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Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

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Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#111

Post by bmc7505 »

anonylizard wrote: post #19
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…

This. People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks. The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view…

  Those two branches despise each other with intense passion.
I never actually made this connection before, but having spent far too much time listening to both camps, this observation does ring true. Another observation I had is that there is an orthogonal axis to the safety/ethics dichotomy that follows a more scholastic approach, namely neuro/symbolism. These two branches correspond, roughly, to the debate between machine learning and mechanized reasoning (a.k.a. good old fashioned AI).

Vastly oversimplifying, the neural branch believes reasoning comes after learning and that by choosing the right inductive biases (e.g., maximum entropy, minimum description length), then training everything up using gradient descent, reasoning will emerge. The symbolists place a heavier emphasis on model interpretability and believe learning emerges from a logical substrate, albeit at a much higher level of abstraction.

Like safety/ethics "research", neural/symbolic folks are constantly bickering about first principles, but unlike their colleagues in the S/E camp (which is at best philosophy and at worst fanfiction), N/S debates are resolved by actually building things like language models, chess bots, programming languages, type theories and model checkers. Both are valid debates to have, but N/S is more technically grounded while S/E is a bit like LARPing.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#112

Post by pixl97 »

teolandon wrote: post #90
pixl97 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if that's the case let me come over and cannibalize your body for sustenance so I may continue my breeding. Oh right, it's unethical and immoral do to that to other humans (though how much better are we for doing that to animals?). I certainly don't want the paperclip maximizer disassembling me for my involuntary donation to the collective.

Your original comment didn't talk about ethics or morals, but was talking about intelligence being its own great filter. More intelligent AI consuming us could be unethical and immoral in your view, but it would still be intelligence spreading, and not filtering itself. Just not specifically human intelligence.

I mean, killing all the people on the planet seems unethical to me. Maybe I have a deep misunderstanding of ethics.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#113

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#114

Post by HervalFreire »

anonytrary wrote: post #92
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…

Having a Chief Diversity Officer to fix a lack of diversity in my mind is no different than having a Chief Culture Officer to fix a poor company culture. Those sorts of problems can only be solved as the collective sum of every individual employee's actions. For example, if a large team of male engineers are all saying no to equally talented female candidates, then you've just hired shitty people. A diversity figureh…

No this isn't true. Human psychology is much more complicated then shitty people and good people. Aspects of both being a complete ass hole and being a good person exists in the psychology of everyone.

Little rules and arrangements from the top can serve to bring out the best in people. In the same way cities and cultures can be shaped by laws and rules so can people within corporations.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#115

Post by dmix »

Anyone paying close attention to the output of generic "AI ethics" people (especially on Twitter) should not be surprised that companies that when push comes to shove the businesses getting actually useful AI tools that are being tested by real people for real things generating real data, are starting to question the utility of the bulk of the crowd who skirted off hypotheticals for years to build their reputations as "experts". Once the hypotehtical meets the meat of the problems you usually can quickly root out the people not providing any value and merely pushing trendy FUDy positions.

The key here is that the costs are still as high a ever, Microsoft is very aware of the consequences of ignoring the legitimate AI ethics issues. So it's not likely it's merely ignoring risk.

The real useful AI ethics people will be born out of real world applications. Not pearl clutching by people making grand projections, often with a limited grasp of what the technology actually means in practice, in a competitve open market where you the cat is out of the bag even if you don't like it.

The legitimately talented AI thinkers will still be highly employable at the end of the day. Even if a small subset of talent got burned by the output/management of their previous team they'll be okay long term. Hell, even the non-talented ones will still be in demand considering the demand in the media for stories/politically convient takes, and the general tolerance for mediocrity in mega-tech-firms.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#116

Post by xyzzyz »

Eisenstein wrote: post #91
xyzzyz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the case with literally all kinds of professional ethicists. Thanks to them, we do not routinely do scientific challenge trials and plenty of other valuable experiments, and in many cases are reduced to collecting significantly worse data and doing it very slowly and expensively.

Much better off when were literally traumatizing babies to see how they would react to adverse stimulus. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment

Ah yes, because there is no reasonable middle ground between forbidding experiments where a subject might get a mote in their eye, and literally sacrificing babies to Moloch. Please. You can make better argument than that.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#117

Post by im3w1l »

pixl97 wrote: post #97
icapybara wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some machines might last longer than us but they are still subject to the same laws of thermodynamics. Most computers from 20+ years ago are inoperable today; show me a machine that can survive millions of years.

Machine or supermachine? You are a machine, you are born, you grow, and you die. But the species you exist in and transfer knowledge in is a supermachine. You have existed as a continuous chain for 3ish+ billion years now. Why would a digital intelligence behave any differently?

Something I've been thinking recently: "Species" is one way to delineate the "supermachine". Another way would be civilization. If we choose that framing, then we could see the biological human species as just one of many possible substrates for our civilization.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#118

Post by Daub »

When ethics are addressed at a corporate level, my first question is 'whose ethical standards are they upholding?' Ethical frameworks are like coding languages, developed and maintained by a few individuals, usually of an evangelical disposition. It amazing how rapidly these frameworks develop and fork.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#119

Post by cratermoon »

LegitShady wrote: post #103
cratermoon wrote: post #63

This seems like a good place to remind people of this: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

please dont link random pdfs without some discussion as to what it is. i mean you can but my guess is it lowers willingness to interact and is not goos for communication. i can differentiate your post from spam.

I didn't think a link to an acm.org paper would come off as "random", but I updated it to give the title and link to the article landing page.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#120

Post by karpierz »

daydream wrote: post #100
karpierz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (productive) point of the ethical AI team is to have internal people to consult when launching an AI product. Embedding ethical AI people on teams makes about as much sense as embedding legal counsel. Their services won't be used on a single team nearly enough to justify their inclusion. Of course, it can be window dressing if the company doesn't actually have product teams care. Just like a CDO position. But you…

The product teams don’t care. And the ethical AI team doesn’t want to sit back and wait for people to come to them. They want a seat at the table for all important AI products. More in my comment on the other submission about this news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35146611

> The product teams don’t care.

As I said, you can't patch over culture problems with a re-org.

If product people don't care, putting a person on the team that works against their interest will not make things better. Same thing with security/diversity/code quality/reliability. If the team doesn't care, putting an enforcer on the team will not fix the situation.

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