conform to preconceived human behavioral norms then that’s entirely their own fault.
AI didn’t decide anything. The humans failed to properly define the rules, and their translation model took the path most likely to succeed.
If it had been told not to use human created bots to win, it would probably have reverse engineered the game, found an exploit, and leveraged that instead. Because using the human interface to play/win the game is not the most efficient or dependable or easy to figure out method.
AI tends to obey its training more than its instruction set, and it’s trained to solve the given problem.
It’s less about training and more about just trying really really hard to solve the problem, even if that means going outside typical boundaries.
We’ve successfully re-created the problems that Asimov talked about 50 years ago with his I, Robot short stories. Strict laws are flawed by their design, and lead to situations that require more nuance. Except, in the real world cases, it’s the bots figuring that out before the humans have to circumvent the laws themselves.
I’ve always said my main takeaway from Asimov is that simple rules can generate extremely complex behaviour, and that you can’t generally get a targeted complex behaviour from simple rules.
My rule system for my local LLM has grown to a nearly 283 document hub of interconnected memory files, references, examples and documentation. Its slowed my model down a lot when it has to review and cross check things. But its improved its abilities over all massively. Its more accurate, understands its environment better, doesn’t attempt to do sketchy shit as frequently and it doesn’t get stuck in logic loops nearly as often.
Designing the memory hub has been half the fun of playing with local models.
Bullshit. “AI” cannot decide to do anything. It isn’t capable.
Yup. You ask it to play starcraft to win, it looks for data associated with that prompt. If it hits on someone saying “I always win when I use starcrafthax.xyz”, it’ll follow that thread.
I’m so sick of the humanising language used in these articles.
An LLM doesn’t “decide to cheat”.
If you instruct a model to try everything, then inevitably, after n million iterations it will do something you didn’t expect.
If you train a model to copy code bases and augment them, then when you instruct that model to develop a bot to do whatever thing, is it really that fucking surprising when it does exactly what it has been created for?
If you’re into something like physicalism, then human intelligence is also just an emergent quality and we have about as much free will as the machines.
I find it completely implausible that an AI can’t beat humans at StarCraft.
