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LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

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Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#71

Post by freedomben »

waynesonfire wrote: post #65
raphlinus wrote: post #52

Disclosure: work at Google, opinions my own. I've had a chance to play with this and it's eerie how good it is. Most impressive to me, it was able to defend itself persuasively when confronted with evidence of how its previous answers were inconsistent (in the version I played with, it tends to be very coherent but frequently wrong).

> Disclosure: work at Google, opinions my own. Disclosure: don't care. why do only google employees do this?

If a person has a conflict-of-interest I still like to hear from them, but it's nice to disclose that. I comment on Red Hat news from time to time but I always disclose that I work there and that my opinions are my own. Even with the disclaimer sometimes people will accuse me of being a shill or like I'm the public face of Red Hat.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#72

Post by skybrian »

moralestapia wrote: post #24

>“I just started taking guitar lessons.” >You might expect another person to respond with something like: >“How exciting! My mom has a vintage Martin that she loves to play.” Not really IMO, I think they just pushed it to just say "whatever's related to the topic". People who behave like that irl come off as self-absorbed and obnoxious most of the time, hope future AIs are not like that!

Technically, that example is supposed to be something a person might say. They didn't claim that LaMBA said it.

If the computer says it then it's confabulating. It doesn't have a mother.

Unless they're working on role-playing, maybe it would be better to somehow remove responses that a computer shouldn't say from the training set?

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#73

Post by Traster »

shawndumas wrote: post #67
waynesonfire wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disclosure: work at Google, opinions my own. Disclosure: don't care. why do only google employees do this?

Disclosure: I work at Google too and my opinions are also my own. We are told internally that when we discuss Google related matters online that we should be cognizant of the what/where/how/why of our communication. Disclosing is—for me—both a reminder for myself and an attempt at a hedge against accidentally representing Google.

FWIW Intel engineers are meant to use the hashtag #iamintel to indicate their role, see it a lot on LinkedIn

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#74

Post by TeMPOraL »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #48
Mizza wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to point this out - this is how people from California communicate. They simply take turns talking about themselves, orbiting around the same subject until somebody says something with enough gravity to drag the conversation into its next orbit. It was really off-putting when I first arrived, I got used to it over time, though I still don't like it and it's sad to see it used as the default model for this…

I'm not sure this is something unique to California. Travelling around, it seems that it's more correlated to people's income level. Richer people tend to talk about themselves more, in both Asia and EU. Maybe it's because they are able to experience more given their wealth/status, thus having more topic to talk about. Or maybe they get wealthy because of that self-centric attitude. In short, I don't think it's a Cal…

> Richer people tend to talk about themselves more, in both Asia and EU. Maybe it's because they are able to experience more given their wealth/status, thus having more topic to talk about. Or maybe they get wealthy because of that self-centric attitude.

Interesting. My experience (Poland/EU) is pretty much the reverse. That is, I expect a richer person to take less about themselves, and more about the topic at hand. That is (generalizing), a rich person will say things like, "$Person is a great $X-maker, you should check them out", or "yeah, X is great, especially ${some refined form}", whereas a less well-off person will keep saying things like "yes, I love X", or "I hate X", or "I'm taking X classes", or "I know ${list of famous people doing X}". My provisional explanation is that the rich person doesn't feel the need to prove anything to you, or to themselves, so they can just talk about the topic itself, instead of trying to position themselves within it.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #38
yupper32 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech companies don't need a specific therapy app to know if you have anxiety. If they wanted to be nefarious in this way, they could just mine your chats and emails and get a great idea about your state of mind. They wouldn't even have to get around potentially legally privileged information. My go-to related example of this: People often worry that Facebook is listening to their conversations because they'll see an…

I think the “Facebook is listening” position is common because realizing how predictable people’s current interests are is a bit unsettling.

I think what's even more unsettling is realizing people's interests aren't as much predictable as they're being made predictable.

My wife and I, we experience a "Facebook is listening" event roughly every month these days. Of course I know they aren't, but these too-well-targeted ads or post recommendations aren't about generic, easy-to-guess interests - they're about completely random things that we just happened to spontaneously and briefly talk about that same day. The most likely explanation to me is that those conversation topics weren't actually spontaneous - that is, we were already primed, nudged to talk about this, and while we didn't know that, ad targeting algorithms did.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#77

Post by desmosxxx »

waynesonfire wrote: post #65
raphlinus wrote: post #52

Disclosure: work at Google, opinions my own. I've had a chance to play with this and it's eerie how good it is. Most impressive to me, it was able to defend itself persuasively when confronted with evidence of how its previous answers were inconsistent (in the version I played with, it tends to be very coherent but frequently wrong).

> Disclosure: work at Google, opinions my own. Disclosure: don't care. why do only google employees do this?

it's a disclosure? conflict of interest? people wondering how they got to test it? seems like very relevant information.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#78

Post by [deleted] »

raphlinus wrote: post #52

Disclosure: work at Google, opinions my own. I've had a chance to play with this and it's eerie how good it is. Most impressive to me, it was able to defend itself persuasively when confronted with evidence of how its previous answers were inconsistent (in the version I played with, it tends to be very coherent but frequently wrong).

[deleted]

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#79

Post by goliatone »

Mizza wrote: post #27
moralestapia wrote: post #24

>“I just started taking guitar lessons.” >You might expect another person to respond with something like: >“How exciting! My mom has a vintage Martin that she loves to play.” Not really IMO, I think they just pushed it to just say "whatever's related to the topic". People who behave like that irl come off as self-absorbed and obnoxious most of the time, hope future AIs are not like that!

I came here to point this out - this is how people from California communicate. They simply take turns talking about themselves, orbiting around the same subject until somebody says something with enough gravity to drag the conversation into its next orbit. It was really off-putting when I first arrived, I got used to it over time, though I still don't like it and it's sad to see it used as the default model for this…

I often interpreted this as a conservative interpersonal communicative approach. It is safer to talk about yourself than to ask questions from people because there risk of inadvertently saying something offensive.

Sure, you will find people that are a bit more self absorbed and would just pong about themselves.

But there are so many conversational constraints- asking “why” is aggressive, direct feedback is discouraged, slipping pronouns or other identity traits is a minefield, etc. You should not follow up when others say something because they were being polite and you’re putting them in evidence…

If you get to engaged in a conversation people can feel weirded out, like you’re supposed to go through the motions but that’s it.

Not talking also can get you in trouble.

Talking about yourself is probably the safest thing to do.

Re: LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

#80

Post by zamadatix »

waynesonfire wrote: post #69
shawndumas wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work at Google too and my opinions are also my own. We are told internally that when we discuss Google related matters online that we should be cognizant of the what/where/how/why of our communication. Disclosing is—for me—both a reminder for myself and an attempt at a hedge against accidentally representing Google.

Sure, you should be cognizant of what you say online otherwise you'll get smacked with the cancel culture hammer. This is regardless of where you work.

The net of what you should be cognizant of when providing insider information on a product from your company or commenting on a topic it is heavily involved in is wider than the single issue you eagerly dredge up.

E.g. the last thing you want from your comment about using early internally are news articles about "What Google plans on doing with " when you were just trying to give your personal opinion on where the technology might go.

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