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Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
101–110 of 466 posts
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, on the one hand, yes, they need direction. On the other hand these kinds of people are by definition leaches. Their existence hinges on this thing being an issue. So I can't feel bad for them. Now, I can see them as a volunteer advisory group. That I'm for. But I loathe seeing all kinds of "industries" pop up that are essentially leaching from businesses. Most "training" kinds of curricula and outside exper…
If a warehouse worker is going to operate a forklift then they need training to do so safely. Those trainers aren't leeches. Out in the real world beyond the software industry there are serious safety risks all over.
The solution is often making it impossible for people to commit mistakes. Just like you can't "accidentally" launch an ICBM.
I admit some of these may be difficult to accomplish with training protocol, but often these firms that come in and advise on how to be "safer" are just pounding harder. You know what, making someone glaze over a checklist isn't going to make them be safer. It takes the right personality and attention to detail that some people just lack.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#103This seems like a good place to remind people of this: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
please dont link random pdfs without some discussion as to what it is. i mean you can but my guess is it lowers willingness to interact and is not goos for communication. i can differentiate your post from spam.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks. The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view…
> this has not caused mass social harm despite the tens of millions of users Isn’t it a bit early to tell? I can foresee ChatGPT being used to farm “karma” on social media sites to bot accounts to credibility on sites like Reddit - maybe even HN.
Yeah, this is like claiming lead ethyl in gas “hasn’t caused mass harm” in 1954.
There’s absolutely zero way to know that yet.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#105You either do AI and talk about AI ethics (OpenAI) or do AI ethics and talk about AI (Google).
Google absolutely does a LOT of AI. And OpenAI stopped releasing model weights and switched to SaaS specifically citing ethical and safety concerns.
They did really? Are you sure it wasn't because of the other reason many companies switch to SaaS? (money)
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#106There’s a danger of confusing the problems with actually existing AI ethics work for evidence that there’s no need to ethically evaluate AI. On any moral realist view, AI will likely be extremely important. And insofar as ethical standards are used to organise society, ethical views on the use of AI will likely be developed in the same way as they are at least very weakly developed and observed in most other fields,…
To say AI will be important is like saying 'guns' will be important or 'internal combustion engines' will be important around the time they are created. In the past these creations took some time to massively change the world, but they did so in unimaginable ways. With AI we are not going to get the benefit of time, especially if the growth rate of the intelligence of AI keeps at is recent, or even faster trajectories.
If there is any chance that we could, even unintentionally, create super intelligence the only ethical answer is to not create it at all. It would be a species ending mistake at our current level of knowledge.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#107These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
This is a rosy way to put it. The real reason is this, corporations don't give a shit about ethics. Ethics exist to appease the public, employees and the law. If ethics get in the way of profits then fuck ethics. That's the way it works.
What "AI" is at the leadership level is bullshit. It either makes money or it doesn't. The leaders are beholden to shareholders and shareholders in aggregate have the mob mentality of a psychopath with one goal: money.
Right now AI isn't really enough of a threat in terms of ethics. Nobody cares too much yet so if such a group got in the way of profits, of course that group will be executed.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#108You either do AI and talk about AI ethics (OpenAI) or do AI ethics and talk about AI (Google).
OpenAI doesn’t talk about AI ethics (it mostly talks about alignment), and the biggest thing Google ever did for AI ethics is drawing attention to the field by its efforts at actively suppressing it.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#109lol. You can’t write sci-fi as good as reality.
"AI fires AI ethics team. New AI CEO demands budget increases for compute and data gathering"
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a warehouse worker is going to operate a forklift then they need training to do so safely. Those trainers aren't leeches. Out in the real world beyond the software industry there are serious safety risks all over.
The solution is often making it impossible for people to commit mistakes. Just like you can't "accidentally" launch an ICBM. I admit some of these may be difficult to accomplish with training protocol, but often these firms that come in and advise on how to be "safer" are just pounding harder. You know what, making someone glaze over a checklist isn't going to make them be safer. It takes the right personality and at…
Please explain how your make it "impossible" to run over a co-worker with a forklift. Have you ever worked in a warehouse?
Checklists have been proven to improve safety in many environments. They aren't a panacea and some workers will inevitably ignore them, but they do help.