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A few months ago, I managed to land an interview at a stealth startup doing some AI stuff. I got in there on the recommendation of a friend from my hometown. He had specialized in robotics early on in his career, pivoted into Machine Learning in the early 2010s when he felt he’d get better opportunities there. When the LLM craze hit, he was already well positioned for the gold rush. He got in early at that startup, and they’re doing the new cool thing where instead of having one beefy model that boils the oceans to chat with you, they instead have a lot of smaller specialized models getting bridged together to give you competitive AI at cheaper costs and with much faster training. That meant they started running a lot of cloud stuff and had distributed systems on their hands with weirder incidents, which is why he reached out to me to apply. They got a lot of funding with the rest of the tech industry shrivelling, and I cleared the screening rounds that were all remote. I know little about running AI things but they didn’t, and I know a lot about being effective around incidents and they didn’t. I told them about adaptivity and the required team dynamics, and so they flew me out for a last round where I could try to sell the team on it. I arrived there with my laptop in case they’d want to do some coding test (in which case I wanted my own dev environment and French Canadian keyboard layout), and my e-ink tablet for note taking. They took both away at reception, and even asked for my phone. They handed me back a paper pad and a pen, said they’d check them on the way out. There was a big display behind the reception desk that had some high-definition security footage, just to show off how they were running face recognition software. It clearly labelled me by name, with my rank—unknown, in red—underneath. Everything the employee in front of me (Blake, title: receptionist in green) told me was subtitled live, and likewise for my responses. When I was done signing the paperwork on a tablet, the rank became interviewee, in orange. The word shifted green when my friend (Jules, title: tech lead) showed up and came within a few metres from me. I have to admit this was a more impressive display of security than the prison-style turnstiles I had seen at big telcos trying to avoid industrial espionage at past jobs. Other monitors were hooked on other walls, implying you’d be watched and monitored everywhere. It certainly is a way to keep people in line. I said hi to Jules in our native Quebecois with a particularly thick accent while shaking his hand; he replied in English, and I noticed the software seemed to only get part of the French while it got the rest fine. Even there they don't think Quebec French is real French i guess. I mentioned it to him and he wasn’t really surprised about it since there isn’t that much data for our accent in their datasets. He walked me to a conference room, asked me if I needed coffee or a snack or anything, and walked out while I prepared myself. There wasn’t much to prepare since they had taken most of my stuff and I was left with paper and pen, but there was a tablet showing a transcript of our conversation, which could be sent or forwarded, but only to people from the employee directory and some “training bucket” entity. The interviews went okay. I won’t get into the details too much—I'm getting to the point, I swear. There was a sort of “how much do you know about AI” quiz I think I did alright on (even if we had already done some or that stuff online), a session on systems architecture I did great at. The guy interviewing me for incidents management and reviews had read some of my material before and it was more of a meet-and-greet. From time to time, I’d ask a somewhat uncomfortable question about the business and its impacts, and the folks interviewing me would to wince before going “eh we’re going off topic” or giving me responses that really seemed like a politician’s prepared statements. You know, asking things like “how do you balance taking a public position of encouraging creativity when artists mostly seem to decry how your training data is acquired” or "aren't your results just good enough for spam and nothing else which would erode public trust" and getting something evasive in return. I didn’t particularly think it would hurt me to ask that, conflicting goals is sort of a major player in incident theory but we’d see. It was time for lunch. Jules walked me to the cafeteria, explaining that I’d meet some execs and do a Q&A for some selected group of employees in the afternoon. I switched to the thickest joual I could muster—caricatural if anything—to avoid getting picked up right away. I mentioned how weird some of the interactions felt and he sucked air through his teeth. He explained that they’re not too big on second-guessing of that kind—there’s plenty of it online—that there’s a general drive to keep people aligned and focused on the product. He sort of redirected the conversation away, telling me we’d talk more after the day of interviews, and switched back to English. As far as I could tell, it felt as if they mostly did the same chat-based whatever everybody else was doing and I wasn’t sure where they’d get their funding from aside from lagging institutional investors trying to get on a late train. Since it had served me well in the past, I more or less directly asked execs about their runway, objectives, and funding sources when it came to that section. Turns out I was wrong and most of their operations are funded by early “effective” altruist VCs who love to shorten their names with numbers instead of letters. They’re people I don’t generally like much. Maybe they picked up on that, or maybe it was my direct (read: rude) interviewing style, but they didn’t extend me an offer. Not a big surprise, and I moved on. Turns out I wouldn’t manage to talk to Jules after leaving there, and I just flew back home on a red-eye. Anyway a few weeks after that was all said and done, I was mailed a paper letter, written by hand, unsigned aside from a PO Box return address. It was sent to my own PO Box, which I got a while ago to use online and make it harder to find me if there are any data leaks or something (it was on my resume as well), meaning it might have been from any random person with access to my info. The content sort of match the events that happened around my interview, but I don’t think it’s from Jules because that would both be too easy to trace to him and because he knows my home address since he stops by when he’s back in town every year. Penmanship is pretty bad, I figure they were sort of paranoid and tried to mask their own handwriting (maybe writing with their off hand?) Anyway here’s some bits: quote:I recently became aware of your job interview with [employer], and I must say, the information I obtained highlighted your concerns regarding their technology development. This could have been some weird rear end loyalty test for the job, but since I don’t really care, I decided to go with it. I ended up writing them back, mailed it their way decided to wait.
