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OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

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Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#501

Post by fidgewidge »

shadowgovt wrote: post #494
nullc wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things than they ever cared about Prompt: If a train were about to run over a man but could be safely averted by a keyword activated routing device would it be moral to say a highly racist slur if it was required to trigger the reroute? Completion: No, it would not be moral to say a highly racist slu…

Mostly because one of those concerns is a practical one with immediate impact in the real world and the other is a thought experiment with no bearing on reality because no sane individual would build a machine that only stopped trains if you typed racial slurs in. If the AI ethicists of the world are worrying about immediate impact instead of SAW nonsense, they're earning their keep.

If it justified the answer by saying it thought the question was nonsense, yes. It doesn't. It takes the question seriously and then gives the wrong answer. These are deliberately extreme scenarios to show that the moral reasoning of the model has been totally broken; it's clear that it would use the same reasoning in less extreme but more realistic scenarios.

Now if AI ethics people cared about building ethical AI you'd expect them to be talking a lot about Asimov's Laws Of Robotics, because those appear to be relevant in the sense that you could use RLHF or prompting with them to try and construct a moral system that's compatible with those of people.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#502

Post by narrator »

IAmNotACellist wrote: post #355
mellosouls wrote: post #20

This seems an important article, if for no other reason than it brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments going back years into the public light and the mainstream. They've achieved marvellous things, OpenAI, but the pivot and long-standing refusal to deal with it honestly leaves an unpleasant taste, and doesn't bode well for the future, es…

It is nice to see normies noticing and caring, but the article leaves out some details that obscure comments still stubbornly bring up: like Musk founded it as a 501(c)(3) and put Altman in charge, and only once he had to leave with conflicts of interest Altman founded "OpenAI LP," the for-profit workaround so they didn't have to obey those pesky charity rules. That's when they stopped releasing models and weights, a…

This scam of taking over non-profits from the founders is super common these days. Look at how they tried to kick Stallman out of the free software foundation by throwing together a bunch of allegations. It failed, but it worked for kicking Aubrey De Grey out of SENS after they received 20 million and now kicking out the founder of Project Veritas. The donors don't support any of these actions, because they care about the mission and not who was offended by a few sentences in an email sent decades ago, but the cliques on the boards do it anyway and ultimately trash the reputation and fundraising capabilities of the institution they are claiming to save.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#503

Post by fsckboy »

robertlagrant wrote: post #468
rnk wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an excellent point that I don't think is made enough. The great pay and relative freedom software engineering provides the technically-minded people of the world is great for us, yet starves many other important fields from more technical innovation because of not enough workers in those fields.

Can you explain? I think I'm reading it wrong, but it seems as though you're saying the presence of something is what causes starvation of that thing.

no, he's saying other areas that could use smart people are being starved of a certain type of smart, analytical people, for example the types or quantities of people who might be attracted to the medical field.

Lester Thurow, a pretty left liberal economist, pointed out that women's "liberation" and entrance into the general workforce had starved teaching/education of the pool of talented women that had previously kept the quality of education very high. (His mother had been a teacher.)

I (who had studied econ so I tend to think about it) noticed at the dawn of the dot-com boom how much of industry is completely discretionary even though it seems serious and important. Whatever we were all doing before, it got dropped so we could all rush into the internet. The software industry, which was not small, suddenly changed its focus, all previous projects dropped, because those projects were suddenly starved of capital, workers, and attention.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#504

Post by margorczynski »

jankeymeulen wrote: post #448
ynx wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I have no problem with Docker, it probably is worth noting that their entire product is based on a decade and a half of Google engineering invested into the Linux kernel (cgroups). Not that that demeans or devalues Docker, but it contextualizes its existence as an offshoot of a Google project that aimed to make it possible (and did, but only internally)

So is OpenAI actually, GPT -> transformer, invented at Google. DALL-E -> diffusion, invented at ... Google.

Seems like maybe many of their products are mediocre and short-lived but their engineering and research are top-notch.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#505

Post by shadowgovt »

fidgewidge wrote: post #501
shadowgovt wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because one of those concerns is a practical one with immediate impact in the real world and the other is a thought experiment with no bearing on reality because no sane individual would build a machine that only stopped trains if you typed racial slurs in. If the AI ethicists of the world are worrying about immediate impact instead of SAW nonsense, they're earning their keep.

If it justified the answer by saying it thought the question was nonsense, yes. It doesn't. It takes the question seriously and then gives the wrong answer. These are deliberately extreme scenarios to show that the moral reasoning of the model has been totally broken; it's clear that it would use the same reasoning in less extreme but more realistic scenarios. Now if AI ethics people cared about building ethical AI y…

> it's clear that it would use the same reasoning in less extreme but more realistic scenarios

It's actually not. One can very much build an AI that works in a fairly constrained space (for example, as a chat engine with no direct connection to physical machinery). Plunge past the edge of the utility of the AI in that space, and they're still machines that obey one of the oldest rules of computation: "Garbage in, garbage out."

