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OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

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Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#281

Post by moritzwarhier »

teiferer wrote: post #250
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

> if the model requires retraining for ethics reasons. Haha, how refreshingly naive. What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from? > The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Or it's exactl…

> What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from?

From the (ethics) team obviously, because the investors just have goals and aren't a team!

Big irony marker of course. But remarkably, in human history, this line of thinking would not be unheard of. Of course, I don't think it easily adapts to companies of course, so I don't really disagree with you.

Remember that MTV show offering people like 5 grand or something to lick an elevator handway in front of a camera?

Well, if someone has a useful idea in this world, and want to build a company from it, the MTV "lick-the-stairway" offers will be the largest and first hurdle before anything else happens. People will simply offer to buy you out, and that's not limited to founders and creatives.

That's how our system works.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#282

Post by madrox »

nradov wrote: post #259
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

It's not technically possible to prove model alignment. At best you can establish a probability of alignment within certain constraints.

"Prove" is a shorthand because of course it's a stochastic process. My point is that I would expect ethics to be part of the training and eval criteria.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#284

Post by madrox »

quickthrowman wrote: post #272
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

I think AI ethicists will be pushed out entirely after (before?) the money really starts rolling in. Ethical concerns interfere with profit margins.

The ethicists who see their job as publishing papers and acting as philosophy professors, sure, but someone has to own the training and eval suite for how AI thinks about trolley problems.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#285

Post by efficax »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #279
minraws wrote: post #267

The rats are fleeing because the captain doesn't care if the ethical ship sinks... Is what my take away would be if I didn't know, that the ship sank a long time ago and we are just pretending anyone really cares. Let's be honest unless AI gains literal limbs, and the records a video of itself presenting a manifesto about world domination and then kills actual humans with its cold mechanical hands. We won't care abou…

What makes you think this is rats fleeing a sinking ship? She probably just got a better offer somewhere else

staying for less than a year usually means you don't take any equity with you, it must've been an incredible offer in that case, since those openai shares are a golden ticket right now

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#286

Post by smt88 »

pandemic_region wrote: post #268
cmiles8 wrote: post #252

Head of ethics at Meta then head of Ethics at OpenAI. Sorry, but if that doesn’t scream useless puffy PR positioning then I don’t know what does. What’s next? Head of ethics for United Healthcare?

The Trump administration could use a Head of Ethics.

There are a lot of government watchdogs, and Trump has been ignoring or dissolving them

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#287

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

Hahaha, what an insane take. No, anyone that gets in the way of the money machine is going to have to rapidly get out of the way, or get fired.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#288

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

madrox wrote: post #284
quickthrowman wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI ethicists will be pushed out entirely after (before?) the money really starts rolling in. Ethical concerns interfere with profit margins.

The ethicists who see their job as publishing papers and acting as philosophy professors, sure, but someone has to own the training and eval suite for how AI thinks about trolley problems.

Why? Are trolley problems making it hard to make money?

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#289

Post by budman1 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #136
embedding-shape wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that be probably one of the most important places to have an ethics team? I'd be much more worried if my local water treatment plant or local bar had an ethics team, and people working there probably would feel slightly more useless than Raytheon's ethics team, which I'm sure feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile.

Come on, what do you think the ethics team at Raytheon is going to say "Hmm, our elected leaders are relying heavily on dangerously inaccurate AI to choose bombing targets and our weapons hit a girl's school as a result, let's withhold weapons from our own govt till that's resolved"? Obviously not. The ethics team at Raytheon is not going to ever be allowed to overrule the leadership or more importantly the political…

I hate to break the news to you, but Raytheon doesn't do the targeting.

The idea to bomb that girls school may have came from Grok, but a card carrying, uniform wearing member of the US military agreed it was the thing to do.

Where was the US military ethics team? Hegseth dismissed them earlier in the year to help with 'lethality'.

(in all reality, the intelligence was old. the database said the building was a military target, so it was sorted and assigned. intelligence is old and leaky and full or errors). a mistake. a tragic mistake, but not a deliberate act.

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