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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

#411

Post by dweinus »

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…

> It seems increasingly that the concerns from the ethics branch have not come to pass at all.

Nonsense, there are countless ethical and alignment harms in the wild, and have been for many years. For example:

- midjourney ripping off artists = ethical harm

- google search telling people to throw batteries in the ocean = alignment harm

- Buzzfeed slashing staff and replacing them with chatgpt = ethical harm

- google photos labelling african americans as "gorilla" = alignment harm

- deep fakes = ethical harm

- COMPAS parole recommender biased against minorities = alignment and ethical harm

- Amazon resume screening model biased against women and minorities = alignment and ethical harm

...I could do this all day, but the point I'm trying to make is that AI ethics and AI alignment are both valid and important concerns. Hoping that companies will take care of them without regulation is folly.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#412

Post by dsign »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #354
dsign wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> you can't stop progress Yes we can, it's actually very easy. Just throw in some regulation. Not convinced by USA and the EU? Then look at the Arabic countries, where women must wear head scarfs. Or to North Korea and Cuba, where they essentially legislated that time should go backwards, and time does go backwards. Smart regulation that forbids the things we don't want and promote the things we want is the holy gra…

I wouldn’t say that’s even remotely feasible. Sure, regulation would help here but your examples are of regulations that have existed for absurdly long periods of time and would not be able to be implemented in todays society from scratch. It’s nearly impossible to take something away . People get accustomed to a certain way of doing it and disruption just means political upheaval when we’re talking about something b…

> People get accustomed to a certain way of doing it and disruption just means political upheaval

I think you have your own answer :-) .

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#413

Post by mcguire »

matusp wrote: post #158
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

> The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) RLHF was not conceived by AI Alignment people. Using RL to train generative models was a thing even ten years ago. Now they finally made it work on scale. This has nothing to do with alignment.

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback does come from a version of the alignment problem: it's intended to prevent the horrible corporate and research PR problems caused by Tay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)), for example.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#414

Post by mcguire »

ssalka wrote: post #89
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

AI alignment people are the group who are capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to do it responsibly. AI ethics people are the group who are not capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to make sure that those who can do it responsibly or not at all.

AI alignment people are dedicated to fending off the gigantic PR disasters like Tay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)) in order to keep their funding.

Whether either is capable of "bringing AGI to life" remains to be seen, but seems very doubtful.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#415

Post by mcguire »

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.

Singularity-related religious beliefs.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#416

Post by mcguire »

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.

None of the existing models of what we call 'general intelligence' are capable of improving themselves exponentially.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#417

Post by grantcas »

hutzlibu wrote: post #185
adamisom wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah man, it’s just math! Whereas we have souls … or something.

We have consciousness. It is going to be hard to proof, that AI's can have that, too. I mean, there were screenshots were the AI said it has it - qnd there will be more, but having something, is something different, from statistically inserting fitting strings.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#418

Post by [deleted] »

hot_gril wrote: post #391
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep. ChatGPT told us what a politically-correct robot would say. Currently we have the ability to ask endless complex questions to pick it apart, but I'll bet they limit that soon. It's far more obvious than before what biases the American corporations want to present; I remember when people used to test the Google search results without getting much out of it. I don't think that the most successful average-user-faci…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#419

Post by baq »

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.

1) progress doesn't happen linearly, it's very coarse stepwise function (remember alphago?) 2) acceptance of an AGI actually being created is also a non-linear function - look at current definitely-not-AGI LLMs: some people think it's close, some people say that absolutely not, these are big matrices of numbers regurgitating words in plausible combinations and that's all - and these people won't change their minds easily one way or the other, thus declaring delivering of AGI will be very controversial even if we could agree on the definition.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#420

Post by leshow »

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…

Perhaps, but the alternative to a CDO is just no CDO, right? Even if the CDO has marginal effectiveness, it seems better than not having one at all. Similarly, an ethics team over no ethics team seems preferable. A single individual on a team would easily be outnumber or ostracized, I'm not sure how that situation would produce better outcomes.

I'd love to know what 'ethical AI' looks like when we exist in a system where the AI is going to replace human workers to the benefit of the employer class.

I have nothing against the technology, but it's a productivity tool that will only benefit a certain set of people.

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