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OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

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Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#181

Post by nomel »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #53
datameta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, how useful is local LLM usage? What are your use cases, hardware, and models used?

Lots of people already have RTX 3090/4090/5090 for gaming and they can run 30b-class models at 40+ tok/sec. There is a huge field of models and finetunes of this size on huggingface. They are a little bit dumber than the big cloud models but not by much. And being able to run them 24/7 for just the price of electricity (and the privacy) is a big pull.

> they can run 30b-class models at 40+ tok/sec.

No, they can run quantized versions of those models, which are dumber than the base 30b models, which are much dumber than > 400b models (from my use).

> They are a little bit dumber than the big cloud models but not by much.

If this were true, we wouldn't see people paying the premiums for the bigger models (like Claude).

For every use case I've thrown at them, it's not a question of "a little dumber", it's the binary fact that the smaller models are incapable of doing what I need with any sort of consistency, and hallucinate at extreme rates.

What's the actual use case for these local models?

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#182

Post by krapp »

const_cast wrote: post #155
idle_zealot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas. People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpo…

I don't even think we necessarily need socialism. So far, we've been pretty good at identifying where capitalism just doesn't work and then bandaiding that area with legislation. For example, capitalism has no solution for disability. In a capitalist system, everyone must work. Those who don't work should, then, be filtered out - die. But that's obviously bad, so bandaid - SSI. We say, if you're disabled, we'll give…

You say we don't need socialism then give an example of where we need socialism.

Socialist activism is the reason we have labor rights and a minimum wage and eight hour workdays. Socialists are the reason American companies no longer field private armies to shoot striking workers dead. Socialists are the reason American schoolchildren get free lunches. Socialists died to make life in the US something more than grist for the mill for anyone who wasn't rich.

I'm going to say yes, we need socialism. And we need to admit that we need socialism. And we need to stop acting like socialism is a bad word.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#183

Post by ACCount37 »

miltonlost wrote: post #51
itqwertz wrote: post #15

I’ve had a few conversations with people who use ChatGPT as a therapist. There is real danger of using LLMs that are engineered agree with you, at least in terms of therapy.

Human therapists? Years of training, certification, can be de-licensed. AI Therapists? No rules! Do what you want! Move fast, break people! (Except in Illinois. They fortunately banned AI use in therapy)

It doesn't matter.

Even if "AI cannot legally do therapy", nothing would stop people from crying their soul out to a "Gangster Sponge Bob" persona on some "funny novelty chatbot" website.

What do you do about that?

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#184

Post by seunosewa »

idle_zealot wrote: post #100
seunosewa wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't force people to seek help. Best to help them as much as you can while trying to persuade them to seek help.

The idea is that the canned message would be an attempt at persuading them. I really don't trust an LLM prompted to persuade someone to seek therapy would yield better results.

Modern thinking models can be trusted to follow nuanced safety instructions. Models like ChatGPT-4o can't. They will make bizarrely inaccurate statements from time to time.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#185

Post by mathiaspoint »

sho_hn wrote: post #132
mathiaspoint wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either people can manage themselves or they can't and the ones that can't probably need to be institutionalized for their and everyone else's safety.

In reality it's not that binary. Plenty of people can manage themselves, except during times when they can't, and then they need help. It'd be a good start if services let you enter emergency contact info, making escalation opt-in.

That is actually absurd. If they're insane enough to think the world is conspiring against them they wouldn't surrender that way.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#186

Post by nomel »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #110
johnfn wrote: post #28

Didn't we have a conversation a few days ago where a kid committed suicide while documenting it on ChatGPT and the clear consensus was that if OpenAI had been scanning user's conversations and reporting them to the police, this could have been averted, and this was a huge issue? But now when they go and do it, everyone says this is completely unacceptable? What exactly is OpenAI supposed to do, then?

Don't release a model that's so sycophantic it provides encouraging advise to suicidal users about how and where their body should be discovered after they kill themselves. Instead, it should warn the user that their pattern of thinking indicates mental health issues and they need to search for health from a medical professional.

> need to search for health from a medical professional.

In all of the cases (that I'm aware of), these people were already diagnosed, and the family was aware of their mental illnesses. The awareness and agency you're asking for, from the mentally ill individual, would probably preclude their condition.

If someone is mentally ill, sometimes the only practical protection is to deem them unfit for access by the caregivers or the government (as we do with guns).

The alternative is to assume everyone is unfit, which has its own practical and ethical problems.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#187

Post by drakythe »

jjani wrote: post #76
idle_zealot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the for…

> What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen. SamA is not an MBA. He did CS for 2 years and dropped out to build a startup. He's YC personified, and the person most responsible for the phenomenon you're talking about. Take that for what you will.

People are what they do. Pretty sure the man has been a Salesman ever since he started seeking funding for OpenAI.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#188

Post by hnuser123456 »

nomel wrote: post #181
hnuser123456 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people already have RTX 3090/4090/5090 for gaming and they can run 30b-class models at 40+ tok/sec. There is a huge field of models and finetunes of this size on huggingface. They are a little bit dumber than the big cloud models but not by much. And being able to run them 24/7 for just the price of electricity (and the privacy) is a big pull.

> they can run 30b-class models at 40+ tok/sec. No, they can run quantized versions of those models, which are dumber than the base 30b models, which are much dumber than > 400b models (from my use). > They are a little bit dumber than the big cloud models but not by much. If this were true, we wouldn't see people paying the premiums for the bigger models (like Claude). For every use case I've thrown at them, it's no…

With quantization-aware-training techniques, q4 models are less than 1% off from bf16 models. And yes, if your use case hinges on the very latest and largest cloud-scale models, there are things they can do the local ones just can't. But having them spitting tokens 24/7 for you would have you paying off a whole enterprise-scale GPU in a few months, too.

If anyone has a gaming GPU with gobs of VRAM, I highly encourage they experiment with creating long-running local-LLM apps. We need more independent tinkering in this space.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#189

Post by thatguymike »

sho_hn wrote: post #48

What I would genuinely like to see in ChatGPT and similar services are well-implemented parental controls that allow a parent to monitor a child's conversations and get reports on them.

Good news! It's being worked on, announced in the blog post linked from that article. https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#190

Post by jononor »

Terr_ wrote: post #103
idle_zealot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the for…

> I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. Analogy: I'm not scared and surprised to hear some consumers are dangerously allergic to peanuts... However I am flabbergasted that there's multi-billion dollar industry somehow selling frickin' Peanut Immortality…

Haven't you heard? All the other foodsources are going to dissappear. Better get good at eating peanuts before it is too late!
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