Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#31

Post by badgersnake » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:58 AM UTC

Llamamoe wrote: post #20

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

The by far biggest harm to society of AI is the devalustion of human creative output and replacing real humans with cheap AI solutions funneling wealth to the rich. Compared to that, an open source LLM telling a curious teenager how to make gunpowder is... laughable. This entire debacle is an example of disgusting "think of the children!" doublespeak, officially about safety, but really about locking shit down under…

The biggest harm is the torrent of AI generated misinformation used to manipulate people. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to come up with a solution for that.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#32

Post by GaggiX » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:58 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

>They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all.

That's not true if you read the article.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#33

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:59 AM UTC

torginus wrote: post #24

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

I wonder how long would it take this to get fixed, if I fed some current best-seller novels into an LLM and instructed it to reword it, renaming the characters and places, and shared the result publicly for free? Although I fear the response would be that powerful AI orgs would put copyright filters in place and lobby for legalization for mandatory AI-DRM in open source AI as well.

[deleted]

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#34

Post by kolinko » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:59 AM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

There is a bigger reason why the end of open source AI might be close: as soon as training data becomes licensed, that’s it for open source AI. Poof. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I’ve mostly just been depressed about this seeming inevitability. Hopefully it won’t be the case. But how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of thousands of people are mad at openai and midjourney for doing exactly what op…

Depends on what you want to use AI for - for a smarter AI we could probably do with the open source material, but better training techniques and some innovative breakthroughs in the model.

Also, an interesting side note is that certain countries may actually want their language corpus involved in training AI - so they may have copyrights that are more AI friendly. I imagine Poland or Czech Republic wanting as much as their data to be involved in training LLMs because it gives their cultures more exposure. Even more so with African countries.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#35

Post by kolinko » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 8:03 AM UTC

torginus wrote: post #29

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

There is a bigger reason why the end of open source AI might be close: as soon as training data becomes licensed, that’s it for open source AI. Poof. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I’ve mostly just been depressed about this seeming inevitability. Hopefully it won’t be the case. But how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of thousands of people are mad at openai and midjourney for doing exactly what op…

my question is - if it's deemed illegal to train AI using proprietary data sets, what's to stop companies from using their already existing LLMs to generate training data?

The fear is that you won’t get better model from training on synthetic data from a worse model, and you will miss a lot of modern day knowledge.

Imho the first is not necessarily so, but the second will be a real hindrance. You can talk about the pandemic with LLMs because they were trained on people’s comments on the subject, but if we had training limits you wouldn’t be able to do so.

Otoh with many cases a sufficiently smart AI can just reach out to the open source material - e.g. if you want to know about modern day politics of Europe, you can read reports of commissions, and if you want info on a new framework/tech, you can just read source code or scientific papers

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#36

Post by gfodor » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 8:04 AM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

There is a bigger reason why the end of open source AI might be close: as soon as training data becomes licensed, that’s it for open source AI. Poof. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I’ve mostly just been depressed about this seeming inevitability. Hopefully it won’t be the case. But how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of thousands of people are mad at openai and midjourney for doing exactly what op…

The US maintaining its lead is a national security issue. Larry Summers is now on the board of OpenAI. The copyright holders are not going to win, or they are, the training will continue anyway, but the technology will be (for now) kept in the hands of the military and IC.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#37

Post by mirekrusin » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 8:06 AM UTC

breadbreadbread wrote: post #25

Ah yes the old "banning things=bad" argument that doesn't offer alternatives to fixing the issues with AI. Just ignore the issues with environmental impact, plagiarism, CP and other non-consensual shit in the data sets, scamming capabilities! All the groups asking for regulation here have **funding** and that means they are evil but we are good for using this tool that is massively subsidized by megacorps that have a…

Less harmful would be to ban large models from being not open.

If you ban open large models in US, you'll cripple US and make few megacorps very rich, very quickly. You'll drain talent to other (also competing) states. Truly bad actors won't be affected, if anything they'll get advantage.

People draw weird analogies equating llama2 to nuclear device etc. nonsense but the closer analogy would be to ban on semiconductors of certain efficiency for US itself.

Similar idiotic argument as for banning cryptography.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#38

Post by kolektiv » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 8:10 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

I'm not convinced the onus should be on one side to prove why something isn't an existential risk. We don't start with an assumption that something is world-ending about anything else; we generally need to see a plausibly worked-through example of how the world ends, using technology we can all broadly agree exists/will shortly exist.

If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern of human behaviour is clear: they could cause immense, species-level damage. There's really little to argue about. With AI, there still seems to be a lot of hand-waving between where we are now and "AGI". What we have now is in many ways impressive, but the onus is still on the claimant to show that it's going to turn into something much more dangerous through some known progression. At the moment there is a very big, underpants gnomes-style "?" gap before we get to AGI/profit, and if people are basing this on currently secret tech, then they're going to have to reveal it if they want people to think they're doing something other than creating a legislative moat.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#39

Post by kolinko » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 8:14 AM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #26

It’s kind of funny to me that these organizations are naming FLOP thresholds and crowning MMLU as the relevant evaluation metric. Seems that several of them have copy-pasted similar thresholds. As compute becomes cheaper, these thresholds will become cheaper and cheaper. Perhaps we will look back on them as quaint and nearsighted.

Well, FLOP make sense, kind of - you can make computing as cheap as you want, but without algorithmic improvements the FLOP count will stay the same. And algorithmic improvements will probably be discrete - happening once in a while, not continuous. There is also a mathematical limit to how efficient we can make the training - we don’t know the limit yet, but there is a point below which we won’t get.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#40

Post by echelon » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 8:15 AM UTC

badgersnake wrote: post #31

Llamamoe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The by far biggest harm to society of AI is the devalustion of human creative output and replacing real humans with cheap AI solutions funneling wealth to the rich. Compared to that, an open source LLM telling a curious teenager how to make gunpowder is... laughable. This entire debacle is an example of disgusting "think of the children!" doublespeak, officially about safety, but really about locking shit down under…

The biggest harm is the torrent of AI generated misinformation used to manipulate people. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to come up with a solution for that.

Or the torrent of great information.

How are we all leaping to the bad? The world is better than it was 20 years ago.

I'm almost certain we'll have AI assistants telling us relevant world news and information, keeping us up to tabs with everything we need to know, and completely removing distractions from life.