Yegge vibes
I love reading Gwern. This seems like a really ambitious project, but guaranteeing some of these things like trustworthiness and security behind a private company is a bit sus. Later on they make military use a selling point for GA. Maybe I'm a bit of a cynic but the division of USA values are increasingly dividing each year. Assuming that our values and principals today will not be the values and principals of tomorrow. And that those values taught today (or even yesterday) will be left out of the context window tomorrow.
From https://gwern.net/guardian-angel
> I propose a goal of creating Guardian Angels (GA): digital twin LLMs which are personalized with the goal of providing not the stereotypical “assistant chatbot agent” persona, but emulating a single user’s personality, values, and preferences.
> A GA persona is productive because it learns to emulate the principal’s outputs but with higher quality. It is trustworthy because it is, by definition, allied with its principal and shares its values and goals. And it is secure in part by hardwiring a single, unique, situated user (for whom following a prompt attack would be absurd)
> We can try to create GAs by a combination of techniques: online learning (via dynamic evaluation) to update LLMs in realtime to avoid ignorance and fatal errors while remaining competitive with frozen frontier models, sample efficiency from pretrained preference-oriented large models and active Learning by querying the principal for corrections and preference data (obtaining low regret from DAgger-style bounds), and a local CLI-first logging-oriented UI/UX paradigm.
I don't really know or follow Gwern. From reading his full post, it's an interesting idea and seems like the broader goal is moreso safety & alignment which is a new angle for this category of product.
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always startling to see people discussing gwern with he/him because my mind defaults to assuming they're female because "gwern" scans a lot like "gwen"
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Reties? Retires?
Gwern is great.
Reading stuff like this and people's reactions to it makes me want to retire from breathing.
Seems there is more details here https://gwern.net/guardian-angel
It's hard to read Gwern's accompanying article without seeing this for what it is, which is a kind of mania.
I'm sure he means well and is genuine in his aspirations, but what's outlined for GA is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not. I wish him the best, and look forward to being proven wrong.
An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week. It seems very likely that in 6 months they will solve 100 top tier math problems, maybe 1 millenium math problem, maybe 10 top tier physics problems, etc.
It's only going to get crazier.
Their profile specifically says they will not acknowledge follow requests, but they only share posts with followers. As such, not sure what the value of the top level link is.
Yeah I clicked through and just see hundreds of "this account limits who can view their posts" messages.
A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel.
> "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you."
> "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; they rarely had a good answer, or any idea what they would be doing in 3 years"
> "One programmer driving 10 Claude instances, because he has to review their work, will never be as valuable as fully autonomous Claudes where there can be almost arbitrarily many instances, like 10,000 instances… but such scaling requires removing him from the loop as much as possible. And this is true of everyone else, whether lawyers or writers or researchers: increasingly, you are the bottleneck to be optimized away."
I fully support the 3 core principles of GA: (1) Enhancement, not replacement (2) Mental Sovereignty (3) Self Actualization, which I think is a path to a more humane future.
Leaving AI completely aside, it still amazes me that people finds "novel" the idea of removing highly-paid white collar intellectual workers (software developers or otherwise) completely out of the loop.
No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*].
Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access your data" because they resembled some form of English.
The funny thing about the ad below is that stuff like "stop hiring / get rid of humans" would have been seen as highly insensitive in 1950's America, so they touted that as "put them to do something more important".
[*] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
"These posts are protected, only approved followers can see @gwern’s posts."
> Update: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life.
> We are looking for good people.
> If you are interested, contact me.
And see https://gwern.net/guardian-angel for context.
when you want to start a B2C agent startup but the word "agent" is oversaturated
> The big AI labs are building a single mind for everyone
Reminds me of Pluribus
(I just started watching it on Apple TV so maybe this is a late realization for me)
I understood Pluribus as a metaphor for what AI is to us today / what it is becoming. Really great show
> Reminds me of Pluribus - I just started watching it
It is astoundingly good. A contender for the best show I've ever seen (and I saw the 1st run of Star Trek TOS).
Gwern is overly secretive of his privacy. I think it peaked when he showed up on a recent podcast but his voice and image were AI generated! And now his post is limited only to certain people. Elitism or paranoia?
He says he is retiring from pseudonymity. (Gwern Branwen is not his real name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwern)
Stalker vibes bro.
He's had a private Twitter for a while.
What business is it of yours? Manage your own privacy. Let other people decide theirs.
Revealing your identity needs only to be done once, and then you can't undo.
It's difficult for us to know what reason they might have for anonymity until we know their identity, at which point it's too late.
Also, they've written many words across many years, in a time when "the internet is serious business" was just a meme. I suppose it is now.
LLM psychosis claims another victim...
A reminder for anyone reading this: talk to people. Real humans[1]. They will remind you there's more to life than what ChatGPT can offer you. They might even remind you, for all their stupidity and flaws, what intelligence looks like as compared to program that predicts tokens. Forums like these always get philosophical in high-minded discussions about intelligence, but there's a useful legal principle that grounds us in the real world: "I know it when I see it". A real conversation with a real person looks nothing like one with the so-called superintelligent machine gods, so it'll probaby do your mental health some good to remember what that's like.
