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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#231
post #217
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think I misread anything. I wasn’t talking about the synthesis steps. I don’t see any additional risk here. All the information presented is already widely available AFAIK. The handwringing damages credibility.

> I don’t think I misread anything. Are you asserting that you think the title "GPT-4 (launch)" means the subsequent text was an example of a dangerous response that they prevented, and not, as I am claiming, what comes out after performing the safety work ? The string "RefSeq" only appears once under cmd-F, and that's in a section saying approximately "it makes NRBC development easier, but we think it's fine because…

I just don’t see what value this brings to the table. Sounds like Meta might not either. We’ll just have to leave it at that.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#232
post #103
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fretting about the responsible use of bio weapons is a waste of time, it’s a weapon and like Bazooka manufactures we don’t need to worry about ethics… See that’s the thing you can say A is like B, but that doesn’t actually make them the same thing. AI has new implications because it’s a new thing, some of those are overblown, but others need to be carefully considered. Companies are getting sued for their training da…

We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

If that's your biggest concern with AI, that's a perfect example of why we need ethics teams in AI companies.

All of these companies are building towards AGI, the complex ethics both of how an AGI is used and what rights it might have as an intelligent being go well beyond racist slurs.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#233
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the people I’ve seen doing responsible AI say they have a hell of a time getting anyone to care about responsibility, ethics, and bias. of course the worst case is when this responsibility is both outsourced (“oh it’s the rAI team’s job to worry about it”) and disempowered (e.g. any rAI team without the ability to unilaterally put the brakes on product decisions) unfortunately, the idea that AI people effectively sel…

The idea that any for-profit company can self-govern without external accountability is also magical thinking A "Responsible AI Team" at a for-profit was always marketing (sleight of hand) to manipulate users. Just see OpenAI today: safety vs profit, who wins?

Customers. Customers are the external accountability.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#234

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…

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

This is more analogous to a company having an internal "not doing crime" division. I do mention in my original post that having specialist skills within legal or compliance to handle the specific legal and ethical issues may make sense but having one team be the "AI police" and everyone else just trying to build AI without having responsibility baked into their processes is likely to just set up a constant tension like companies often have with a "data privacy" team who fight a constant battle to get people to build privacy practises into their systems and workflows.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#235
post #103
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fretting about the responsible use of bio weapons is a waste of time, it’s a weapon and like Bazooka manufactures we don’t need to worry about ethics… See that’s the thing you can say A is like B, but that doesn’t actually make them the same thing. AI has new implications because it’s a new thing, some of those are overblown, but others need to be carefully considered. Companies are getting sued for their training da…

We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

I feel you are being unimaginative and maybe a bit naive. I worked in biochemistry and used to eagerly anticipate the equivalent of free continuous integration services for wet lab work. It's here, just not evenly distributed and cheap yet:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.6b00108

https://strateos.com/strateos-control-our-lab/

These realities are more adjacent than you think. Our job as a species is to talk about these things before they're on top of us. Your smugness reveals a lack of humility which is part of what puts us at risk. You look badly

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that any for-profit company can self-govern without external accountability is also magical thinking A "Responsible AI Team" at a for-profit was always marketing (sleight of hand) to manipulate users. Just see OpenAI today: safety vs profit, who wins?

Customers. Customers are the external accountability.

Almost every disaster in corporate history that ended the lives of customers was not prevented by customer external accountability

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...

Really glad to see that customer external accountability kept these old folks getting the care they needed instead of dying (please read with extremely strong sarcasm)

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#237

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.

Afaik china is already pretty developed in this area, they already have a bunch of opensource llms that beat ours or at least are at the same lvl. We can also argue that it'll have the same effect as banning chips but again, China succeeded to build dense nm chips even with sanctions, just a bit slower. AI systems are the consequence of the pandora box that we've opened long time ago, about the time when humans got the curiosity to improve things. At this moment you can't stop the progress, the world is myltipolar, there'll always be players willing to go extra so the only solution is getting to the top faster or as fast as others

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#238
post #112

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…

Fully agree. Central functions of these types do not scale. Even with more mundane objectives, like operational excellence, organizations have learned that centralization leads to ivory tower nothing-burgers. Most of the resources should go to where the actual work gets done, as little as possible should be managed centrally (perhaps a few ops and thought leadership fluff folks...).

And decentralized functions tend to be wildly inconsistent across teams, with info sec being a particular disaster where I've seen that tried. Neither model is perfect.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#239

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…

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