Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#301

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

lame-robot-hoax wrote: post #152

pixl97 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> especially if the growth rate of the intelligence of AI keeps at is recent, or even faster trajectories. How are you measuring intelligence? How are you defining intelligence? Formal measures of intelligence like ARC still show even SOTA LLM’s doing incredibly poorly. As Chollet said, people are misinterpreting LLMs as looking or seeming intelligent, therefore they are, just in the same sense that they think there…

Chollet really reminds me of someone in 1901 saying men will never fly because their is no way we can flap our wings fast enough.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#302

Post by hgsgm » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:15 PM UTC

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 Super Intelligent AGI, not merely AGI.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#303

Post by darkwater » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #160

nradov wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AGI happens slowly then suddenly all at once, to paraphrase a saying. There is no other way it can happen.

Why not? I'd be interested in hearing the reasons.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

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Post by hgsgm » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

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.

Existing AI is not AGI. Existing AI is dangerous. Existing AI is widely deployed and growing.

Existing AI is more important to worry about.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#305

Post by angstrom » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #294

pc86 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost entirely, the existence of Chief Diversity Officers - and to a lesser but still prevalent extent, this "off-to-the-side" teams you mention - are just jobs programs with an identity politics twist. CDOs exist so that the "right" people can have a high-power (even if only via public perception), well-paid C-suite role. These ethics teams exist so that a group of the "right" people can level up their resumes. Ins…

More than being created to create jobs, I suspect things like ethics teams are mainly created for PR purposes, to make the company look good -- and in fact, the "product" they are expected to produce are defenses against the company looking bad, keep the actual product teams from doing things that make the company look bad. (Whether they are given the tools to succeed at this is another question, but it's not like pe…

If it wasn’t for appearances only it would be under HR or perhaps HR would report into DEI role.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#306

Post by hgsgm » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:19 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #168

cameldrv wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

The brand is obvious- it's the author's ethics. Why shoehorn into someone else's brand? Sam Bankman-Fried claimed "Effective Altruiat" ethics. What is the value in demanding someone lie about their vrand?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

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Post by nonethewiser » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:19 PM UTC

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…

Why not create a diversity team? If diversity is a good goal and companies aren’t meeting it then why not create a diversity team to make more progress?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#308

Post by polygamous_bat » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #220

dragonwriter wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 po…

Sam Bankman-Fried is a uniquely terrible example of ideology, given St. Petersburg: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie... and https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-250 (and, y'know, being a fraudster who temporarily pulled the wool over the eyes of the regulators not just the charities he promised money to) Also: is SBF really the central example of alignment in your head, and no…

> Also: is SBF really the central example of alignment in your head, and not, say Yudkowsky? Because Yudkowsky is my central example, and he's the exact opposite on all counts.

For normal people who don't spend six hours every day on lesswrong, they were literally in the same camp up until about six months ago (when all the "rationalists" violently disclaimed SBF after being funded by him for a few good years.)

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#309

Post by bonadrag » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

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…

> It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable

The fact that you pre-emptively accept the idea that maximizing diversity to its limits is beneficial to corporations shows that people just take these things at heart because "the people in charge said so". It is not a coincidence that much of the research of the supposed benefits of diversity in businesses comes from business schools in prestigious institutions—HBR, Stanford Business School, etc. As these institutions are one of the most authoritative entities of the structures of power in the West. At some point this bubble must burst.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#310

Post by hgsgm » Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 1:23 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #195

dragonwriter wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. I don’t think that’s really true. Rather, the faction that sees alignment as a subordinate concern within ethics hates the faction that sees ethics as a subordinate concern within alignment. > The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and…

Note that if you see someone bring up Roko, it's overwhelmingly somebody arguing against alignment researchers; its use is primarily as "look at this crazy thing these people believe."

That's because the rationalist/alignment people's belief system leads to a logical conclusion that talking about Roko's Basilisk harms the person you tell, and even rationalists have a human heart interfering with their extreme ultilitarianism.