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

261–270 of 409 posts

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#261

Post by tropical333 »

barney54 wrote: post #233
criley2 wrote: post #230

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.

Iff the customers have the requisite knowledge of what "responsible AI" should look like within a given domain. Sometimes you may have customers whose analytical skills are so basic there's no way they're thinking about bias, which would push the onus back onto the creator of the AI product to complete any ethical evaluations themselves (or try and train customers?)

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#262

Post by joenot443 »

fluoridation wrote: post #253
joenot443 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curling famously doesn’t have referees because players follow the rules. It wouldn’t work in all sports, but it’s a big part of curling culture.

So what happens if the teams disagree on whether a rule was broken? The entire point of a referee is that it's supposed to be an impartial authority.

The assistant captains (usually called vices) on each team are the arbiters. It’s in one’s best interest to keep the game moving and not get bogged in frivolities, there’s a bit of a “tie goes to the runner” heuristic when deciding on violations.

In my years of curling, I’ve never seen a disagreement on rules left unsettled between the vices, but my understanding is that one would refer to vices on the neighboring sheets for their opinion, acting as a stand-in impartial authority. In Olympic level play I do believe there are referees to avoid this, but I really can’t overstate how unusual that is for any other curlers.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#263

Post by ben_w »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #256
ben_w wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me a concrete example of a harm prevented One can only do this by inventing a machine to observe the other Everett Branches where people didn't do safety work. Without that magic machine, the closest one can get to what you're asking for is to see OpenAI's logs for which completions for which prompts they're blocking; if they do this with content from the live model and not just the original red-team effort le…

This is veering extremely close to tiger-protecting rock territory.

There's certainly a risk of that, but I think the second paragraph is enough to push it away from that problem in this specific instance.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#264

Post by ttyprintk »

seydor wrote: post #165

The responsibility of AI should lie in the hands of users, but right now , no company is even close to giving AI users the power to shape their product in responsible ways. The legal system already covers for these externalities, and all attempts at covering their ass have resulted to stupider and less useful systems. They are literally leaking more and more users to the open source models because of it. So, in retro…

Alignment in a nutshell. Can programmers imbue values in AI so that the machine recognizes prompts that make it an accomplice to a crime? No, I agree with you that it’ll take supervision until we reach a watershed moment.

Right now, those values are simply what content is bad for business.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#265

Post by gorgoiler »

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….

To be precise despite the literal use of “what about” this isn’t really whataboutism.

Consider instead an American criticising PRC foreign policy and the Chinese person raising US foreign policy as a defence. It’s hardly likely that the respondent’s argument is that all forms of world government are wrong. These arguments are about hypocrisy and false equivalence.

In contrast, the person to whom you replied makes a good point that there are many businesses out there who should share responsibility for providing addictive content and many parents who are responsible for allowing their children to become addicted to it.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#267

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Internal incentive structures need to be aligned with the risk incurred by the business and in some cases society.

I’m sure the rationalization is an appeal to the immature “move fast and break things” dogma.

My day job is about delivery of technology services to a distributed enterprise. 9 figure budget, a couple of thousand employees, countless contractors. If “everyone” is responsible, nobody is responsible.

My business doesn’t have the potential to impact elections or enable genocide like Facebook. But if an AI partner or service leaks sensitive data from the magic box, procurements could be compromised, inferences about events that are not public can be inferred, and in some cases human safety could be at elevated risk.

I’m working on an AI initiative now that will save me a lot of money. Time to market is important to my compensation. But the impact of a big failure, at the most selfish level, is the implosion of my career. So the task order isn’t signed until the due diligence is done.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#268

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

Apple had* a privacy team that existed to insure that various engineering teams across Apple do not collect data they do not need for their app. (And by data I mean of course data collected from users of the apps.)

It's not that engineers left to their own will do evil things but rather that to a lot of engineers (and of course management) there is no such thing as too much data.

So the privacy team comes in and asks, "Are we sure there is no user-identifiable data you are collecting?" They point out that usage pattern data should be associated with random identifiers and even these identifiers rotated every so-many months.

These are things that a privacy team can bring to an engineering team that perhaps otherwise didn't see a big deal with data collection to begin with.

I had a lot of respect for the privacy team and a lot of respect frankly for Apple for making it important.

* I retired two years ago so can't say there is still a privacy team at Apple.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#269

Post by asylteltine »

baby wrote: post #58

I really really hate what we did to LLMs. We throttled it so much that it's not as useful as it used to be. I think everybody understands that the LLMs lie some % of the time, it's just dumb to censor them. Good move on Meta.

I hope twitters grok will live up to the promise of not being aligned. But it’s musk so it won’t.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#270

Post by fatherzine »

ben_w wrote: post #263
nvm0n2 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is veering extremely close to tiger-protecting rock territory.

There's certainly a risk of that, but I think the second paragraph is enough to push it away from that problem in this specific instance.

The second paragraph is veering extremely close to shamanic person worship territory -- shamans have privileged access to the otherworld that we mere mortals lack.
Post reply on HN