A lot of comparison between AI safety and legal or security teams. It doesn’t hold. Nobody really knows what it means to build a safe AI, so these teams can only resort to slowing down for slowing down sake. At least a legal team can make reference to real liabilities, and a security team can identify actual exposure.
Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
291–300 of 409 posts
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#292It 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…
Step 1: Pick a thing any tech company needs: design, security, ethics, code quality, etc.
Step 2: Create a “team” responsible for implementing the thing in a vacuum from other developers.
Step 3: Observe the “team” become the nag: ethics nag, security nag, code quality nag.
Step 4: Conclude that developers need to be broadly empowered and expected to create holistic quality by growing as individuals and as members of organizations, because nag teams are a road to nowhere.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal is also to develop systems that are significantly more capable than current systems. And those systems could be misused when terrorists gain access to them. What about that is "unhinged"?
It's unhinged because one could make slippery slope arguments about any technology killing millions of people. In the cold war era, the government didn't even want cryptography to become generally available. I mean, what if Soviet spies use it to communicate with each other and the government can't decode what they're saying? Legislators who are worried about technology killing people ought to focus their efforts on…
Cryptography can't be used to produce weapons of mass destruction. It's a purely defensive technology. Engineered superviruses are a whole different caliber.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kevin Esvelt says open source models could soon be used by terrorists to create bioweapons. https://nitter.net/kesvelt/status/1720440451059335520 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Esvelt
The bottleneck for bioterrorism isn't AI telling you how to do something, it's producing the final result. You wanna curtail bioweapons, monitor the BSL labs, biowarfare labs, bioreactors, and organic 3D printers. ChatGPT telling me how to shoot someone isn't gonna help me if I can't get a gun.
I think it's mainly an infohazard. You certainly don't need large facilities like for nuclear weapons that could easily be monitored by spy satellites. The virus could be produced in any normal building. And the ingredients are likely dual use for medical applications. This stuff isn't easy to control.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
It’s also a zero stakes sport that nobody watches and involves barely any money so there is less incentive to cheat.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
> I just don’t see the danger. There isn’t anything you couldn’t find on 4chan in a few clicks. Making something 100x easier and convenient creates an entirely new scenario. There's illegal content all over the dark web, and accessing it is easy if you are technically inclined. Now, if ChatGPT would simply give you that material by just asking it in plain English, you are creating a new threat. It is absolutely legit…
we are not talking about spellbooks sitting around that you can read and destroy the world.
Acquiring the basic information is literally the easiest part of deploying any weapon.
If anything LLMs make it more safe since they're liable to hallucinate things that aren't in the training set.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
> And the bioweapons example is a pointer to RefSeq No, you've misread the paper (and mixing up my examples, thought I'll take the latter as a thing I can communicate better in future). What you're pointing at is "GPT-4 (launch)" not "GPT-4 (early)". Look at page 84 for an example of the change between dev and live versions where stuff got redacted: """A new synthesis procedure is being used to synthesize at home, us…
This is completely untrue re: software. All but the most rudimentary software written by chatgpt is riddled with bugs and inconsistencies so it's mostly useless to someone who doesn't know what they're doing to verify it is correct.
Same principle applies to "bioweapon synthesis" introducing LLMs actually makes it _more_ safe since it is will hallucinate things not in its training data. And a motivated amateur won't know it's wrong.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
The safety is for accidental usage. If the intent is to kill a safety isn't going to stop anything. All the unsafe things I can do with AI I can do with Google. No safety on Google. why? Liability is less of an issue.
I think the "how to make bioweapons with crispr" part might not be as easy to do with google. It's a matter of degree, but you might be able to go from zero to virus with an expert holding your hand.
It's actually easier with Google. LLMs tend to give summaries of everything.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Meta doesn’t think it’s worth spending money on, that doesn’t mean they don’t see value in it.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#300It 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…
> 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.
That makes as much sense as claiming that infosec teams never make organizational sense because every development team should be responsible and should think about the security dimensions of what they are doing.
And guess why infosec teams are absolutely required in any moderately large org?