Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 409 posts

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#191

Post by ben_w »

peyton wrote: post #185
ben_w wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said it would give you instructions, not do it for you. Do you really think that's infeasible compared with everything else they're good at? Fraud being illegal is why I used it as an example. Fully automated fraud is to one-on-one fraud as the combined surveillance apparatus of the Stasi at their peak is to a lone private detective. Or what a computer virus is to a targeted hack of a single computer. Sign flip: ht…

Nobody’s taking those instructions and building out a lab successfully who doesn’t already know what they’re doing haha. What have the safety people stopped so far? That’s where I’m struggling to see the point.

> Nobody’s taking those instructions and building out a lab successfully who doesn’t already know what they’re doing haha.

Long may it remain so; but you can only be sure of that by having some people trying to red team the models you release before publishing the weights. If you don't, and the model can, you can't ever undo publication.

Getting the models good enough to do that seems extremely plausible to me, given what else they can do.

> What have the safety people stopped so far? That’s where I’m struggling to see the point.

Meta's in particular, or AI safety in general?

If the former: Meta's AI safety people get in the news so little I didn't know they had any until today, let alone what they have achieved.

If the latter: see the initial report on GPT-4 and all the stuff they could get it to do before public release. Some of the outputs were redacted from publication even in that report.

https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#192

Post by jojobas »

toomim wrote: post #184
jojobas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Police are needed for society when there's no other way to enforce rules. But inside a company, you can just fire people when they misbehave. That's why you don't need police inside your company. You only need police at the base-layer of society, where autonomous citizens interact with no other recourse between them.

The "you" that fires people that misbehave is what, HR?

It takes quite some knowledge and insight to tell whether someone in the AI team, or, better yet, the entire AI team, is up to no good.

It only makes sense for the bosses to delegate overseeing research as sensitive as that to someone with a clue. Too much sense for Facebook.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#193

Post by Sai_ »

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…

Do companies need an info sec team?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#194

Post by martindbp »

Vetch wrote: post #152
martindbp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aut…

Tesla is running these models on 4 year old hardware to control a car in real time (30 fps). You don't need a full 100B model to control a drone, and it doesn't have to be as good as a car to cause a lot of damage. Reportedly both Ukraine and Russia are putting together on the order of a thousand drones a day at this point, Tesla includes the compute to run this in every car they make already today. Hardware is also moving fast, how come people forget about Moore's law and software improvements? To me there's no question that this tech will be in tens of thousands of drones within a few years.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#195

Post by vasco »

endisneigh wrote: post #188
vasco wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta? What about Snap? What about Tinder? Youtube? Do you have a bone to pick with Meta, the whole internet, or the fact that you wish people would teach their kids how to behave and how long to spend online?

Whataboutism, really? Their statement hardly excludes those entities….

I was illustrating their problem has to be with all social media, not specifically Meta. If you believe Meta does something different from those others you can say that!

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#196

Post by logicchains »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #26
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.

> 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.

>Yeah, that is the whole point - not wanting bad actors to be able to define "alignment" for themselves.

Historically the people in power have been by far the worst actors (e.g. over a hundred million people killed by their own governments in the past century), so given them the sole right to "align" AI with their desires seems extremely unethical.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#198

Post by peyton »

ben_w wrote: post #191
peyton wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody’s taking those instructions and building out a lab successfully who doesn’t already know what they’re doing haha. What have the safety people stopped so far? That’s where I’m struggling to see the point.

> Nobody’s taking those instructions and building out a lab successfully who doesn’t already know what they’re doing haha. Long may it remain so; but you can only be sure of that by having some people trying to red team the models you release before publishing the weights. If you don't, and the model can, you can't ever undo publication. Getting the models good enough to do that seems extremely plausible to me, given…

I just don’t see the danger. There isn’t anything you couldn’t find on 4chan in a few clicks. And the bioweapons example is a pointer to RefSeq? Come on.

These efforts just don’t stand up to scrutiny. They risk appearing unserious to people outside the responsible AI world. I think there are better places to spend time.

Edit: > If you don't, and the model can, you can't ever undo publication.

We’re talking about a model trained on published information. You already can’t undo publication.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#199

Post by jmopp »

toomim wrote: post #184
jojobas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Police are needed for society when there's no other way to enforce rules. But inside a company, you can just fire people when they misbehave. That's why you don't need police inside your company. You only need police at the base-layer of society, where autonomous citizens interact with no other recourse between them.

The problem is that a company would only fire the cavalier AI researchers after the damage is done. Having an independent ethics department means that the model wouldn't make its way to production without at least being vetted by someone else. It's not perfect, but it's a ton better than self-policing.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#200

Post by unglaublich »

Subdivide8452 wrote: post #190
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…

That’s like saying a sports game doesn’t need a referee because players should follow the rules. At times you perhaps don’t follow them as close because you’re too caught up. So it’s nice to have a party that oversees it.

The current analogy is sports teams selecting their own referees.
Post reply on HN