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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

#371
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it sounds like you would struggle to define communism if pressed Having read the Communist Manifesto, I think that description of me is both totally fair and would also apply to Karl Marx. Darn thing read like an unhinged run-on blog rant.

> basically every American literally voted for that by repeatedly saying no to *the alternative* (the communist party) in every American election. I had a good laugh playing with this ridiculous framing, thinking about all of the candidates we've said no to. * "Get out of here Donald Trump! We don't want communism, we want the alternative; Joe Biden!" * "Hit the bricks secret pamphlet-loving marxists John McCain and…

I think you misunderstand; when I said communists, that wasn't a spicy republican hot take about the democrats or whatever, it was literally the communists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA for example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party,... or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Alternative_(United_...

I think it's really obvious that Americans don't want those things, so one way to rephrase my original comment could be "the rejection of communism is why rich people get to own and control businesses".

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/11xbe9o/comment/jd2...

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I searched and didn’t find any identical prior comment

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/11xbe9o/comment/jd2...

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

The estimate I've found say GPT-3 released an estimated 552 tons of CO2, and so about two large lorries being driven for a year, wouldn't lose my sleep over it

Yup, let's just keep saying that I guess?

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

#375
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> basically every American literally voted for that by repeatedly saying no to *the alternative* (the communist party) in every American election. I had a good laugh playing with this ridiculous framing, thinking about all of the candidates we've said no to. * "Get out of here Donald Trump! We don't want communism, we want the alternative; Joe Biden!" * "Hit the bricks secret pamphlet-loving marxists John McCain and…

I think you misunderstand; when I said communists, that wasn't a spicy republican hot take about the democrats or whatever, it was literally the communists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA for example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party,... or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Alternative_(United_... I think it's really obvious that Americans don't want those t…

You misunderstand. Saying

> "the rejection of communism is why rich people get to own and control businesses".

is as wrong as saying "the rejection of [pastafarianism | soccer/futbol | anarchocapitalism | mandatory left-handedness | manual transmission cars | etc] is why rich people get to own and control businesses".

Communism and the communist party have never been part of the question. The closest "Communism" came to being part of the political landscape was when a power-hungry alcoholic grifter named Joseph McCarthy won a Senate seat in Wisconsin and then started a paranoid campaign of lobbing unsubstantiated accusations of secret communistic allegiance at academics, civil servants, members of the media, and of anyone he wanted. It whipped up a frenzy of anti-communist protestation, but not because people knew anything about communism, rather people rejected being called "communist" not because they knew anything about the economic theory of communism, but because McCarthyism made that term a career-killer. McCarthy starting attacking leadership of the US military, alleging that they were infested with communists, and organized hearings in the Senate that were essentially modern day witch burnings. From 1946 to 1954, McCarthy whipped up a massive panic while smearing the symbolic label "communism" with so much shit that essentially no one can think clearly about the ideas behind that system of social organization. In 1954, other Senators countered with a campaign to censure McCarthy for his invalid and unwarranted abuse of US Military Generals, culminating in a vote to condemn McCarthy (67 votes to condemn, 22 against condemning). After this humiliation, McCarthy wasn't decent enough to resign his seat and leave voluntarily, but fortunately he died of cirrhosis of the liver about 2 years later at the age of 48.

In short, the claim that "the rejection of communism", something no one here spends any time thinking about, "is why rich people get to own and control businesses" is ridiculous and evidence of a broken thought process. I refer you to my prior advice about dealing about slowing down and recognizing when you've built your beliefs on logical fallacies.

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

#376
post #197

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…

Which is absolutely ridiculous. The supposed dangers are science fiction. This is glorified autocomplete. It has no ability to do anything whatsoever without a human controlling it. It has no alignment because it has no mind. Duh. Even if the risks were real, the measures they took to prevent these alleged dangers are laughable. I discovered "jailbreaks" within an hour of sitting down with ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, they have taken no measures to prevent the real abuses of this tool. It will plagiarize C+ papers all day long. It will write a million articles of blogspam. It has, as far as I can tell, only illegitimate uses, and they have released it to the public with much fanfare and a slick web interface.

