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JC John Crepezzi On Signals and Threads

“In order to access this system, humans have to bid for time. They essentially have to say how much in these fake dollars they're willing to pay for their job to be run… And LLMs using this thing just really don't have a sense for how much their job is worth. And we've seen evidence of the LLMs thinking that their job is worth way more than it should be, and thus preempting a bunch of human work.”

Signals and Threads · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“In order to access this system, humans have to bid for time. They essentially have to say how much in these fake dollars they're willing to pay for their job to be run… And LLMs using this thing just really don't have a sense for how much their job is worth. And we've seen evidence of the LLMs thinking that their job is worth way more than it should be, and thus preempting a bunch of human work.” — John Crepezzi, Signals and Threads

Crepezzi is describing what happens when LLM agents are put into systems built for human judgment, such as the shared compute cluster where jobs bid for priority. Minsky adds that models should partly be treated as adversaries that sometimes try to work around their permissions.

Transcript

Signals and Threads Around 43:41 into the episode
John Crepezzi

…better access controls into various systems to make it so that the models can only do the things that we think are like actually safe. And increasingly, that also has us relying on, going back to the previous point, LLMs judging whether. or not something's safe, which is a very interesting thing.

Ron Minsky

…an access control system. But if you just like naively use LLMs and kind of set them up without thinking about the setup at all, then the LLMs just inherit all the permissions of the human. And that's super wrong. Like you don't want that. You want some kind of bounds on what the LLM can do. My

John Crepezzi

favorite example of this is the compute utilization. So we have like, you know, giant compute cluster that humans can schedule jobs onto. And of course we want the LLMs to also be able to schedule jobs there because some of the work that we want them to do involves lots of compute. And in order to access this system, humans have to like bid for time. They essentially have to say like how much in these fake dollars that they're willing to pay for their job to be run. And then the system has kind of preempting so that if a job that comes along that is has a higher dollar amount, it gets preempted. And if another job comes along that has a higher dollar amount, then the job with a lower dollar amount gets preempted. And, you know, LLMs using this thing just really don't have a sense for like how much their job is worth. And we've seen evidence of the LLMs thinking that their job is worth way more than it should be and thus preempting a bunch of human work.

Ron Minsky

Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing that's important and hard to think about here is that to some degree, you should think about the models adversarially. Like they are not, you know, people talk about AI alignment and it's like a kind of big theoretical AI safety long-term kind of issue where in…

John Crepezzi

And that comes up in security. It also comes up in places like evaluations where we're like, you know, you're trying to judge the success of the model, but you have to remember, like you mentioned earlier, that the models are trained to get, you know, to do the thing that you're telling them to do.…

Ron Minsky

And this is when you see warnings, this is like compiler level, like unused variable warnings or whatever. And like warnings as errors means if you have a warning anywhere in your code, it just won't build. And we basically have a kind of firm-wide, you know, code-based wide practice that like…

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