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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

#161

Post by vasco »

dmix wrote: post #115

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 a…

> Hell, even the non-talented ones will still be in demand considering the demand in the media for stories/politically convient takes

Language models can probably do a better job soon.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#163

Post by dragonwriter »

ssalka wrote: post #89
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AI alignment people are the group who are capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to do it responsibly. AI ethics people are the group who are not capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to make sure that those who can do it responsibly or not at all.

> AI alignment people are the group who are capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to do it responsibly.

AI alignment people are the group who believe “responsibly” means, centrally, bringing AGI to existence as fast as possible, and, critically, under the tight, opaque, authoritarian control of a narrow group of people whose ideology is, well, exemplified by figures like Sam Bankman-Fried, and doing everything possible to advance that goal, including fostering broad acceptance of sub-AGI AI under the same tight control for other purposes without concern for adverse social impact as a means of advancing and funding progress toward AGI. They believe that the ends (AGI) inherently justifies any means taken in its pursuit.

AI ethics people are the group who believes “responsibly”, with regard to AI, isn’t restricted to pursuit of AGI (which is maybe a nice to have, but a non-essential goal), and means openness, transparency, and resolving bias and harm issues as rapidly as possible when, and ideally before, adopting AI – including AI far short of AGI – in roles with social impact (and most critically, resolving those for roles with the greatest social impact.) They believe that AI is, to the extent it at any level is desirable, is a means to improving concrete, present, immediate conditions, not an ends to be pursued in itself.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#164

Post by xvilka »

bmc7505 wrote: post #111
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

N/S dichotomy is fake, a lot of organizations these days explore hybrid approaches, involving both NN or other probabilistic models, plus symbolic rules of some kind.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#165

Post by jamilton »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #83
paramount wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think the push for ethics in AI is important. As much as these functions do get sidelined in the prioritization process as outlined in the parent comment, the intent of introducing the rigor is valid.

I agree AI ethics is important, but unfortunately, the field is dominated by frauds. Do you remember the drama[1] with Google's AI ethics team? Here's a sample of the "research" they were producing: https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Exit_from_Google

Why scare quotes on research? I feel like you should just say why you think it's not good.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#166

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Exactly, this is a form of ass coverage and not a genuine desire to do good. The job of ethics, legal, compliance, etc. departments is not necessarily to ensure the company behaves like a boy scout but to ensure that they have plausible deniability when they don't and to prevent companies from making expensive mistakes. The potential damage to the company is substantial and having such departments is a form of insurance against that. A necessary evil.

The flip side is that such departments can put the brakes on because not doing risky things is the best way to ensure you don't take risk. If you ask a lawyer if you should do X, the answer is almost certainly going to be a "no" or a "yes" with a lot of "buts and ifs". That's their job and they bias to playing it safe. Same with financial compliance departments. Etc. That's fine if you are in a slow moving line of business where nothing changes much. But when you need to move more quickly, having a lot of internal bureaucracy and box ticking isn't helpful.

With AI, it kind of stopped being academic in the past few years and this is now a multi billion dollar business opportunity that requires companies to act decisively and with purpose. Companies sitting on their hands because it's risky, scary, etc. are going to end up being sidelined. And of course there are some companies going all in on this. Most of these are startups that can afford to take risk. Meaning they are not going to fight with their hands behind their backs taking it carefully, easy, and slowly. Going all in means doing things that are risky, a little bit uncomfortable, and have uncertain outcomes.

We see that playing out with the behavior of MS relative to Google. Google is not launching the AI stuff they have because it might do or say something embarrassing. MS has in fact launched a few AI things that said and did something mildly embarrassing (taybot, and recently the bing chat bot). Very entertaining. But it's fine. They learn from it and move on. Limited damage and it actually got them a lot of positive press. Making mistakes is an essential part of R&D. Having an ethics department trying to slow down things isn't that helpful.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#167

Post by ethbr0 »

vorticalbox wrote: post #159
worrycue wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this has not caused mass social harm despite the tens of millions of users Isn’t it a bit early to tell? I can foresee ChatGPT being used to farm “karma” on social media sites to bot accounts to credibility on sites like Reddit - maybe even HN.

Do you consider "karma" farming "mass harm"?

In answer, how frequently does "append Reddit" appear as a top comment on a "Google search is ad-optimized garbage now" article?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#168

Post by skissane »

cameldrv wrote: post #79
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The main issue I see is terminology. Ethics is a broad field. “AI Ethics” has come to mean mostly eliminating different kinds of bias from AI models. However, AI raises multitudes of ethical questions, and merely being unbiased is far from enough for an AI model (or a person) to be acting ethically.

Whenever I hear the word “ethics” I always ask myself “whose”. I hate how people talk about ethics as if it was some non-controversial topic where everyone can clearly see what the “right” answers are.

This world features a competition between radically opposed ethical systems. We don’t agree on whether ethics is objective (i.e. some people’s ethics are superior to those of others) or subjective (i.e. “superior” is just another way of saying “same as my own”), and even those who agree that it is objective, often can’t agree on who is objectively more correct, even though they both agree that in principle someone must be.

I much prefer those who talk about ethics while making clear which brand of ethics they are selling - whether their name is John Rawls or Robert Nozick or Peter Singer or Edward Feser - than people who pretend we all agree on what is ethical, and leave their actual ethics as something to be inferred rather than openly advertised. From what I’ve seen, “AI ethics” fails at this completely

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#169

Post by dragonwriter »

runarberg wrote: post #143
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aren’t you revising history a bit here? I recall early facial recognition model having pretty hard time with dark skinned faces, I remember early models reflecting gender stereotypes, etc. In fact I remember the ChatGPT team putting tons of engineering into supervised learning to not let it fall victim to regurgitating these biases. The history that I remember very much did experience AI biases and racism. And tons o…

> I recall early facial recognition model having pretty hard time with dark skinned faces

The recently adopted app Customs and Border Protection mandates for asylum seekers still has that problem, its not a mere historical footnote of early efforts.

> In fact I remember the ChatGPT team putting tons of engineering into supervised learning to not let it fall victim to regurgitating these biases.

And I remember seeing demonstrations (here, on HN) within the last week of how ChatGPT still falls victim to regurgitating those biases. (And then will lie about its ability to assure that it won’t do so in the future.)

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#170

Post by bonzini »

swyx wrote: post #156
nradov wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence that any group is capable of bringing AGI to life.

no evidence? none? Google Lambda and Bing/Sydney are not at least incrementally closer to evidence?

That's not AGI. An AGI would be able to tell you they don't know things, ask for clarification as to why you think they're wrong, etc.

ChatGPT just spouts out a different wild guess when you tell it it's wrong, but doesn't learn from its mistake—not even within a single chat. Sydney just goes full psychopath.

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