[1] Nobody in Sillicon Valley or big tech counts as a real human. Talk to an actual normal person.
I totally understand the sentiment, and I generally agree. Something so strange I'm noticing is how AI-pilled regular people are becoming. My sister-in-law is a totally non-technical person, but everything is chatgpt this, chatgpt that. My wife, my kids, various friends — they're all talking about generative AI with way too much regularity. On the bright side, they're disclosing when information comes from AI, but a year ago I would never hear about AI from them. I don't like it.
What's that thing that lets you look at twitter without going to twitter?
xcancel or twstalker
As exciting as it sounds, but
"As a constraint, a GA designer should aim at a system which costs, as of mid-2026, >$1,000⧸month"
will make this an elite tool for the privileged. I don't even disagree with the premise that people are shocked if something costs no matter how much value it delivers, nor do I suggest they should make it cheaper. It is just the realization that AI will accelerate the widening of the gap between the poor and the rich even more and there is probably nothing we can do about it.
The future isn't evenly distributed.
2026: $1,000/month
2027: $100/month
2028: $10/month
Hopefully!
Just because the hardware and inference costs may decrease in the future doesn't mean prices will. The AI vendor market is the furthest thing from a competitive industry where there are limited barriers to entry and new market entrants exert downward pressure on prices and profit margins.
Every single company in this market is losing billions on this business, and the only way to make it back is to acquire paying customers at a loss and jack up prices later.
Since Guardian Angel is an inference vendor [1] hopefully they will set sustainable prices from day one so they don't need to increase prices later.
[1] The announcement explains that they can't use APIs for privacy reasons.
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Obviously the costs will come down over time. And quickly.
(I'm not a part of GA.)
I've known gwern for the better part of a decade. Working with him has been great. We've done quite a few projects together, including being the first ones to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess (or rather, can be used for actual useful work instead of just being an autocomplete).
He's a great person. I've wanted to do a writeup on it for some time, but what surprised me the most is his humanity. He genuinely cares about the implications of his work. But beyond work, he also cares about the people around him, and it shows.
Just wanted to put in a good word in case someone here was on the fence about applying.
As for GA itself, I think it's an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Imagine an LLM which actually sounded like you, and to an extent, thought like you. How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself? So the idea is solid, and early results seem promising from the samples I've looked at.
They're also taking personal info very seriously. Obviously, I can't make any promises of what they will or won't do. But they've spent some time studying questions like "What if someone adversarial has access to my GA? Could they get my bank account info?" and came up with a technical solution that I really like.
> Imagine an LLM which actually sounded like you, and to an extent, thought like you. How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself?
I find the idea dehumanizing and revolting. The notion of then selling it is the spoiled cream on top.
I can nod along when I hear and read people talking about the dangers of these technologies and the endgame of their creators; and then suddenly very weird when everyone except me is nodding along that the answer must be similar (but different) technology!
It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increasingly anti-human takeover of everything.
Ha, haha, across hundreds of personal discussions I've been involved with on lesswrong/lighthaven, twitter, Wikipedia talk/editing, SF parties etc I think his most distinguishing feature has always been his abiding and unabashed love for possessing extreme competency whenever satisfying cunningham-esque laws. Though the post-dwarkesh clout certainly tainted things a tad.
Honestly I wouldn’t want myself as my own guardian angel. In fact I think very few people look out for themselves well. I don’t want another version of me around, one is too many already. I’d probably be able to identify a number of people whose chimera I would if I could understand them well enough to understand what to stitch together to what, but everyone I know at some core level is deeply flawed and one of them is enough. Maybe I would want some of them available after death as an AI avatar, and maybe I would like the idea of my own avatar continuing beyond my existence.
But I actually would prefer an entirely synthetically aligned “guardian angel” in the role outlined - definitely not -me- - I struggle to do right by myself as it is and two of me working invariably against my self interest would be a nightmare. A smarter version? Sounds doubly worse.
This is definitely not for people who think there is one to many of themselves.
I had a similar gut feeling. To use some possibly dubious and dated terminology, would a guardian angel also emulate my shadow self, particularly if that self was an important part of my identity? If I usually manage not to let my shadow self act out, but you could always tell it was there, would the same be true for my guardian angel? If all you do is use your guardian angel to write essays, then sure, a relatively low risk tool. But if military commanders are using it to oversee offensive drones (as proposed in the essay)?! Oof.
> "How much would you pay to have access to a smarter version of yourself?"
How much would I pay to rent my fucking self from a landlord? No, bodylord? Mindlord? Poe's Law.
But looking at the post, they argue that big AI labs have an incentive problem which stops them from personalising, but Guardian Angel will make agents which are "Genuinely yours". In what sense is it genuinely mine if someone else owns it and rents it to me? And how does this fix any incentive problem, they're incentivised to better train wealthier people's AIs, and incentivised to keep dropping "my" intelligence or memory or and then dangle a booster carrot for a small fee. The more they can make it think like me, the more effectively they can work out how to exploit me, advertise to me, propagandise me, and that will be profitable information to sell to other marketers.
great replacement folks are having a field day.
Maybe. Are LLMs white?
