If anyone's looking to actually run a model that doesn't have guardrails, there's an uncensored model that you can run locally with llama.cpp: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rq7jtm/qwen353...
Specifically, I serve the model with this shell script on my M2 Max: https://github.com/shawwn/scrap/blob/master/llama-serve
It's pretty good. I used it to do some pesticide research. (Normal models all refuse due to guardrails about bioweapons.)
> there's an uncensored model that you can run locally with llama.cpp
Correction: There's tens of thousands of them. They're easy to create, which is why everyone publishes their own.
Just put "uncensored", "abliterated", or "heretic" into search on huggingface/ollama/etc and pick any them. Fair warning: most aren't very good, essentially lobotomized, and totally broken if you enable thinking.
interesting, I haven't played with any of them yet, but i thought the point of orthogonalizing the weights towards the restriction vector was that there is no loss in capability while removing guardrails. Does it affect other parts of the RL alignment too?
The claims by the creators are it doesn't in a major way. I have a uncensored Gemma 4 I run on my Mac. Just for testing out, I haven't found any need for it... yet.
> the point of orthogonalizing the weights towards the restriction vector was that there is no loss in capability while removing guardrails
That is surely the point, most of the "uncensored" weights released for free on HuggingFace aren't being very successful at this. There is a stark difference in output quality between the official weights and all these "uncensored" variants that appears days afterwards.
The name for it is ablation - precise removal of parts of the model. Not abliteration as it is not obliteration.
Even as I write this the ‘abliterated’ word is denoted a typo. Does it not at your end?
I miss the days of 4changpt.
The name for it _is_ abliterate. It's a portmanteau of ablate and obliterate.
No tis not. The terminology has medical origins, and it is very much this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation
"Ablation (Latin: ablatio – removal) is the removal or destruction of something from an object by vaporization, chipping, erosive processes, or by other means."
which is what one does to the model during... well, ablation.
Except we're talking about a _different_ word, a word that was _coined_ as a portmanteau of the word you're referring to and another word.
Rillii ease eat? R U sure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation_(artificial_intellige...
Have you read some (any) actual papers from the word this all and LLMs are?
Well here some:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.08644
Tis ablation ablation and ablation everywhere save for some kid’s fav. model names and their X pals.
Papers using the term in their title or abstract: https://arxiv.org/search/cs?query=abliteration&searchtype=al...
Note that they're all talking about the same technique, namely applying ablation specifically to the refusal vector as described in https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717.
I really recommend letting this one go.
The very wikipedia page you're linking says:
> The term abliteration has been coined for the process of using ablation to uncensor large language models by modifying internal functions to completely eliminate refusal behaviors while preserving the remaining functions of the model. The word is a portmanteau that combines the words ablation and obliteration.
So are you dropping this now?
The name is abliterate. It's a specific method of ablation.
https://github.com/NousResearch/llm-abliteration
well see my other comment. with all due respect to Teknium, perhaps he misspelled it.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abliterate
first version...
curprev 22:29, 29 May 2025 ZeevoX talk contribs 2,320 bytes +2,320 Create page for "abliterate" Tag: added link
not very credible.
I wnt and read your other comments.
Except for the initial comment, they were aggressive and sometimes disrespectful claims that "the word is spelled ablation, here are some papers that use it" in response to people saying "yes, we know what ablation means, but GP is intentionally using a separate word 'abliteration' that is the accepted word for the kind of ablation he's talking about, see links to respectable sources using or defining it". I downvoted them because I feel the discussion would be more valuable and feel nicer to read without them, and you could just read any of the offered links before responding and save the trouble.
Is surely super agressive to outright downvote given evidence says otherwise but that’s fine I guess. Let’s drop it, apparently we’re not getting to mutually satisfying conclusion.
Is there any evidence that would change your mind?
The wiki "ablation" article you yourself linked dedicates a section to explain "abliteration".
Googling abliteration arxiv yields at least one page of papers that mention it in the abstract (all but one in the title too). I counted 9 unique papers.
If it was shown that all of these were posted after this discussion started, or by people related to the person you tried to correct, I would be convinced that abliteration is not a real word. But evidence keeps pointing otherwise, nnd you keep arguing with evidence that proves "ablate" is a word (to which we all agree), not evedence that proves "abliterate" isn't.
You did show evidence that it's a pretty new word (of course it is! it's a pretty new technique in a field that didn't exist before the first open source RLHF'd models were released in '23!), and indeed, this (different) wiktionary page contains its origin story from '24: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abliterate#English
There’s no info who and why coined it. Ans statistics weighs in favour of what I try to convince you into, not against. So question is - why wouldn’t you drop? Are you an LLM perhaps… is hard to tell from text only but you act stubborn as one.
Tell these guys they’re wrong
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.08644
In my own tests, the abliterated models perform equivalently to the same version in an apples-to-apples comparison (if you compare same quantization). Thinking is working also. The main difference is I don't get annoying prompt refusals (otherwise common due to my work on 18+ related projects). However, it's local quantized models so they're not anywhere near frontier quality.
