141–150 of 156 posts
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Parent: "Go to your room! How many times have I told you about memory safety? Now I find gcc on your computer and you are hanging out with the GPL crowd... You are grounded!" Kid: "I AM NEVER USING RUST, I HATE MEMORY SAFETY AND I HATE YOU!" door slam
Reminds me of the old Java Zone ad: https://youtu.be/RnqAXuLZlaE?si=Yo6xYRsGWYEu2pF6
Woe is Google. How did it get this bad?
> How did it get this bad? Serious answer? It's an LLM. They don't actually understand anything, they chain words together. C and C++ are often used next to words like 'unsafe' and 'dangerous'. Not to mention that 'concept' isn't far from 'conceive' or 'conception' - something that a lot of people think is unsafe or dangerous for children to, uh, do. There's a trillion weird edge cases that need to be dealt with to a…
Woe is Google. How did it get this bad?
They used an LLM, that's how. On the surface level, Google tends to release stuff right away to get feedback, which means you get to see all the bullshit right away. OpenAI carefully manages access to their models, which increases hype, even if that isn't what they intended. Going deeper, a lot of Google's core[0] search business relies on having a healthy information ecosystem. Their search algorithms - e.g. PageRan…
Well, yes and no, I think. It is entirely plausible that nobody at Google composed a library of Nazi soldier pictures (though I imagine their data set contained some) and trained it specifically and purposely to produce historically correct results in this context.
What they did train for is that the results should be "diverse", and I am sure the model was appropriately punished (retrained, etc.) when they weren't "diverse" enough. Until the model learned, that if it follows historical data, it is bad. If it follows the required "diverse" result, it is good. The model does not know what "Nazi soldier" means and how it's different from "Forth programmer". It just knows it's very, very bad to produce non-diverse results for "Forth programmer". Really, really low value function, stay away from it. So the weights are adjusted accordingly, and of course the other group of people would be as diverse - because why not? It was specifically trained to give ideologically biased results. It gives ideologically biased results. It's being a good LLM. It's not an oversight - you can't tell the model to prefer ideological component over existing data set and not get results that prefer ideological component over existing data set. Exactly because the model doesn't understand anything, it just does what it is told. It's not an oversight, it's inevitable consequence of the training paradigm.
Of course, if they though about the specifically hilarious example of Nazi soldiers, they could tell the model "except in case where we're talking about Nazi soldiers, in this case be historical". But there's no way you can list all the cases, while keeping the bias (or, in minds of googlers, bias correction) intact. It's very hard to teach doublethink to a computer, it's not smart enough for that yet.
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>> 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.
I think this is an important distinction and actually sort of a brave one. That a technology stack can be the basis of an entire industry and still be unappealing and lacking for people that are obliged to interact with it directly/regularly.
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> How did it get this bad? Serious answer? It's an LLM. They don't actually understand anything, they chain words together. C and C++ are often used next to words like 'unsafe' and 'dangerous'. Not to mention that 'concept' isn't far from 'conceive' or 'conception' - something that a lot of people think is unsafe or dangerous for children to, uh, do. There's a trillion weird edge cases that need to be dealt with to a…
it is true that it doesn't understand anything, but it is trained to do things and to associate things. These chains are not random - they are formed by training. And whoever trained it was so obsessed with "safety" and not letting anything "unsafe" to leak through - probably at explicit command of their higher ups - that they trained the model to have this bias. It's not only their blame - in current American cultur…
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…
Communications Decency Act. They're legally responsible for what the AI says, but not what their users say.
Or, if you do indeed get offended, it is because of lacking understanding on your part. Of course a prompt can have an offensive intent, but I don't see how you can make the tool responsible. Doesn't work with knives or hammers, so the legislation might just be crap (Intent of this judgement is meant to be offensive in this case).
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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.
Tangential: At the risk of getting downvoted and flagged: Gemini (and its Gemma child) is beyond repair because fixing these models means deviating from the core hypocrite PR that Google and some other big tech are pursuing in regards to alignment and DEI. I say "hypocrite PR" because despite what they want you to believe, I don't remember the last time they actually did something good for the minorities they claim t…
Solution: Don't have racial quotas or you will get additional conflict between the two arbitrary groups.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parent: "Go to your room! How many times have I told you about memory safety? Now I find gcc on your computer and you are hanging out with the GPL crowd... You are grounded!" Kid: "I AM NEVER USING RUST, I HATE MEMORY SAFETY AND I HATE YOU!" door slam
Reminds me of the old Java Zone ad: https://youtu.be/RnqAXuLZlaE?si=Yo6xYRsGWYEu2pF6
Woe is Google. How did it get this bad?
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.