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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#121

Post by fatherzine »

peyton wrote: post #103
Retric wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fretting about the responsible use of bio weapons is a waste of time, it’s a weapon and like Bazooka manufactures we don’t need to worry about ethics… See that’s the thing you can say A is like B, but that doesn’t actually make them the same thing. AI has new implications because it’s a new thing, some of those are overblown, but others need to be carefully considered. Companies are getting sued for their training da…

We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

not sure it's fair to trivialize ai risks. for just one example, the pen is mightier than the sword.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#122

Post by troupo »

peyton wrote: post #103
Retric wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fretting about the responsible use of bio weapons is a waste of time, it’s a weapon and like Bazooka manufactures we don’t need to worry about ethics… See that’s the thing you can say A is like B, but that doesn’t actually make them the same thing. AI has new implications because it’s a new thing, some of those are overblown, but others need to be carefully considered. Companies are getting sued for their training da…

We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

> At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

Ah yes. Let's see:

- invasive and pervasive tracking

- social credit scores

- surveillance [1]

All done by adults, no need to worry

[1] Just one such story: https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-amer...

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#123

Post by makeitdouble »

seanhunter wrote: post #70

It never made any organizational sense for me to have a "responsible AI team" in the first place. Every team doing AI work should be responsible and should think about the ethical (and legal at a bare minimum baseline) dimension of what they are doing. Having that concentrated in a single team means that team becomes a bottleneck where they have to vet all AI work everyone else does for responsibility and/or everyone…

Isn't it the same as a legal team, another point you touch upon ?

I don't think we solved the need for a specialized team dealing with legality, feels hard to expect companies to solve it for ethics.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#124

Post by cubefox »

xvector wrote: post #117
cubefox wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a big difference when you have an expert which you can ask questions.

Terrorists already have all the information they need to build some heinous shit with ~no external guidance aside from what's already on the internet.

Engineered viruses could cause far more deaths than conventional weapons. Even more than nuclear weapons, and they are easier to manufacture.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#125

Post by JoshuaDavid »

torginus wrote: post #113
Simon_ORourke wrote: post #76

AI is a tool, and there's about as much point as having some team fretting about responsible usage as there is having similar notions in a Bazooka manufacturer. Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka) will always dictate how and where the particular tool is used. Many of these AI Ethics foundations (e.g., DAIR), just seem to advocate rent seeking behavior, scraping out a role for themselves off the backs of o…

I dislike the weapon analogy, because it implies that proliferation of AI (ergo everyone running an LLM on their PCs for code completion or for the ability to speak to a home assistant) is akin to everybody having a cache of unlicensed firearms. It has been the agenda of most FAANG corporations (with the notable exception of Apple) to turn the computers average people own into mere thin clients with all the computing…

There were in fact concerns about normal people having access to strong cryptography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#126

Post by nonrandomstring »

JanSt wrote: post #79
__loam wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly after what happened with the OpenAI board, it's kind of hard to take the AI safety people seriously. I think there are real problems with Gen AI systems including data privacy, copyright, the potential for convincing misinformation/propaganda, etc, but I'm really not convinced a text generator is an existential threat to the species. We need to take these problems seriously and some of the AI safety discussi…

"'m really not convinced a text generator is an existential threat to the species" Except it's not only a text generator. It now browses the web, runs code and calls functions.

And yet we've survived Emacs.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#127

Post by earthnail »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #47
Ericson2314 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting the results is nice but that's "shareware" not "free software" (or, for a more modern example, that is like companies submitting firmware binary blobs into mainline Linux). Free software means you have to be able to build the final binary from source. Having 10 TB of text is no problem, but having a data center of GPUs is. Until the training cost comes down there is no way to make it free software.

If I publish a massive quantity of source code — to the point that it’s very expensive to compile — it’s still open source. If the training data and model training code is available then it should be considered open, even if it’s hard to train.

I doubt you’d say that if one run of compiling the code would cost you $400M.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#128

Post by csydas »

corethree wrote: post #120
csydas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i would disagree. i thjnk the safety concerns and conversations from the companies serving AI services are misguided simply because the companies know what they want to do with it (advertising based on user data and input) but they have no idea how to accurately predict all the unexpected or undesired responses from the AIs. they know there is likely some potential revenue there but they aren’t sure how to make the A…

Right. You and I are in agreement. Read my post carefully. I stated that it's all about liability. That's the only reason why they care.

I think there are elements we agree on (liability), but I don't think it's about any real safety concern or anything beyond just "we are not sure we cannot break the law on privacy and data collection/advertising with our AI...so we are going to pretend we are trying", and this just seems like it's Meta just stopping the pretending, but naturally just my opinion which is open to change.

that's more my point, but yes, I can see that maybe I came off as too disagreeable

edit: In other words, my contention with Meta's statements and your analysis is mostly that I don't really think "safety" is Meta's concern -- the knife analogy I think isn't even necessary (the models are already neutered in this regard as I see it), I think instead it's that they likely know the models will violate many regulations and also privacy laws, and they're trying to seed the idea that they built their AI implementation responsibly and any violation is just a "hallucination".

It would be great if a reporter truly took meta to task on what they mean by safety and what specifically they are trying to protect people from; I have little hope this will happen.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#129

Post by fatherzine »

123yawaworht456 wrote: post #89
martindbp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a doomer but I honestly don't understand this argument. If releasing model as open source helps researchers determine if it's safe, what about when it's not deemed safe? Then it's already out there, on the hard drives of half of 4chan. It's much easier and cheaper to fine-tune a model, distil and quantize it and put it on a killer drone, than it is to train it from scratch. On the other hand I totally relate…

what purpose does a LLM serve on a killing drone, exactly?

a multimodal llm is a general purpose device to churn sensor inputs into a sequence of close to optimal decisions. the 'language' part is there to reduce the friction of the interface with humans, it's not an inherent limitation of the llm. not too farfetched to imagine a scenario where you point to a guy in a crowd and tell a drone to go get him, and the drone figures out a close to optimal sequence of decisions to make it so.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#130

Post by IshKebab »

123yawaworht456 wrote: post #89
martindbp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a doomer but I honestly don't understand this argument. If releasing model as open source helps researchers determine if it's safe, what about when it's not deemed safe? Then it's already out there, on the hard drives of half of 4chan. It's much easier and cheaper to fine-tune a model, distil and quantize it and put it on a killer drone, than it is to train it from scratch. On the other hand I totally relate…

what purpose does a LLM serve on a killing drone, exactly?

I think GPT-4V could probably make high level decisions about what actions to take.

Not really practical at the moment of course since you can't put 8 A100s on a drone.

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