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Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

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Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#151

Post by [deleted] »

bmc7505 wrote: post #111
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. I never actually made this connection before, but having spent far too much time listening to both camps, this observation does ring true. Another observation I had is that there is an orthogonal axis to the safety/ethics dichotomy that follows a more scholastic approach, namely neuro/symbolism. These two branches correspond, roughly, to the debate between m…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#152

Post by lame-robot-hoax »

pixl97 wrote: post #106
eynsham wrote: post #53

There’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 trajectorie…

> especially if the growth rate of the intelligence of AI keeps at is recent, or even faster trajectories.

How are you measuring intelligence? How are you defining intelligence? Formal measures of intelligence like ARC still show even SOTA LLM’s doing incredibly poorly.

As Chollet said, people are misinterpreting LLMs as looking or seeming intelligent, therefore they are, just in the same sense that they think there must be lemon in this lemon flavored candy since it tastes like lemon, when there’s no lemon at all.

This just seems like more Yudkowsky BS about how AGI is right around the corner, despite industry leaders (Ng, Chollet, etc.) saying we aren’t much, if any closer to AGI despite recent developments. There’s no indications that LLM -> AGI.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#153

Post by Eisenstein »

xyzzyz wrote: post #116
Eisenstein wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much better off when were literally traumatizing babies to see how they would react to adverse stimulus. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment

Ah yes, because there is no reasonable middle ground between forbidding experiments where a subject might get a mote in their eye, and literally sacrificing babies to Moloch. Please. You can make better argument than that.

I was responding to 'scientific ethics enforcers are ruining science'. Sorry for the lack of nuance but why should I make the effort when you didn't?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#154

Post by foobiekr »

dmix wrote: post #115

Anyone paying close attention to the output of generic "AI ethics" people (especially on Twitter) should not be surprised that companies that when push comes to shove the businesses getting actually useful AI tools that are being tested by real people for real things generating real data, are starting to question the utility of the bulk of the crowd who skirted off hypotheticals for years to build their reputations a…

This, 100%.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#155

Post by maldev »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These 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…

You're on the nose. I've been calling these types of positions a low interest rate phenomena.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#156

Post by swyx »

nradov wrote: post #126
ssalka wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI alignment people are the group who are capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to do it responsibly. AI ethics people are the group who are not capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to make sure that those who can do it responsibly or not at all.

There is no evidence that any group is capable of bringing AGI to life.

no evidence? none? Google Lambda and Bing/Sydney are not at least incrementally closer to evidence?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#157

Post by ComplexSystems »

worrycue wrote: post #74
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

I'm certainly not looking forward to this next election of GPT-3 powered social media Super PACs, that's for sure. But I wouldn't get rid of it either.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#158

Post by matusp »

anonylizard wrote: post #19
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These 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. 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…

> The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT)

RLHF was not conceived by AI Alignment people. Using RL to train generative models was a thing even ten years ago. Now they finally made it work on scale. This has nothing to do with alignment.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#159

Post by vorticalbox »

worrycue wrote: post #74
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

Do you consider "karma" farming "mass harm"?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#160

Post by baq »

nradov wrote: post #126
ssalka wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI alignment people are the group who are capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to do it responsibly. AI ethics people are the group who are not capable of bringing AGI to life, but want to make sure that those who can do it responsibly or not at all.

There is no evidence that any group is capable of bringing AGI to life.

AGI happens slowly then suddenly all at once, to paraphrase a saying. There is no other way it can happen.
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