Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 466 posts

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#281

Post by contextfree »

dragonwriter wrote: post #189
circuit10 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI alignment people are the group who believe “responsibly” means, centrally, bringing AGI to existence as fast as possible From what I’ve seen it’s the exact opposite? They want AI development to slow down so we can get it right and make it safe. There are people who are trying to speed it up but that seems like the opposite of alignment to me

> From what I’ve seen it’s the exact opposite? They want AI development to slow down so we can get it right and make it safe. The only way that the alignment faction wants to slow things down is in that they want to maintain tight control of models and gated access to assure “proper” use. This does have an effect of slowing certain kinds of development, as broader access to build around models without centralized con…

There's no single "alignment faction" in terms of these questions. There are people associated with the alignment research program who do advocate slowing things down, e.g., https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/lets-think-abou... . There are a variety of other different positions, e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, and MIRI have all taken different public stances on this

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#282

Post by CuriouslyC »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #200
swyx wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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…

We have lots of examples of generally intelligent systems, they're common and they evolve by themselves, so the idea that it might not be possible at all just seems ridiculous.

Large language models might not be capable of general intelligence by themselves, but a model network that includes a LLM as part of a generalized game playing model would certainly have the potential to get there.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#283

Post by AstralStorm »

narag wrote: post #184
skissane wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

Often when they say ethics they mean politics, their politics specifically. For me, democracy is a system where persons can vote for their interests. Different persons have different interests and that's good. You must compromise with others so everybody gets partly satisfied. Others see democracy as a way to establish truth, those are the ones talking about ethics. Even if they lose, they still believe they must win…

Partly satisfied is not ethical enough. An ethical version would end up with equitable compromises...

(I probably do not have to spell out economic implications of that.)

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#285

Post by CuriouslyC »

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.

We're generally intelligent but we can't consciously rewire our brains.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#286

Post by lr4444lr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52
jcheng wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Chief Compliance Officer or Chief Risk Officer? (Granted, not an awesome moment to be arguing that those are effective...) Or Chief Security Officer?

Excellent point actually, I think those examples made me adjust my opinion a bit. Chief Security Officer I don't really agree is analogous, because while all teams are responsible for security, there is enough "independent security work" (e.g. managing infrastructure and IT security) to warrant their own teams. But I think Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Risk Officer are pretty analogous - their main directive is…

I think you should bite the bullet on this one: those officers he describes are excellent resources for the heads of other departments with the accountability to use as a resource, but they aren't unilaterally setting policy for the entire org., nor dictating specific rules to the rank and file. A Chief Diversity Officer could be useful in a similar capacity, e.g. a CFO decides that the company's charitable contributions should better reflect modern sensibilities, or when a head of HR wants to know how to recruit a more diverse pool, or when a CMO wants to brand-target better. But the Chief Diversity Officer isn't running his own parallel competing initiatives.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#287

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

pixl97 wrote: post #106
eynsham wrote: post #53

There’s a danger of confusing the problems with actually existing AI ethics work for evidence that there’s no need to ethically evaluate AI. On any moral realist view, AI will likely be extremely important. And insofar as ethical standards are used to organise society, ethical views on the use of AI will likely be developed in the same way as they are at least very weakly developed and observed in most other fields,…

To say AI will be important is like saying 'guns' will be important or 'internal combustion engines' will be important around the time they are created. In the past these creations took some time to massively change the world, but they did so in unimaginable ways. With AI we are not going to get the benefit of time, especially if the growth rate of the intelligence of AI keeps at is recent, or even faster trajectorie…

I think you should lay off the sci-fi.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#288

Post by cwillu »

“On the other hand, everyone involved in the development of AI agrees that the technology poses potent and possibly existential risks, both known and unknown. Tech giants have taken pains to signal that they are taking those risks seriously — Microsoft alone has three different groups working on the issue, even after the elimination of the ethics and society team. But given the stakes, any cuts to teams focused on responsible work seem noteworthy.”

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#289

Post by AstralStorm »

skissane wrote: post #215
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.

I wonder - is it possible that medical research in (say) China might overtake the US (even “the West” as a whole) at some point, due to having less stringent ethical standards? Maybe not in the immediate future, but how about in 25 years from now? Or 50 even?

The ethical standards, interestingly enough, are actually relatively stringent but based on more self-control and collective feel.

Now the use of the results of that research...

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#290

Post by mordae »

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…

Hahaha, reminds me of Strategic Planning and Innovation departments I've seen at various public sector orgs.
Post reply on HN