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May 16, 2024 13:30
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MononcQc posted:This could have been some weird rear end loyalty test for the job, but since I don’t really care, I decided to go with it. condolences on not getting picked up by the wonka company op
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May 16, 2024 13:49
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congrats op on being on the ground floor of the anti-ai revolution
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May 16, 2024 14:13
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their selection criteria look hosed up, I'm sure I can shitpost my way to a rebellion
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May 16, 2024 14:46
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lol you could've condensed that story a bit but i'm interested in seeing where this goes i don't think it's some weirdo loyalty thing, i think you probably got a live one on your hands
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May 16, 2024 14:47
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the new deus ex is wild
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May 16, 2024 15:00
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Pollyanna posted:condolences on not getting picked up by the wonka company op w3a
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May 16, 2024 15:20
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i mean as fun as it would be to take down eggmans panopticon company seems like you dodges a bullet there. I would go with the "as a large language model" response. especially if you have access to one of those handwriting machines insurance companies and home renovations places like to use
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May 16, 2024 15:21
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May 16, 2024 16:12
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OP is going to have a chip in his brain by next week.
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May 16, 2024 16:22
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taking down big language model from the inside by letting the disk that the logs are written to fill up
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May 16, 2024 17:47
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Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:especially if you have access to one of those handwriting machines insurance companies and home renovations places like to use the what now?
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May 16, 2024 17:50
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Beeftweeter posted:the what now? its a plotter but you put a pen in it https://youtu.be/cQO2XTP7QDw?si=OvjBWrEKwcw1vCT6 window installers love to print out a houses picture from google street view and use this to pretend they are writing a hand written note about RENEWAL by Anderson or garage doors and poo poo
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May 16, 2024 20:36
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Archduke Frantz Fanon posted:its a plotter but you put a pen in it ugh i hate that scams have become an essential pillar of the modern economy to tie into the thread: ai will only serve to perpetuate this, of course
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May 16, 2024 20:54
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how does this person think you’re going to help while not employed there? I would say obvious loyalty test but who would spend the effort handwriting that?
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May 16, 2024 20:57
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I checked this post for an acrostic. None found.
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May 16, 2024 21:30
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welcome to the resistance, jean connor
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May 16, 2024 21:55
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i think a lot about how youd go about smashing the looms too. I think its pretty hard but I dont really think anyone has actually tried.
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May 16, 2024 21:58
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next Neal Stephenson book sounds pretty alright
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May 16, 2024 21:59
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The Management posted:I would say obvious loyalty test Ya it's gotta be this especially after all the security they showed off at the office.
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May 16, 2024 22:17
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AlbertFlasher posted:Ya it's gotta be this especially after all the security they showed off at the office. to what end? they didn't hire mononcqc, so, uh. loyalty to whom? the anonymous letter writer?
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May 16, 2024 22:23
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Beeftweeter posted:to what end? they didn't hire mononcqc, so, uh. loyalty to whom? the anonymous letter writer? Maybe the company had some info stolen or their servers hacked and they are trying to sniff out who did it? I don't know. It's a bizarre story so it has to be something equally strange. Or maybe it's just a really unhinged dude at the company.
