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Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
251–260 of 466 posts
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#252Earlier 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…
> 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.
These people still exist?
Personally, I don’t think gradient descent is the way to AGI either (I think it’s efficient algorithmic search over the space of all computable programs), but I haven’t heard anything from the symbols crowd since the early 2010s.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok so what’s your point? We can just ignore it? Or what.
AGI worries we probably could ignore until AGI exists but there is now an industry around them which has its own momentum.
This seems dumb to me. It’s like if the Japanese had the clairvoyant ability to know that nuclear bombs were being built and used and the immediate future and said “We can ignore it until it exists)”. No. You leave Hiroshima and Nagasaki now and not when the freaking bombs are above your head.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I supposed to know these terms?
Sorry, yes that wasn't clear. Scott Alexander coined most of them in "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" [1] Red & blue are exactly what a U.S reader would think they are. "Grey" is an attempt by Scott to define something else, loosely hacker-ish / rationalist (you can tell who he thinks the cool people are). "Rainbow tribe" I just made up, but I think you can guess what I mean now based on context. Alignme…
This is still wildly unclear.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#255Earlier 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…
> 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.
Who’s checking the karma of posters on Reddit?
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#256These 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…
The elephant in the room is that "ethics" and "diversity" and so on are not business concerns in the sense that they help make the company money. The Chief Diversity Officer is a thing if there is a market pressure for companies to have one but the goal if the company is to maximize its profit and once having an ethics team or a diversity team gets in the way of that, they'll be overturned or abandoned. It's literally virtue signalling (i.e. a performative display of virtue rather than a legitimate interest in the virtuous behavior itself).
What should be concerning is that the environment has changed in such a way companies find it more profitable to forego these signals or maybe even use that change itself as a signal (e.g. consider Coinbase making a big show of becoming "apolitical" and gaining recognition from a certain audience for that).
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google Lambda and Bing/Sydney are not at least incrementally closer to evidence? No, in the same way that boiling water in a kettle is not incrementally closer to inventing the fuel for a rocket ship. You can, in hidsight do a linear connection of water boiling -> steam engine -> fuel engine -> aeronautics -> space travel But the first time someone boiled water, if you said that got you closer to being on the moon…
Except, in your example, boiling water did get us closer to the moon :)
Yep, and there was a much mre promissing science on checking Ether, and the magical qualities of gravity defying physics.
Who is to say that our current ML models are not Ether studies and utterly useless.
If we crack AGI in 10 years, maybe our current models are the fuel engine. But if they are not even close, we might be boiling water. Or perhaps be wrong all together, thats why I said your observation of us getting closer thanks to those proyects is not right, at least not yet.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#258End of the day the AI space will be dominated by whatever model doesn’t lecture you about “as a large language model I can’t…”.
And the company that will ship that won’t have the largest “AI safety and ethics” team.
ChatGPT will become as irrelevant as Dall-E2 when that happens.
(Not saying this is for the best, just saying what I think will happen)
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not AGI. AGI would be able to write its own code, and improve it exponentially.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems increasingly that the concerns from the ethics branch have not come to pass at all. It is literally happening right now in the US justice system: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm... There's all sorts of problems with this, but the use of "AI" to launder biased data (via IP law no less - these are proprietary blackbox algorithms being used by the justice system, owned by corporat…
We have been here a long time with both fingerprints and DNA. A black box points the finger and it just happens to align with cultural bias and expectations. No one really want to change the system if there is a risk that a person people think is guilty might go free.
DNA testing is hardly a black box. The methodology, process, scientific basis and all other details are open and widely available.
DNA has also cleared a lot of people who have been falsely accused.