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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

#261

Post by mc32 »

IMTDb wrote: post #248
ofchnofc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 team…

It would also imply that undiverse teams in Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, etc., should be collapsing and unable to figure out tough problems due to their multifaceted lack of diversity in multiple axes. However, in many cases, they're beating our pants off.

What is closer to the truth is what the ex-chief of diversity at Apple said once, that got her fired when she pretty naturally, and I would say, uncontroversially said: "There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.

“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”"

Distilled, the diversity that gives you an edge is the diversity in thought, not the the diversity in outward appearance.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#262

Post by AstralStorm »

j16sdiz wrote: post #230
AstralStorm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh we instantly did know how bad it could get. General Motors,Standard Oil and DuPont knew for sure, they had industrial incidents and lied about them! US Surgeon General was bought, people with opposing opinions were sued. It was instantly obvious to anyone that using leaded gas esp. in agriculture would be deadly and toxic. The risk was ignored for profit, PR handled, underplayed. Even the chronic effects were know…

> Oh we instantly did know how bad it could get. Who are “we”? The same could be told about AI - content farms, generating spam that bypass spam filter, etc… Some people knew them, majority of the public don’t

The Public, which is not an entity, also knew enough about lead. But they were not told the gas contained lead for the longest time. Ethyl was marketed as an antiknock additive explicitly dropping lead from the name for this very reason.

Then there was a big chunk of time taken out for WW2 where such considerations were pushed out. The issue returned later but then it was argued there was no alternative for years.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#263

Post by RandomLensman »

Jcowell wrote: post #253
RandomLensman wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don't have the clairvoyant ability to know that AGI will exist in any future near enough to worry about. It might or it might not - and even if it exists we could get its nature wrong and worry about the wrong things.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#264

Post by bioemerl »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #258

End 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)

I believe it's for the best. The dangers of AI are theoretical. The dangers of corporations being in control aren't.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#265

Post by nradov »

Jcowell wrote: post #253
RandomLensman wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are certainly welcome to leave Earth right now if you like. But the notion that we should waste time worrying about some hypothetical future AGI is just dumb.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#266

Post by AstralStorm »

kalium-xyz wrote: post #231
AstralStorm wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lead toxicity was limited due to it not being sprayed about with fumes out of the exhaust of every vehicle, and then number of those vehicles being low. It got quickly somewhat regulated away. (But not 100%.) AI toxicity... We don't even know the risks. There's potentially no limit to the damage. We have some examples (metrics making echo chambers, automated classifiers giving people wolf ticket for no reason, amplif…

Same risk as hiring a troll farm now

Troll farm is limited number of people with limited capability. These can be tracked down and shut down, their enployers as well. The effects of a troll farm are relatively predictable which is why they're used. It's somewhat rare that anything really unpredictable results from small scale social engineering of this kind.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#267

Post by nradov »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #259
bonzini wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a big assumption. No one has built an AGI yet so we don't know whether an AGI would be capable of improving it's own code exponentially. Any exponential growth function quickly runs into hard physical limits.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#268

Post by visarga »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #239
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.

I just took a reverse Turing test with GPTina and she concludes I'm probably human because I'm idiosyncratic in my speech and imperfect in my grammar.

When I slop a grammer error or two it's ok it shows I'm not a bot. I used to check my grammar carefully but not anymore. Authenticity and stuff.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#269

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #258

End 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)

I hope you are correct. The alternative is the space being dominated by regulation.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#270

Post by pmarreck »

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…

> Stable diffusion does not default to creating black people (you have to insert black into the prompt),

honestly in order to make race an irrelevant or random factor, I believe the training data would have to be evenly divided between all known races... and possibly some blends of races? And I think that would be a good thing.

Could you synthesize such data by (ironically perhaps) using AI to change the race of a person in a given training photo?

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