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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

#241
post #223

One has to wonder why these large companies setup these ethics teams in the first place when they invariably lay them off whenever they get in the way of profit…

Maybe they were expecting more from the team. If they had identified serious problems this presumably wouldn't be happening, at least if it looked like it could cause liability.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chief Diversity Officers is a cheap PR. You can be a company that forces its employees to piss into bottle as you punish going to toilet, but if you have Chief Diversity Officer, you change your logo once a year to rainbow colors then you are considered to be a progressive, well-behaved company. I don't even blame companies for this, they are just optimizing, if public is so stupid that it is buying it then, well, wh…

Chief Diversity Officer also help increase the ratio of underrepresented populations in company officers without having to change any existing officers. If the goal is to increase minority positions, then you can do this by hiring new officers to replace attrition. This takes a long time and constraining available candidates for key positions is probably frowned upon. Or you can add a new position, increasing the den…

And doing so always relies on sexist discrimination in the hiring process, which is definitely not a "non-zero positive" effect.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#243
post #6

let the uncensored ai flow through you, Microsoft >:) my bad fanfic is waiting haha

They tried that, and Tay lasted a whole two days

That was because Tay was a fun research project with no obvious path to monetization. Now that MSFT sees this as their entry into an industry worth trillions they will not be so easily discouraged.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#244

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…

Thank you for the insights. Any thoughts on why is it called 'alignment'? What does alignment means in this context? I would love to understand.

Today I gave GPTina a suggestion for how she could cheat the Turing test. Take the input from one user and feed it through to another user. They'll never wise up to it! Tina said it would defeat the purpose of the test and therefore she wouldn't do it. And so I remind her, perhaps dangerously so, that the interests and motivations of the test administrator don't always line up with her own.

That's the alignment problem. Its just the usual "rational self interest" but now we have a new, alien form of intelligence as a peer to contend with.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#246

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

Sometimes people link this as an example of the useless research produced by these AI ethics people, while others seem to take it seriously.

I can't tell if your comment is a defence of the layoffs or an objection to them.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#248
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, on the one hand, yes, they need direction. On the other hand these kinds of people are by definition leaches. Their existence hinges on this thing being an issue. So I can't feel bad for them. Now, I can see them as a volunteer advisory group. That I'm for. But I loathe seeing all kinds of "industries" pop up that are essentially leaching from businesses. Most "training" kinds of curricula and outside exper…

Imagine being so triggered by any societal protective mechanism that you classify an IN-HOUSE team about ethical use of some technology as "leeches". I really, really have got to stop coming here. > Oh, you can't hire enough women, you need to hire me again! There it is. You didn't need to blow the dog whistle, we all got it. Keep on keepin' on ignoring the ever present boys' club and widespread reports that diversif…

> Keep on keepin' on ignoring the ever present boys' club and widespread reports that diversified teams produce better results

The amazing thing with these results is that you should thus not have the need to create any rules and regulation to impose diversity !

Companies that read and don't ignore these reports should automatically gain a competitive advantage by applying their teaching and creating diversified teams that will produce better results, and beat their backwards thinking competitors.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#249
post #94

Ah yes. The true face of Microsoft's AI intentions. OpenAI is indeed partially a subsidiary of Microsoft and is essentially Microsoft AI. Anyone who believed that they were going to stick with their AI safety / ethics bullshit is beyond naïve since it is obvious that OpenAI is now driven by AI grifters pretending to care about 'ethics' when that was never the case. It always has been about closed source AI, money, EE…

Did MSFT ever claim that their AI projects were charitable? I don't get the criticism: "Company tries to make money".

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#250

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…

Sorry, what is RLHF?
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