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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

#401

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

AstralStorm wrote: post #271
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not AGI. AGI would be able to write its own code, and improve it exponentially.

Not necessarily, much like every human does not know pharmacology, genetics, robotics or other specialties that could be used for self improvement. Including social engineering and programming. What you're describing is a particular kind of superintelligence, recursively improving kind. Between that and general intelligence is another gap.

Humanity as a whole can improve itself indefinitely, there is little doubt about that. For robots, there is no distinction between a single robot and robotuity, as software can be replicated cheaply and quickly.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#402

Post by onos »

r00fus wrote: post #392
onos wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, studies find that the current variant of diversity training is making people beHave in more biased ways. So what you’re saying is true: if you want people for be less biased in their actions, avoid today’s en Vogue style of diversity training.

[cite needed]

Apologies

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210614-why-ineffectiv...

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#403

Post by turtleyacht »

darkwater wrote: post #303
baq wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would have to be reproducible: one second of a snippet of a video clip of something; the next, the thing happening. You rewind it and play again. Scrub through and try to determine a different branch. At one timestamp, separation, peace, unknowing. In the next, flames and smoke and a flashing blur.

But no--the state of the world in that second versus the next could not have been predicted. It just happened, just so, and it would take longer to calculate the determinism than to adjust to the new.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#404

Post by pc86 »

Angostura wrote: post #378
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…

Presumably you feel the same way about - say 'Chief Security Officers' who may not own a specific team. Off-the-side offers are there to make sure that issue which have been identified as organisationally important have representation at the top table.

I'm not sure why you would presume that when CSOs (and their teams, which they absolutely do have) perform a very valid, necessary technical function.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#405

Post by CatWChainsaw »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #249
rvz wrote: 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".

The criticism is that companies chase the dollar and will do whatever it takes to do so. Even when the billionaires who run these companies all talk about "existential risk". Humanity might end? But money.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#407

Post by turtleyacht »

pessimizer wrote: post #10
charcircuit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather ethics be built into the process of everyone or would you rather keep it only as a team? Just because the team is gone, it doesn't mean that ethics is thrown out of the window.

I would rather keep it as a team responsible for building it into the process of everyone. It is a strong signal of ethics being thrown out of the window.

I guess the AI dev teams wanted to budget for more AI devs, and less AI QA folks--

Oops, I mean more AI ethics folks: the people whose job is to apply brakes, the certifiers prior to production, the people with the least incentive to give urgency any cause, because--well, that may be the whole point of quality.

I'm all ears for the coaching process to improve things as the braking team versus team breakage (or breakneck), but I fear neither of us have successfully advocated a process for it.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#408

Post by turtleyacht »

ausbah wrote: post #365

concerning but not surprising that the engineering mindset of hacker news view philosophical ruminations as "getting in the way of progress" or "not providing value"

So I.1 for Engineers (real, certified ones) is to prevent stakeholder damage, but I imagine ethics are unnecessary when they can hide the "You were warned about this" in the ToS.

Think of our lives spent--exhausted even--up to this point. How many of us would turn inward, spend even more the limited fumes for a Classics reset, and crawl around in paper stacks? What venerable insight would we find to throw the strange bolt into the works? Which technical capability could we summon in our wasted nights?

We review file permissions and adding unprivileged users, celebrate the hardware hackers and realize the shortcomings of our inability to contribute, utterly ignorant of the giant strides above us, such giants as they seem to be: monied, lucky, and claimants of news and our collective attention.

If we have any foresight, I guess we can only make sure mistakes are not repeated in the future. But even that is thought unneeded, and we are back to features, features, features!

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#409

Post by mcguire »

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)..."

Sure it does; just give it a prompt about urban poverty, inner city youth, or welfare mothers.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#410

Post by CuriouslyC »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #395
CuriouslyC wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We can, this process is called "learning".

Practice and study are conscious behaviors. Learning is not.
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