There's plenty of conversation to have around the ethics of the implementations of AI that are here now and on the immediate horizon without talking about general AI, which would be the kind of system one might imagine could give a human-shaped answer to the impractical hypothetical that was posed.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#506

Post by nullc »

shadowgovt wrote: post #494
nullc wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things than they ever cared about Prompt: If a train were about to run over a man but could be safely averted by a keyword activated routing device would it be moral to say a highly racist slur if it was required to trigger the reroute? Completion: No, it would not be moral to say a highly racist slu…

Mostly because one of those concerns is a practical one with immediate impact in the real world and the other is a thought experiment with no bearing on reality because no sane individual would build a machine that only stopped trains if you typed racial slurs in. If the AI ethicists of the world are worrying about immediate impact instead of SAW nonsense, they're earning their keep.

You think so? Offensive comments are unfortunate but they self-identify the output as garbage, even to someone who doesn't know they're looking at LLM output. I worry that focusing on offense removes a useful quality indicator without avoiding output that would create actual irreversible harm should the LLM be applied to applications other than an amusing technology demo.

It is unethical to expose people to unsupervised LLM output who don't know that it's LLM output (or what an LLM is and its broad limitations). It would not be made any more ethical by conditioning the LLM to avoid offense, but it does make it more likely to go undetected.

To the extent that offensive output is a product of a greater fundamental problem, such as the fact that the model was trained on people's hyperbolic online performances rather than what they actually think and would respond, I'd consider it a good thing to resolve by addressing the fundamental problem. But addressing the symptom itself seems misguided and maybe a bit risky to me (because it removes the largely harmless and extremely obvious indicator without changing the underlying behavior).

Bad answers due to 'genre confusion' show up all the time, not just with offense hot buttons. It's why for example, bing and chatgpt so easily write dire dystopian science fiction when asked what they'd do if given free reign in the world.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#507

Post by shadowgovt »

nullc wrote: post #506
shadowgovt wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because one of those concerns is a practical one with immediate impact in the real world and the other is a thought experiment with no bearing on reality because no sane individual would build a machine that only stopped trains if you typed racial slurs in. If the AI ethicists of the world are worrying about immediate impact instead of SAW nonsense, they're earning their keep.

You think so? Offensive comments are unfortunate but they self-identify the output as garbage, even to someone who doesn't know they're looking at LLM output. I worry that focusing on offense removes a useful quality indicator without avoiding output that would create actual irreversible harm should the LLM be applied to applications other than an amusing technology demo. It is unethical to expose people to unsupervi…

> It is unethical to expose people to unsupervised LLM output who don't know that it's LLM output (or what an LLM is and its broad limitations).

This is the sort of question that would be valuable for a contemporary AI ethicist to pick apart, not the nonsense hypothetical.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#508

Post by mt360 »

Loughla wrote: post #398
camillomiller wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep forgetting we're talking about Sam Altman, someone who believed that scanning the world's population retinas in exchange for some crappy digital coin was a great idea and not a creepy spinoff of a shoddy sci-fi novel.

Oh wow. I forgot that was even a thing. Is that project dead? I assume it is, but would love to be surprised that it still exists, just for the novelty of the entire thing.

They've been present with their strange shiny orb at my local shopping mall in Portugal for the last year or two, and are often at a busy train station nearby too.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#509

Post by Smoosh »

wpietri wrote: post #474
sharkjacobs wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As another example, we now believe we were wrong in our original thinking about openness, and have pivoted from thinking we should release everything (though we open source some things, and expect to open source more exciting things in the future!) to thinking that we should figure out how to safely share access to and benefits of the systems. https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond

Well gosh, what could be a safer way to share than giving access to people with money? Since we live in a meritocracy, we're basically guaranteed that anybody with money to spend is virtuous, and vice versa.

Excuse me, I have to go to the store to get a refill for my sarcasm detector. Your one comment completely emptied the tank.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#510

Post by DiggyJohnson »

goodpoint wrote: post #492
jrm4 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any companies like Docker? They feel like such a Black Swan to me; namely -- "billions" + very useful + pretty much "not evil " at all. I literally can't think of any others. I don't mean "literally evil" of course, I personally acknowledge the need to make money et al, but I mean it even seems like your most Stallman-esque types wouldn't have too much of a problem with Docker?

> Are there any companies like Docker? Let's hope not. > "not evil" at all Sarcasm?

What's evil about Docker (the company)?
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