It's like they released a key that will open any lock, but brag about their commitment to safety because the thing won't interfere with a hyperspace matrix.

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

#377
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…

> Since OpenAI didn't release the parameter count of GPT-4 That makes me ask what the open in OpenAI stands for?

[dead]

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

#378
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most of those individuals have absolutely nothing commercial to gain from stopping AI research. There are always financial incentives. Like it or not, there's a lot of money on the line in the "AI" industry; if someone wants that industry to go a certain way, they definitely have something to gain or lose financially. In particular, it's obvious to anyone who's been paying attention that the west halting/ceding AI r…

> 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…

>What kind of evidence would convince me that a decision was not driven primarily by financial incentives?"

For one, the decision couldn't be made by a for-profit company required by law to be driven primarily by financial incentives.

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

#379
post #367
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory was that they were worried about GPT-2 if society weren't ready for it . So they've been trying to make people aware of what its capabilities are. I think ChatGPT really did an amazing job of that, as I said. Now everyone knows that computers can write low-quality drivel for pennies a paragraph, and as a society we're starting to adjust to that reality.

Just to be clear you think OpenAI achieved this by holding off releasing it for a short period? And this achieved mainstream penetration? Or among programmers? IMO stuff like deep fakes didn't become real until people started seeing it IRL. They weren't reading FUDy posts on HN or academic papers. Even the niche tech posts on NYT rarely get more than a few hundred thousand people reading them.

I have no idea what would have happened if they'd just dumped GPT-2, weights and all, into the world when it first came out; or even if they'd just gone straight to a paid API. They didn't know either. I think given that nobody knew, their strategy of "try to warn the technorati, give access slowly and make sure nothing bad happens, then make a widely-accessible interface" seems like a reasonably cautious approach.

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

#380
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand; when I said communists, that wasn't a spicy republican hot take about the democrats or whatever, it was literally the communists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA for example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party,... or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Alternative_(United_... I think it's really obvious that Americans don't want those t…

You misunderstand. Saying > "the rejection of communism is why rich people get to own and control businesses". is as wrong as saying "the rejection of [pastafarianism | soccer/futbol | anarchocapitalism | mandatory left-handedness | manual transmission cars | etc] is why rich people get to own and control businesses". Communism and the communist party have never been part of the question. The closest "Communism" came…

You're arguing against an imaginary totem instead of what I actually wrote.

> Communism and the communist party have never been part of the question

De facto/de jure. Nobody wants it (de facto), I've demonstrated by linking to the actual parties that de jure it's totally been an option.

Those parties I linked, you could have voted for, but y'all didn't.

Given I've explicitly said I'm not talking about dem/rep culture war nonsense, your over-detailed rant about McCarthy (who, you may be surprised to learn, was sufficiently relevant to your politics that his actions are well known on the other side of the Atlantic and his name is likewise used as a derogatory term) was a waste of your own time.

I am specifically and literally referring the idea of private ownership of the means of production, which is in the actual literal Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei as written by Karl Marx in 1848.

Which I have in fact read.

Section 2, English translation, has the following passage:

""" The proletariat will use its political supremacy, to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. """ - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_the_Communist_Pa...

That, right there, is why not having Communism in the USA means that rich people get to keep their stuff out of public hands.

Now, do you know some other political ideology besides communism that wants to remove control of factories from their owners? Because that would be an additional option beyond the dozen or so communist parties of the USA coming 7th-25th in a two-horse race, and the complaint being made against OpenAI is that it's not letting users do whatever with the tools that OpenAI made and own.

So far as I am aware, none of

> the rejection of [pastafarianism | soccer/futbol | anarchocapitalism | mandatory left-handedness | manual transmission cars | etc]

Have any causal connection to

> why rich people get to own and control businesses

(Maybe anarchocapitalism?) But that's the specific point of communism.

Which you as a nation reject, even though they're a thing you're not, AFAIK, banned from voting for.

I mean, reading what you've written, you and I definitely agree 100% that communists are not politically viable in the USA. I'm just saying that the logical consequences of their non-viability includes "rich people can own and control businesses".

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