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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#151

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…

> Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka) will always dictate how and where the particular tool is used. Your take confuses me, because in this case the owner is Meta. So yes, they have to think about what tools they make ("should we design a bazooka") and how they'll use what they made ("what's the target and when to pull the trigger ?") They disbanded the team that was tasked with thinking about both. From…

You will notice the goal of the team wasn't to make the world a better place, it was to reduce customer support / moderation costs.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Open source models in general. Meta has for instance released DINO which is a self supervised transformer model. LLMs are also going multi modal (see LLaVA for instance). The name "LLM" has stuck but they should really be called Large Transformer Models. LeCun is working on self supervised visual world models (I-JEPA) which if successful and released could form the basis for killer drones. It's still a lot of enginee…

For a drone, an LLM derived solution is far too slow, unreliable, heavy and not fit for purpose. Developments in areas like optical flow, better small CNNs for vision, adaptive control and sensor fusion are what's needed. When neural networks are used, they are small, fast, specialized and cheap to train.

A multimodal or segmentation algorithm is not the solution for bee-level path planning, obstacle avoidance or autonomous navigation. Getting LLMs to power a robot for household tasks with low latency to action and in an energy efficient manner is challenging enough, before talking about high-speed, highly maneuverable drones.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose it depends on the relative demands of legal vs AI ethics

Well, I guess we have the answer when it comes to Meta.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think open sourcing your models isn't ethical?

Not necessarily, no. Open source models are already being used for all kinds of nefarious purposes. Any safety controls on a model are easily stripped off once its weights are public. Usually I love open source software. Most of my career has been spent writing open source code. But this is powerful and dangerous technology. I don’t believe that nuclear weapons should be open source and available to all either.

You have a technically valid viewpoint, its just utterly impractical if you carry it to its logical conclusion.

If something that can be used for good can also be used for nefarious purposes, you claim that some entity should exert a modicum of control over that thing to prevent it from being used for nefarious purposes.

Now think about all the things in peoples day to day life that can be used for good, but also can be used for nefarious purposes, and see if you would be ok with your argument being applied for those.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#155
post #94

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

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? This is just silly. Everyone knows the barrier to terrorists using bio weapons is not specialist knowledge, but access to labs, equipment, reagents etc. It's the whole Guttenberg's printing press argument. "Whoaa hold on now, what do you mean you want knowledge to be freely available to the vulgar masses?" The only difference with LLMs is that you do not have to search for this knowledge by yourself, you g…

Neither Wikipedia nor public libraries allow instructions to make weapons of mass destruction.

All of the information AI regurgitates is either already available online as part of its corpus (and therefore the AI plays no particular role in access to that information), or completely made up (which is likely to kill more terrorists than anyone else!)

Reiterating other comments, terrorists can't make bioweapons because they lack the facilities and prerequisites, not because they're incompetent.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there are rumors that the latest gen drones in ukraine use crude embedded vision ai to increase terminal accuracy. launch and iterate, this will only get more lethal.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#158
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agreem…

yes but what i’m saying is the knife analogy weakens this position imo )) if it’s bullshit (which we agree)i personally find such analogies serve to support the nullshit narrative instead of calling bs on it ). that’s all). i do agree you and i agree though penultimately

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#159
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which far larger problems? A synthetic virus could kill a large fraction of humanity.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#160

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.

> instead being allowed to define “alignment” for themselves. Yeah, that is the whole point - not wanting bad actors to be able to define "alignment" for themselves. Not sure how that is unethical.

Let's say someone figures out alignment. We develop models that when plugged into the original ones either in the training as extra stages or as a filter that runs on top. What prevents anyone from just building the same architecture and leaving any alignment parts out Practically invalidating whatever time was spent on it.
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