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OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

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Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#231

Post by matheusd »

bheadmaster wrote: post #228
gwd wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are always financial incentives. A useful question to ask yourself is, "How would I know if I were wrong? What kind of evidence would convince me that a decision was not driven primarily by financial incentives?" If your "model" is equally compatible with all possible observations -- if anything that happens actually confirms the model rather than disproving it -- then it's not actually that useful as a model…

Applying your own reasoning, what evidence would convince you that every money-making industry is necessarily driven by profit?

That ("_every_ money-making industry...") seems like a too strong statement and can be proven false by finding even a single counter-example.

gwd's claim (AFAICT) is that _specifically_ OpenAI, _for this specific decision_ is not driven by profit, which is a much weaker claim. One evidence against it would be sama coming out and saying "we are disabling codex due to profit concerns". Another one would be credible inside information from a top-level exec/researcher responsible for this subproduct to come out and say that as well.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#232

Post by emptysongglass »

gwd wrote: post #197
danpalmer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those suggestions would be very in-line with the original purpose of OpenAI. A purpose they are now actively hindering in the name of profit.

I think what most of the people here are missing is how big, how paranoid, and how influential the "AI alignment" movement is. To you it looks like they're being overly careful and paranoid, perhaps as an excuse to set up a monopoly silo to extract money. But a lot of the people the OpenAI researchers work closely with -- people deep in the "AI alignment" community -- are telling them that they're being wantonly reck…

No one discusses the elephant in the room: who elected these elites to decide what was and wasn't ethical and responsible? Nobody.

So who ends up making the ethical decisions? A group of highly privileged SV types insulated from the very real problems, concerns, and perspectives of the ordinary person.

This is just more of what humans have been doing over millennia: taking power then telling everyone else it was too dangerous for them to wield.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#233

Post by walleeee »

gwd wrote: post #197
danpalmer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those suggestions would be very in-line with the original purpose of OpenAI. A purpose they are now actively hindering in the name of profit.

I think what most of the people here are missing is how big, how paranoid, and how influential the "AI alignment" movement is. To you it looks like they're being overly careful and paranoid, perhaps as an excuse to set up a monopoly silo to extract money. But a lot of the people the OpenAI researchers work closely with -- people deep in the "AI alignment" community -- are telling them that they're being wantonly reck…

Until the alignment movement begins to take seriously the idea that we already have misaligned artificial general intelligences I think they are best viewed as a convenient foil

Paperclip maximizers exist, they're made not only of code but of people

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#234

Post by ChatGTP »

avereveard wrote: post #110
danbmil99 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to get serious about competitive open source models. Can't we do a seti at home sort of thing to distribute the training?

"GPT-3 175B model required 3.14E23 flops" according to their marketing material. Seti at home was about 1PetaFlops iirc so about 3 years training, possibly less if you can generate enough attention to the project that the people with the beefy devices will partecipate. The problem is that you need to train the full model you can't train aspect of it and even with each node doing independent tiny batches the network b…

How does something of this scale impact climate change? Like when there are 5-6-7 OpenAIs, what does that look like, is this just a huge amount of energy consumption ?

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#235

Post by aleksanderhan »

ar9av wrote: post #75
sva_ wrote: post #22

Since OpenAI didn't release the parameter count of GPT-4, I've been wondering/doubting if it is really much bigger than GPT-3. The release of GPT-3.5 has shown that they've found ways of drastically cutting down compute costs (an order of magnitude) while maintaining or even improving the quality of the model's outputs. Perhaps the reason that they didn't release the specifics of GPT-4 might be in part due to them wa…

I saw this coming a long time ago and I'm still very pissed off. For three reasons: 1. We are all forced to use the damn "chat" API instead of regular completions. Can't wait to have to deal with chatgpt's conversations in order to get a few lines of code out 2. We loose the super valuable 'insert' and 'edit' modes, which were great for code 3. 3-day notice period? that's going to be a hell for people who are actuall…

Nobody are forced to anything. You don't have to use openai services if you don't want to...

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#236

Post by selfhoster11 »

mcaledonensis wrote: post #85
ar9av wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this coming a long time ago and I'm still very pissed off. For three reasons: 1. We are all forced to use the damn "chat" API instead of regular completions. Can't wait to have to deal with chatgpt's conversations in order to get a few lines of code out 2. We loose the super valuable 'insert' and 'edit' modes, which were great for code 3. 3-day notice period? that's going to be a hell for people who are actuall…

Completion API for GPT-4 will be there soon. With extra stop tokens, but better than nothing. A compromise. And it's not like what OpenAI did was an impossible magic trick. They've had a right team composition. And three insights. All present in the literature. Repeat that, you'll have GPT-4. But GPT-5. Well, that one is different game. As to being open, they are still relatively open. Consider Apple, for example. No…

Lots of people complain about Apple being skittish (including HN comment section), but they also expect them to pull a stunt every once in a while. OpenAI was an unknown quantity until now.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#237

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

nunodonato wrote: post #195
ar9av wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this coming a long time ago and I'm still very pissed off. For three reasons: 1. We are all forced to use the damn "chat" API instead of regular completions. Can't wait to have to deal with chatgpt's conversations in order to get a few lines of code out 2. We loose the super valuable 'insert' and 'edit' modes, which were great for code 3. 3-day notice period? that's going to be a hell for people who are actuall…

dude why are you copy and pasting my comments from other threads?

Did they actually plagiarize a comment you’ve made previously?

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#238

Post by selfhoster11 »

aleksanderhan wrote: post #235
ar9av wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this coming a long time ago and I'm still very pissed off. For three reasons: 1. We are all forced to use the damn "chat" API instead of regular completions. Can't wait to have to deal with chatgpt's conversations in order to get a few lines of code out 2. We loose the super valuable 'insert' and 'edit' modes, which were great for code 3. 3-day notice period? that's going to be a hell for people who are actuall…

Nobody are forced to anything. You don't have to use openai services if you don't want to...

> Nobody are forced to anything. You don't have to use a smartphone if you don't want to...

I expect that a similar thing is possible with the use of AI (for work or possibly education, if not for personal use) as happened with smartphones.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#240

Post by mshron »

walleeee wrote: post #233
gwd wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what most of the people here are missing is how big, how paranoid, and how influential the "AI alignment" movement is. To you it looks like they're being overly careful and paranoid, perhaps as an excuse to set up a monopoly silo to extract money. But a lot of the people the OpenAI researchers work closely with -- people deep in the "AI alignment" community -- are telling them that they're being wantonly reck…

Until the alignment movement begins to take seriously the idea that we already have misaligned artificial general intelligences I think they are best viewed as a convenient foil Paperclip maximizers exist, they're made not only of code but of people

Some of us do! Check out a whitepaper on that exact point:

https://ai.objectives.institute/whitepaper

It’s weird to have been working on a paper for almost a year and have it launch into this environment, but uptake has been good. My hope is that we will continue to see more nuance around different kinds of alignment risks in the near future. There’s a wide spectrum between biased statistical models and paperclip maximizing overlords, and lots bad but not existentially catastrophic things for the public to want to keep a pulse on.

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