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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#141

Post by matkoniecz »

cubefox wrote: post #94
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Because Meta is releasing their models to the public, I consider them the most ethical company doing AI at scale. Keeping AI models closed under the guise of “ethics”, is I think the most unethical stance as it makes people more dependent on the arbitrary decisions, goals, and priorities of big companies, instead being allowed to define “alignment” for themselves.

Kevin Esvelt says open source models could soon be used by terrorists to create bioweapons. https://nitter.net/kesvelt/status/1720440451059335520 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Esvelt

> Would sharing future model weights give everyone an amoral biotech-expert tutor? > Yes.

claim seems dubious to me

Is he explaining somewhere why it is worse than virology scientists publishing research?

Or is he proposing to ban virology as a field?

Also, if AI can actually synthesize knowledge at expert level - then we have far larger problems than this anyway.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#142

Post by bigfudge »

corethree wrote: post #33
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for the record, people put a lot of effort into making safe bullets and shotguns. Neither is going to go bang unless you make it go bang. Definitely not pointless.

The safety is for accidental usage. If the intent is to kill a safety isn't going to stop anything. All the unsafe things I can do with AI I can do with Google. No safety on Google. why? Liability is less of an issue.

I think the "how to make bioweapons with crispr" part might not be as easy to do with google. It's a matter of degree, but you might be able to go from zero to virus with an expert holding your hand.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#143

Post by fatherzine »

peyton wrote: post #138
fatherzine wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m not trivializing risks. I’m characterizing output. These systems aren’t theoretical anymore. They’re used by hundreds of millions of people daily in one form or another. What are these teams accomplishing? Give me a concrete example of a harm prevented. “Pen is mightier than the sword” is an aphorism.

oh, these teams are useless bureaucratic busybodies that only mask the real issue: ai is explosively powerful, and nobody has the slightest clue on how to steward that power and avoid the pain ai will unfortunately unleash.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#144

Post by corethree »

csydas wrote: post #128
corethree wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

>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.

Read more carefully. I literally said Meta does not give a shit. We are in agreement on this.

The difference between us, is I don't give a shit either. I agree with metas hidden stance on this.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#145

Post by TeMPOraL »

makeitdouble wrote: post #123
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.

We haven't formalized ethics to the point of it being a multiplayer puzzle game for adults.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#146

Post by mcny »

timkam wrote: post #112
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…

Fully agree. Central functions of these types do not scale. Even with more mundane objectives, like operational excellence, organizations have learned that centralization leads to ivory tower nothing-burgers. Most of the resources should go to where the actual work gets done, as little as possible should be managed centrally (perhaps a few ops and thought leadership fluff folks...).

It works for things you can automate. For example, at Microsoft they have some kind of dependency bot such as when you have newtonsoft installed but have version But I don't know if things are straight forward with machine learning. If the recommendations are blanket, And there is a way to automate checks, It could work. Main thing is there should be trust between teams. This can't be an adversarial power play.

https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-5crp-9r3c-p9vr

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#147

Post by peyton »

cubefox wrote: post #94
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Because Meta is releasing their models to the public, I consider them the most ethical company doing AI at scale. Keeping AI models closed under the guise of “ethics”, is I think the most unethical stance as it makes people more dependent on the arbitrary decisions, goals, and priorities of big companies, instead being allowed to define “alignment” for themselves.

Kevin Esvelt says open source models could soon be used by terrorists to create bioweapons. https://nitter.net/kesvelt/status/1720440451059335520 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Esvelt

That thread is simply unhinged. There is no terrorist with a wet lab who outright refuses to read papers and instead relies on a chatbot to work with dangerous agents.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#148

Post by ralusek »

There is no putting the cat back in the bag. The only defense against AI at this point is more powerful AI, and we just have to hope that:

1.) there is an equilibrium that can be reached

2.) the journey to and stabilizing at said equilibrium is compatible with human life

I have a feeling that the swings of AI stabilizing among adversarial agents is going to happen at a scale of destruction that is very taxing on our civilizations.

Think of it this way, every time there's a murder suicide or a mass shooting type thing, I basically write that off as "this individual is doing as much damage as they possibly could, with whatever they could reasonably get their hands on to do so." When you start getting some of these agents unlocked and accessible to these people, eventually you're going to start having people with no regard for the consequences requesting that their agents do things like try to knock out transformer stations and parts of the power grid; things of this nature. And the amount of mission critical things on unsecured networks, or using outdated cryptography, etc, all basically sitting there waiting, is staggering.

For a human to even be able to probe this space means that they have to be pretty competent and are probably less nihilistic, detached, and destructive than your typical shooter type. Meanwhile, you get a reasonable agent in the hands of a shooter type, and they can be any midwit looking to wreak havoc on their way out.

So I suspect we'll have a few of these incidents, and then the white hat adversarial AIs will come online in earnest, and they'll begin probing, themselves, and alerting to us to major vulnerabilities and maybe even fixing them. As I said, eventually this behavior will stabilize, but that doesn't mean that the blows dealt in this adversarial relationship don't carry the cost of thousands of human lives.

And this is all within the subset of cases that are going to be "AI with nefarious motivations as directed by user(s)." This isn't even touching on scenarios in which an AI might be self motivated against our interests

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#149

Post by jojobas »

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…

In other news, police is not needed because everyone should just behave.
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