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OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

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Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#21

Post by namuol »

Barrin92 wrote: post #19
namuol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it's clearly the goal of OpenAI to bring more public attention to advances in the field, specifically to help voters and policymakers consider potential ramifications well in advance of any "truly" groundbreaking work before it's too late. Of course they're "hyping" this technology. Secondly, have you seen the results? I was dumbfounded and fascinated. I spent hours reading the samples. Maybe I'm just out of t…

>Secondly, have you seen the results? I was dumbfounded and fascinated. I spent hours reading the samples. Yes, I've seen the result. They're nice but, as the article points out, not extraordinary compared to state of the art, open NLP research. OpenAI's behaviour here smells of Gibsonesque 'anti-marketing', using the misunderstanding of AI and its capabilities in the general population as a means to stir up publicit…

> not extraordinary compared to state of the art, open NLP research

> misrepresents progress in the field

Can you point me to some examples of unsupervised learning with similar results? Not asking for rhetorical purposes; I just genuinely was shocked by how compelling their results were, especially given this was unsupervised.

> OpenAI's behaviour here smells of Gibsonesque 'anti-marketing'

I don't disagree that the ethics are questionable, but I think it's highly speculative to suggest that they didn't release the full model purely as a marketing ploy (I'm assuming this is the main objection to their marketing "tactics"). As you say, it "smells" this way, but I fail to see how it's really so clear-cut.

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#22

Post by m0zg »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #15
m0zg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen the results and I don't get why people think this is any more dangerous than journalists who selectively report to fit a predetermined agenda or make shit up on the spot. Which, today, is a lot of them.

It's Bulk. Same reason why spam is a problem.

There's plenty of "bulk" coming from "journalists". On any given day a significant fraction of any popular news site is utter and complete horseshit, selectively reported or made up outright to fit a narrative, which will be retracted and/or forgotten weeks later. You could argue that this is _more_ dangerous because the bovine manure is mixed with the actual legit news stores to make it harder to tell which is which.

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#23

Post by ilyasut »

Ilya from OpenAI here. Here's our thinking:

- ML is getting more powerful and will continue to do so as time goes by. While this point of view is not unanimously held by the AI community, it is also not particularly controversial.

- If you accept the above, then the current AI norm of "publish everything always" will have to change

- The _whole point_ is that our model is not special and that other people can reproduce and improve upon what we did. We hope that when they do so, they too will reflect about the consequences of releasing their very powerful text generation models.

- I suggest going over some of the samples generated by the model. Many people react quite strongly, e.g., https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1096111155469180928.

- It is true that some media headlines presented our nonpublishing of the model as "OpenAI's model is too dangerous to be published out of world-taking-over concerns". We don't endorse this framing, and if you read our blog post (or even in most cases the actual content of the news stories), you'll see that we don't claim this at all -- we say instead that this is just an early test case, we're concerned about language models more generally, and we're running an experiment.

Finally, despite the way the news cycle has played out, and despite the degree of polarized response (and the huge range of arguments for and against our decision), we feel we made the right call, even if it wasn't an easy one to make.

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#24

Post by KVFinn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #19
namuol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it's clearly the goal of OpenAI to bring more public attention to advances in the field, specifically to help voters and policymakers consider potential ramifications well in advance of any "truly" groundbreaking work before it's too late. Of course they're "hyping" this technology. Secondly, have you seen the results? I was dumbfounded and fascinated. I spent hours reading the samples. Maybe I'm just out of t…

>Secondly, have you seen the results? I was dumbfounded and fascinated. I spent hours reading the samples. Yes, I've seen the result. They're nice but, as the article points out, not extraordinary compared to state of the art, open NLP research. OpenAI's behaviour here smells of Gibsonesque 'anti-marketing', using the misunderstanding of AI and its capabilities in the general population as a means to stir up publicit…

>Yes, I've seen the result. They're nice but, as the article points out, not extraordinary compared to state of the art, open NLP research.

This isn't my impression.

It's not the best in many domains but it a single network that is moderately decent in many domains. You can use it to summarize by adding TLDR to the end of text. You can use it to translate by listing previous translations. And of course it does blow away any state-of-the-art RNN text generation I've seen. RNNs tend to fall apart after 1 or 2 sentences where as this holds it together for multiple paragraphs.

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#25

Post by hcs »

Permit wrote: post #5
cma wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper cost to put out a bigger volume of content.

Is volume really what dictates whether or not you can impersonate someone? It's never seemed that way to me.

It affects how many people you can impersonate, cheap enough for many authors with small readerships each. (I guess, it does seem overblown.)

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#26

Post by modeless »

ilyasut wrote: post #23

Ilya from OpenAI here. Here's our thinking: - ML is getting more powerful and will continue to do so as time goes by. While this point of view is not unanimously held by the AI community, it is also not particularly controversial. - If you accept the above, then the current AI norm of "publish everything always" will have to change - The _whole point_ is that our model is not special and that other people can reprodu…

> The _whole point_ is that our model is not special and that other people can reproduce and improve

Only people with a large amount of money and a lot of expertise. What you are doing is the opposite of democratizing AI.

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#28

Post by ultrasounder »

amrrs wrote: post #8

>Elon Musk distances himself from OpenAI, group that built fake news AI tool This is the worst headlines in this matter. This is one of the leading media in India. A language model being touted as Fake news AI tool. This is like calling a car, A run over machine by Ford. https://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/elon-musk-distances-hims...

Hindustan Times is far from being a leading media outlet.it squarely falls in the same category as The National Enquirer of Jeff Bezos fame.

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#29

Post by sigil »

ilyasut wrote: post #23

Ilya from OpenAI here. Here's our thinking: - ML is getting more powerful and will continue to do so as time goes by. While this point of view is not unanimously held by the AI community, it is also not particularly controversial. - If you accept the above, then the current AI norm of "publish everything always" will have to change - The _whole point_ is that our model is not special and that other people can reprodu…

Ok but isn’t this the opposite of OpenAI’s “nukes are safer when multiple actors have them” strategy wrt AI?

I’m also confused by the threat models earnestly put forth in your blog post. Are we really concerned about deep faking someone’s writing? The plain word already demands attribution by default: we look for an avatar, a handle, a domain name to prove the person actually said this.

Re: OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues

#30

Post by namuol »

KVFinn wrote: post #24
Barrin92 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Secondly, have you seen the results? I was dumbfounded and fascinated. I spent hours reading the samples. Yes, I've seen the result. They're nice but, as the article points out, not extraordinary compared to state of the art, open NLP research. OpenAI's behaviour here smells of Gibsonesque 'anti-marketing', using the misunderstanding of AI and its capabilities in the general population as a means to stir up publicit…

>Yes, I've seen the result. They're nice but, as the article points out, not extraordinary compared to state of the art, open NLP research. This isn't my impression. It's not the best in many domains but it a single network that is moderately decent in many domains. You can use it to summarize by adding TLDR to the end of text. You can use it to translate by listing previous translations. And of course it does blow a…

Have you been following NLP closely lately? It seems like most of the frustration and/or skepticism is coming from those closest to the field (i.e. researchers), so I'm pretty sure I'm missing a big part of the picture.

I'm trying to get a sense of just how quickly things have been advancing. I read a few NLP white papers about a year ago and never saw anything as compelling as this, but I am definitely an outsider possibly on the left hand side of the Dunning Kruger graph...

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