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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#21

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.

Exactly this.

There certainly needs to be regulation about use of AI to make decisions without sufficient human supervision (which has already proven a problem with prior systems), and someone will have to make a decision about copyright eventually, but closing the models off does absolutely nothing to protect anyone.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#22

I honestly believe the best to make AI responsibly is to make it open source. That way no single entity has total control over it, and researchers can study them to better understand how they can be used nefariously as well as in a good way—doing that allows us to build defenses to minimize the risks, and reap the benefits. Meta is already doing that, but other companies and organizations should do that as well.

Great, Russia and China get the ability to use it or adapt it for any reason they want without any oversight.

There is no obvious reason they couldn't just train one themselves, or merely steal existing weights given enough time.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#23

I honestly believe the best to make AI responsibly is to make it open source. That way no single entity has total control over it, and researchers can study them to better understand how they can be used nefariously as well as in a good way—doing that allows us to build defenses to minimize the risks, and reap the benefits. Meta is already doing that, but other companies and organizations should do that as well.

Great, Russia and China get the ability to use it or adapt it for any reason they want without any oversight.

[deleted]

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like making safe nukes. One person can do a lot more damage with AI than they can with a gun.

I'm not sure if it will actually be like that. In just a few years, AI will be so widespread we'll just assume anything not from a source we trust is fake.

Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

The US (in particular) has seen a significant decline in trust (think community, as in union, as in Federalist #10 etc.) in all manner of fundamentals of democracy and 'modernity' (tech, science, etc.) in the past several decades. And, bear in mind that there are significant differences in the way people cope with these sorts of changes and the increasing instability* quite generally for many people as well as local and regional communities.

Fire departments, since the time of Ben Franklin, have mostly, to my knowledge, doused fires with "extinguishers," not "accelerants".**

* Especially economic - not in the sense of "time for 'entitlements'", ideally, in the sense of "time to reconsider if trashing the 'New Deal' starting ~ in the 70s might have been a bad idea" ... for those not already thinking that way. Nothing better (socially) than to provide people with meaningful ways of 'acquiring capital.'

** Outside of stories in books, anyway...

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#25

I honestly believe the best to make AI responsibly is to make it open source. That way no single entity has total control over it, and researchers can study them to better understand how they can be used nefariously as well as in a good way—doing that allows us to build defenses to minimize the risks, and reap the benefits. Meta is already doing that, but other companies and organizations should do that as well.

Great, Russia and China get the ability to use it or adapt it for any reason they want without any oversight.

They will get access to the good stuff anyway. The only question is whether you get access to it.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#26

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.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#27

Safety for AI is like making safe bullets or safe swords or safe shotguns. The reason why there's so much emphasis on this is liability. That's it. Otherwise there's really no point. It's the psychological aspect of blame that influences the liability. If I wanted to make a dirty bomb it's harder to blame google for it if I found the results through google, easier to blame AI for it if I found the results from an LLM…

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.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#28

I honestly believe the best to make AI responsibly is to make it open source. That way no single entity has total control over it, and researchers can study them to better understand how they can be used nefariously as well as in a good way—doing that allows us to build defenses to minimize the risks, and reap the benefits. Meta is already doing that, but other companies and organizations should do that as well.

Exactly. The biggest question is why you would trust the single authority controlling the AI to be responsible. If there are enough random variables the good and the bad sort of cancel each other out to reach a happy neutral. But if an authority goes rogue what are you gonna do?

Making it open is the only way AI fulfills a power to the people goal. Without open source and locally trainable models AI is just more power to the big-tech industry's authorities.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#30
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like making safe nukes. One person can do a lot more damage with AI than they can with a gun.

First off that's theoretical. No damage of that scale has been done by an LLM yet. Second off nobody really believes this. That's why there's no age limit for LLM usage and there is for gun usage. Would you let your 10 year old kid play with a hand gun or chatGPT? Let's be real.

I agree with your pragmatic approach. LLMs are a "high magnitude" advancement but we can't really correlate that with "severe destruction" in a physical way - maybe in a theoretical or abstract way.

Kind of reminds me of the whole "dihydrogen monoxide kills so many people per year" parody

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