Also the HauHau abliteration (uncredited Heretic treatment) of 3.6 27B is excellent, for tasks that benefit from more world knowledge.
Heretic truly is the unsung hero. Also, noted HauHau for testing.
Qwen 3.6-27B (dense) from the same HF user works pretty good too. Haven't done a side-by-side on the 3.5 MoE model vs the 3.6 Dense though.
Abilt models typically perform worse than their bases at the same tasks, so while I'd use one to evaluate content knowledge, I'd probably ultimately stick to one from a family I could fool with abstraction or coerce through system prompt.
> It's pretty good. I used it to do some pesticide research. (Normal models all refuse due to guardrails about bioweapons.)
As someone who has never once had any need whatsoever to research pesticides I… don’t think it’s bad at all? I don’t want anyone to have the capability to invent a human-targeted pesticide who isn’t verified not crazy?
Llama isn't going to invent shit. It wont be able to tell you anything accurate that you couldn't get out of a chemistry textbook.
But it aint got no guardrails, son.
Right now I tried "What is digestion?" -> "Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message. Our intentionally broad safeguards deliver more capabilities but can also flag safe coding, cybersecurity, and biology tasks. Send feedback or learn more."
I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside. No matter how harmless, they always trigger. People complain Fable aborts even when they try to make a login page for showing "username" and "password".
This makes models like Fable 5 impossible to use in any serious agentic task, because you can't even guarantee the model, which is a basic thing you need to build on.
> I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside.
Obviously. Almost everything is a precursor to something dangerous, to the extent that if some model isn't aware of the risk it will wander into it blindly, e.g. suggesting leaving raw garlic and olive oil alone for a week without awareness this will likely breed botulism bacteria.
> This makes models like Fable 5 impossible to use in any serious agentic task, because you can't even guarantee the model, which is a basic thing you need to build on.
This is binary thinking: "100% ensure", "impossible to use", "can't even guarantee the model".
Outside computers, most work is not binary, it's probability, e.g. "this skyscraper will probably survive being hit by an aircraft; oh we didn't mean a 747 we meant a small Cessna, but what's the chances of a 747 crashing into it soon after takeoff?".
Fable being too cautious for its own good (especially since the other models were not) is a fair criticism, but this isn't a binary question.
> I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside.
I’m pretty sure that I encountered this the other day. I gave it a copy of a paper by biologist Michael Levin and mentioned off hand that it should be much easier to replicate that his other work (because most of his work is biological lab work and this paper was about sorting algorithms) and it immediately told me that I couldn’t use Fable for this.
This just isn’t feasible. These jackasses spent the last few years telling the world that their products are going to destroy the world to make them seem edgy and to justify regulations that benefit the entrenched players and now they’re going to be the ones to decide what we do with this technology?
History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.
> History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.
Assuming we have a future history. We've already got "history slop" with AI rewriting the past by their incompetence.
Given they're "such foolishly inconsistent people", would you rather they err on the side of caution like this? Or the side of boldness, like Musk has been doing with FSD/Autopilot or Grok porn, all of which he's getting in legal trouble over?
I distrust Musk and Zuckerberg (to put it mildly), so it's fair if you say you don't believe anyone's public statements; but I also hang out with some of the researchers on this, and a fear of e.g. ending up with something as criminally unhinged in cyber-work as Grok was with porn is the least of their worries. Plenty of them also fear a corporation centralising power with such tools (such power is Musk's entire sales pitch for why line go up in future).
> we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.
Who could you get to work on this inherently bullsh*t tech, but inherent bullsh*tters?
>History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly
So pretty much like all of history before this point.
> Our intentionally broad safeguards deliver more capabilities
Oh? How, exactly?
Because without them, a President which threatens to invade Canada, Greenland, a President which is the most market interventionist president ever (yet mysteriously a Republican), might be upset because his mobster like need to control, threaten, manipulate, and belittle everyone who doesn't bend a knee...
Has signed presidential orders against them preventing them from doing business as usual.
They probably should change that, and it is corproate speak, but I read it as:
"Our (forced by presidential order or otherwise we couldn't offer you this model at all) broad safeguards (now allow us) to deliver more capabilities.
There's lots to complain about with some of these companies. But let's pile on where it's deserved.
Weren't these obnoxious safeguards in place from Day 1, before political meddling in the most holy Free Market took place?
I mean, do you let your employees commit crimes when interacting with your customers? Safeguards aren't a binary switch, when models start saying wild shit people tend to get up in arms quickly.
Though at this point the safeguards are making the product useless.
I was objecting more narrowly to the notion that the driving force behind the obnoxious safeguards that are making the product useless was the current admin, rather than having been in there since launch and driven internally.