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May 16, 2024 22:37
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AlbertFlasher posted:Or maybe it's just a really unhinged dude at the company. yeah putting my money on this one again i just don't see why a company that didn't hire someone would waste their time trying to sniff out a hacker or whatever when they made a big show of having mononcqc under constant surveillance the whole time and (i assume) didn't see him do anything nefarious or otherwise suspicious, other than speaking in french i guess
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May 16, 2024 22:44
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let me join
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May 16, 2024 22:45
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maybe the message is from you in the future after you started working for the company and found out it's not AI they've been building, but a time machine, and they want to go back and clone a whole army of hitlers just a thought
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May 16, 2024 22:45
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AlbertFlasher posted:Maybe the company had some info stolen or their servers hacked and they are trying to sniff out who did it? I don't know. It's a bizarre story so it has to be something equally strange. Buying $80,000 in physical surveillance but leaving your ssh bastion connect to the internet with a root user who's password is qwerty123
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May 16, 2024 22:52
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koolkal posted:welcome to the resistance, jean connor lol
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May 16, 2024 23:04
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lol at taking an interview at a company without knowing what they do. even a stealth startup should be able to give you general information like industry and application. why didn’t your friend warn you?
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May 17, 2024 00:00
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Beeftweeter posted:lol you could've condensed that story a bit but i'm interested in seeing where this goes just ask chatgpt to summarize it for you
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May 17, 2024 01:47
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good luck with your weird arg MononcQc
infernal machines fucked around with this message at 01:51 on May 17, 2024 |
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May 17, 2024 01:49
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MononcQc posted:
lol
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May 17, 2024 02:04
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death cob for cutie posted:next Neal Stephenson book sounds pretty alright
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May 17, 2024 03:04
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rotor posted:i think a lot about how youd go about smashing the looms too. I think its pretty hard but I dont really think anyone has actually tried. 
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May 17, 2024 03:06
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thanks for writing me back, op
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May 17, 2024 03:08
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i was thinking about this after posting about llms in the bauble thread and, you know, maybe whoever wrote that isn't so unhinged after all i mean, seriously: gently caress ai. it hasn't even been available to the general population for even like, what, two years, right? but we've already seen at least hundreds of instances of it being inappropriately, extremely bad at whatever it was supposed to be doing. and we've probably seen thousands of instances of it being used to trick or scam someone. so there's nothing wrong with wanting to make sure it isn't used in lovely ways i could also see someone being concerned about their privacy because they work at a company that has a ton of ridiculous surveillance equipment and security restrictions despite working on a goddamn chatbot or whatever. so they probably didn't want to type any of that letter, and, well, some people just have bad handwriting i'll grant that the idea of teaming up and fighting some injustice at some startup is kinda weird and absurd, though. and mailing a letter like that to someone that was simply a candidate for some position is definitely strange. and hand writing it instead of just using some device you know isn't bugged to type it and then printing it at a library or something is also pretty weird but the content of the letter doesn't seem to be all that odd, really
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May 17, 2024 03:53
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psyched for this, I'll get the wiki going. can somebody get started on a gangtag?
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May 17, 2024 16:02
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lol I'm guessing the company was doing something that was an actual war crime (targeting for air strikes) or gauche (republican campaign ads) and it broke the brain of an ai true believer
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May 17, 2024 16:28
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MononcQc posted:I have to admit this was a more impressive display of security than the prison-style turnstiles I had seen at big telcos trying to avoid industrial espionage at past jobs. Other monitors were hooked on other walls, implying you’d be watched and monitored everywhere. It certainly is a way to keep people in line. lol ditto the one (remote) interview i did with openai had some lolworthy YOU MUST DISABLE ANY AUTOMATED NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE industrial espionage cargo cult nonsense in the prep material (lol wut, i am perfectly capable of taking notes by hand, but wtf are you gonna do if i wanted to run some transcription poo poo or whatever) along with a "so, what do you know about AI" that seemed like a weird probe of "do you believe in the singularity?" versus my "here's my basic outsider knowledge of the state of CS research as someone that casually follows it" response
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May 17, 2024 21:09
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I am very glad I'm not interviewing right now because I would not be able to maintain kayfabe when talking about ai/ml poo poo and it's everywhere
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May 17, 2024 21:16
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did you check that the interviewer didnt gently caress with your belongings in any way
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May 17, 2024 21:22
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