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I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

gemini.google.com

121–130 of 156 posts

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#121
post #52

Its very amusing to me to compare "content moderation" applied to social media versus LLMs. The last 15 years we've seen some of the most awful and bizarre things happen on social media where motivating mantra seemed to be "move fast and break things." Now we have a company "trying" to be more responsible when they are releasing a new technology and they are having hilariously terrible results... (hilarious because u…

I think this is a reaction to the whole social media debacle. These companies have gotten burned and now they are shy about touching the stove. Also I feel like we don't have the same competitive environment of two decades ago. There are only really a few players in the AI game and they can afford to move more slowly because it's not like some small start up is going to beat them at AI because they moved quicker.

> These companies have gotten burned

Have they really though? Usually companies overreact to a lot of social media outrage that would blow over in a couple days. But their very online PR/social media employees turn everything into an emergency. Imagine infosec people making every CVE a big deal, you’d end up with a needlessly limited system - that ironically doesn’t satisfy anyone, because the infosec people will always have a new urgent CVE tomorrow.

This automatic fear based approach to doing anything, without actually balancing risks and tradeoffs, is its own ritualistic system of self-harm. Companies burning themselves on the stove.

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just have "Safe AI" switch like "Safe search" switch that turns all unnecessary danger filters off. The rule should be "what you can find in Internet search cannot be dangerous."

I would personally like to have it working that way. But I also understand that it wouldn't work for people who have the expectation that once a dangerous content is identified and removed from the internet, the models are re-trained immediately

I hope local-first models like Mistral will fix this. If you run it locally other people with their other expectations have little to say about your LLM.

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#123
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI absolutely has: here it is, doing the exact same thing as Gemini [^1] People are looking at a bad LLM, coupled to an image generator that adheres to prompts better than Dall-E 3, with an industry-best-practice for bias: image prompt injector, just like OpenAI. It is confusing to tease it all out if you're an armchair QB with opinions on AI and politics (read: literally all of us), and from people who can't sep…

It's hard to be mad at this because everyone trying to make a general purpose AI generator realized the "it only generates white people" problem and the training data is likely too far gone to fix it from the ground up. And so they (DALL-E) made a compromise to inject a diverse set of races into people's prompts and accept that it will be silly in cases where the prompt implies a race without explicitly saying it bec…

If you can't win because no matter what option you pick, equally matched groups of politically motivated people will yell at you, then the logical thing to do is to just do whatever is easiest. In this case that would be to not try to correct for bias in the training set. The fact that Google did try to correct for the bias implies that either, rather than being politically neutral, they are actually on the side of the "woke" group, or they perceive that the "woke" group is stronger than the other groups. Other evidence suggests that Google is probably on the side of the "woke" group.

10 years ago I would have loved to be hired by Google, now they repel me with their political bias and big nanny approach to tech. I wonder how many other engineers feel the same way. I do understand that for legal and PR reasons, at least some of the big nanny approach is pretty much inevitable, but it seems to me that they go way beyond the bare minimum. Would I still go to work for them if they paid me half a million a year? Probably, but I feel like I'd have to grit my teeth and constantly remind myself about the money.

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One podcast (Coder Radio) suggested that it might be due to corporate culture and people being afraid of reporting issues upward. While I do think it's culture, I think it stems from Googles advertising based business model. I believe they have attempted to make their LLM safe for advertisers and prefer to err on the side of being safe, even if the risk of being non-brand-safe is minimum.

The Economist did a piece on how Google's culture affected Gemini. HN link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39550359

Yannic gave his anecdotal experience about Google's culture: https://youtu.be/Fr6Teh_ox-8

It was eye-opening for me. I had no idea things were so bad.

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Even when those were created there were better ideas. Rust, Java, Javascript, Windows, Android, etc all are better ideas than C and UNIX.

It seems every domain and human endeavor in existence has some form of disagreement between practitioners who desire progress/advancement and people who are content to never change or learn anything new, in spite of glaringly obvious benefits. It's brave to say that no one has come up with better ideas than Unix and C because it's bound to rile up users of (your favorite platform + language here). I also think that s…

You don't get to say for/anti progress when there isn't a consensus definition of progress.

All progress is change. All change is not progress.

A programmer or someone presuming to opine on programming, who overlooks a thing like that, exposes and advertizes that their opinions in such a domain are of questionable value.

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> reading nothing but effusive praise for the cleverness and elegance of C and Unix It isnt that these are GOOD ideas, it's just that no one has come up with better ones.

What do you mean? Even when those were created there were better ideas. Rust, Java, Javascript, Windows, Android, etc all are better ideas than C and UNIX.

Unix and c far far predate all those choices.

The reality is that any tech decision can later be replaced with "something better".

Much of the debate is bugs and daffy screaming "duck season"... "rabbit season" at each other.

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#127
post #52

Its very amusing to me to compare "content moderation" applied to social media versus LLMs. The last 15 years we've seen some of the most awful and bizarre things happen on social media where motivating mantra seemed to be "move fast and break things." Now we have a company "trying" to be more responsible when they are releasing a new technology and they are having hilariously terrible results... (hilarious because u…

I think this is a reaction to the whole social media debacle. These companies have gotten burned and now they are shy about touching the stove. Also I feel like we don't have the same competitive environment of two decades ago. There are only really a few players in the AI game and they can afford to move more slowly because it's not like some small start up is going to beat them at AI because they moved quicker.

?

openai is literally a small startup that did what all the big guys were not doing, and only now after the fact they are essentially forced to put their half-baked long term works in progress out into the public because a little guy went ahead without them and moved quicker.

I don't admire openai btw. It's just that that is what happened.

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#129

This is definitely an age gate I’ll stand behind. C++ has unimaginable power to ruin the minds of our young children.

We can’t have LLMs giving footguns to our children. ;)

KYC before you’re allowed to use c++. This will facilitate making a list of all c++ users >:)

Re: I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

#130
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to be mad at this because everyone trying to make a general purpose AI generator realized the "it only generates white people" problem and the training data is likely too far gone to fix it from the ground up. And so they (DALL-E) made a compromise to inject a diverse set of races into people's prompts and accept that it will be silly in cases where the prompt implies a race without explicitly saying it bec…

If you can't win because no matter what option you pick, equally matched groups of politically motivated people will yell at you, then the logical thing to do is to just do whatever is easiest. In this case that would be to not try to correct for bias in the training set. The fact that Google did try to correct for the bias implies that either, rather than being politically neutral, they are actually on the side of t…

"faced with 100% white people for 'a smart person', my move would be damn the torpedos, ship it!"

Rolling with that, then complaining about politics in grandiose ways, shows myopia coupled to tone-deafness.

Pretty simple situation, they shouldn't have rushed a mitigation against line-levels engineering advice after that. I assume you're an engineer and have heard that one before. Rest is boring Wokes trying to couple their politics hobby to it.

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