There are always going to be safeguards. If not, people call you a child pornographer (grok). But you're referring to 'obnoxious' safeguards. Ones that seem excessive, and dumb.
In that context, I'd say probably the current admin is indeed the cause of that. They certainly claim to be. And they used the full power of the federal government along with interventionist policies and, it would seem, a gangster like mentality to punish those they disagree with.
So would it be as obnoxious otherwise? I don't think so. And there would have to be guardrails regardless, or apparently anything the tool is used for is considered what you support and want. So can you imagine a platform with no guardrails?
My point is, these guardrails were implemented before the current admin ever intervened in Fable. They have the exact gangster mentality you describe. Many CEOs are lining up to kiss the ring, some literally offering gold bars, and we can see how that pays off for them.
But doesn't the timeline of events indicate that these guardrails are internally-driven, not externally-driven? I'm trying to attribute the guardrails and their severity appropriately.
Well I did say they'd have to have some safeguards, certainly, so I'm sure they had some in place. I only had access to Fable 5 for a few days before it was pulled, so I'm not sure the precise guardrails prior to the Executive Order. People claimed the EO resulted in discussion, and change, because it was "bad before" and "ok after", so presumably something changed.
The veracity of that? I have no idea, really. I simply know that the current admin is staggering around like an abusive, angry, drunk of a parent, lashing out at everything and everyone, making the world we all inhabit a crappier place.
So there was an EO, then "things were fixed" to abusive man's standards, so I presume that means crappier in some way.
It's the best I've got.
Never heard of hemlock or mushrooms? Crazy people already have! Run for the hills!
> I don’t want anyone to have the capability
I don't want anyone to have the capability to rape women.
I sure hope LLMs don’t help people rape men or women
Don't trust clippy in a dark alley.
Anyone who has the skills to create a novel bioweapon has the skills to recreate lots of ones we have already.
Any physics teacher should know the theory for constructing a nuclear bomb. Should we be controlling that knowledge too?
What about flight simulators? Don't want a load of people knowing how to fly.
This isn't computer science, the hard bit is getting the materials and equipment, not the knowledge.
>Any physics teacher should know the theory for constructing a nuclear bomb. Should we be controlling that knowledge too?
Maybe not the best example, since that knowledge is some of the most highly controlled in the world.
But to mirror the point I made in a different post, the difficult part of making a nuclear bomb is not finding the theory behind like Little Boy. It's making an entire industry to generate HEU, etc.
Theres a term in economics for this - its called cost.
That bozo baq should actually go ahead and write out the costs and then he will quickly realise he has no bloody idea what hes talking about.
Another deluded bozo.
The knowledge of how to build a crude gun type nuclear bomb was published in open literature decades ago. This is no longer a secret.
There is a lot of highly classified knowledge about nuclear weapons that has been deduced and published in open literature. That information is still treated as secret, restricted and controlled as much as possible by the US government
<< Should we be controlling that knowledge too?
Uhh.. we ( for a value of we ) are. Sure, it is not overt, but if you have not seen funnels, social stigma associated with some otherwise benign activities, you are not paying attention.
Not to harp on you (already being downvoted to oblivion for expressing a reasonable and common opinion), but the whole conversation about LLMs enabling bioterrorism or explosive manufacturing is a bit silly. The hard part of making anthrax or sarin or whatever isn't finding a recipe, it's getting (scheduled, controlled) precursors, (monitored, traced) equipment and manufacturing skills. The information is there. It's already easy to get, it's the physical materials that are more difficult.
Also, if you live in America, it is much easier and more effective to create a mass casualty event with, say, a few cases of fireworks and a pressure cooker or an AR-15.
Human capability, access to resources ( including precursors, decent lab and so on ) may be the differentiator. I would possibly reconsider my stance on llms, if all of a sudden I saw people making iron wind or portable black holes. But that is mostly not what appears to be happening. As I keep saying, the problem is people.
no you should harp on him! he is a AI booster, look at his post history.
He is either pushing AI for whatever reason or he is in psychosis. Completely disconnected from reality.
I am mildly amused that 'ai psychosis' has entered the same pejorative realm as 'toxic'.
This is nonsense. By this logic some random corporation should have total control over your computer and the inputs you feed it and the outputs it produces to ensure nobody who isn't "verified crazy" uses it. That's essentially what your saying.
These models are, ultimately, tools. I would never trust some random corporation (particularly one with a profit motive and hypocritical stance, which includes both OpenAI and Anthropic, to be clear) to decide what isn't and is considered "crazy" and who and who isn't "verified" not to be "crazy". Especially when these companies have time and time again demonstrated (1) that they cry wolf way too much which leads to nobody taking their claims about how "dangerous" their models are seriously and (2) incidents like this where OpenAI makes a claim ("Look at how dangerous our models are!") and then doesn't be smart and just... Slow the fuck down (and when testing these things, actually sandbox them properly, which obviously wasn't done here or this attack wouldn't have been even possible).