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Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

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Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That implies that thinking is not based on some kind of biological statistical system.

Counterpoint: person hears 15 arguments. 14 say one thing, 1 says another. Person agrees with the 1 argument because it resonates with them more. I'm not saying the 14 are right and the 1 is wrong. I'm saying that the decision was not based on a statistical model.

Not so simple. Why did the argument of that one person resonate more? Likely because of some other „experience“ or data that is not necessarily expressed or codified in either of the arguments.

That experience or intuition or whatever you want to call it can itself be based on some statistical „model“.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#32
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's seriously contradicting himself there in that the algorithms he argue are AI certainly do not meet his stated standard, and it seems like he's drawing a line where he refuses to use the term about anything that might be seen as intelligent that doesn't meet his standard for intelligence, but is fine with using it for techniques where there's no chance of confusion. I think if he wasn't making an essentia…

> This is especially notable when he then goes on to point to measurable success as a metric for other AI tech - he'd have made a far better point if he argued that LLMs also need to be evaluated carefully on a case by case basis like these other systems, rather than be taken on trust. The examples he gives are technologies where you can point the AI to a problem and trust the results will work as intended. You don't…

> The examples he gives are technologies where you can point the AI to a problem and trust the results will work as intended.

No, they're technologies where AI's have been tuned and tested and validated for there domain so that we after that process know that they will work as intended sufficiently often to measurably be a net benefit, just as you yourself go on to describe. They'll still make mistakes, just like you yourself point out. But they've been tested to ensure they make few enough mistakes to be worthwhile.

> What is the equivalent for LLMs?

The equivalent for LLMs is exactly the same process. To quote myself:

> he'd have made a far better point if he argued that LLMs also need to be evaluated carefully on a case by case basis like these other systems, rather than be taken on trust.

In other words: Test them on your use case, and validate their performance on that use case. Don't assume. We wouldn't take the performance of any domain specific model on trust, and there's no more reason to take the performance of an LLM on trust for a domain we've not tested it thoroughly for, and quite possibly fine tuned it for.

The difference is that LLMs do well enough to convince some people of the idea they can skip the testing and validation step, and that point - that people are prone to give them a level of trust that they should not be given - is valid. But extending that to dismissing them as "bullshit generators" as he did is equally ridiculous.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#33

[flagged]

RMS while studying at MIT published about what's considered early/classic "AI" (for example I was very surprised and double-checked the author when I encountered a paper about Prolog backtracking / backjumping by him many years ago). I'd assume he knows the topic he is writing about very well.

Hoping to elicit one more double-take, here's someone else who wrote a paper on (implementing a genetic algorithm in) Prolog, a long time ago:

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/geneticprogramming.html

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#34
Recommend watching the video[1], there are some classic moments where the crowd can’t hear rms because of how he is holding the microphone and we get a classic stallman rant about microphones.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vUwQLsWjA-g&pp=ygUQcmljaGFyZCB...

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#35
I went to a small talk rms gave in London in around 2009. The talk was unmemorable (my fault, likely, not his) but the Q&A afterwards was remarkable:

He screamed at people for using 'open source' instead of 'free software' in their questions, raved about the Amazon "Swindle" like a 12-year-old, and talked over and down to everyone. He was often accurate in the core of what he was trying to say, but his attitude was unhinged, and discouraged most people from interacting.

The 100 or so developers all left the talk in silence, mourning the loss of the hero we had imagined him to be.

To those who say we need him for GNU outreach: we absolutely don't. ANYONE would be better for the job.

I thank him for his many incredible contributions to our world, and wish him a speedy recovery, but we don't need these talented assholes to represent our community.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#36
“It’s not really expression of anything. It’s freedom of manipulation; freedom of engineering people’s brains to be ideal victims. Maybe that’s something society needs to prohibit.”

I think governments were first in this space of “engineering people’s brains to be ideal victims” and will remain active in that long after any regulation is crafted to limit individuals and corporations from doing the same. Engagement optimization seems like a thing that can be regulated, but it’s just the same thing tv stations have been doing forever, basically marketing. I think really the problem is a different one. People need better education especially when it comes to ethics. Psychological experiments (a/b testing for example) should be governed by boards that oversee the ethics of experimenting on human subjects. Stallman identifies the problem as “popularity” but what if popularity required behaving ethically and not doing what is incontrovertibly unethical human subject research for personal greed.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#37
post #35

I went to a small talk rms gave in London in around 2009. The talk was unmemorable (my fault, likely, not his) but the Q&A afterwards was remarkable: He screamed at people for using 'open source' instead of 'free software' in their questions, raved about the Amazon "Swindle" like a 12-year-old, and talked over and down to everyone. He was often accurate in the core of what he was trying to say, but his attitude was u…

[dead]

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#38
post #35

I went to a small talk rms gave in London in around 2009. The talk was unmemorable (my fault, likely, not his) but the Q&A afterwards was remarkable: He screamed at people for using 'open source' instead of 'free software' in their questions, raved about the Amazon "Swindle" like a 12-year-old, and talked over and down to everyone. He was often accurate in the core of what he was trying to say, but his attitude was u…

I read the infamous article that tried to cancel Stallman and agreed with most of it. She was wrong at the end when she tried to destroy his legacy and image.

Stallman has done a lot, but he's doing more harm than good nowadays. It's mature to know when to step down and give the next generation space to grow.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#39
post #10
post #4

> “As I see it, ‘intelligence’ needs something like the ability to know or understand some area,” he said. “If something can’t actually understand things we shouldn’t say it’s intelligent, not even a little intelligent, but people are using the term artificial intelligence for bullshit generators.” I wouldn't go as far in blaming AI. It is certainly error prone and has very short autonomy. It's not better than subjec…

His thinking here leans on assuming that there's a qualitative difference between LLM's "understanding" and our "understanding" that justifies using the term for us, but not for LLMs. Maybe there is, but their reasoning ability is sufficient that I don't think is at all a given, and at a minimum an assertion that should make you ask someone how they define "understanding", because defining that in a way that is focus…

> assuming that there's a qualitative difference between LLM's "understanding" and our "understanding" that justifies using the term for us, but not for LLMs

If there is no qualitative difference, then human brains are no more than machines that predict the next word at each step. This could be the case, but instinctively I feel that it's not. You're right that it's very tricky - there's some interesting approaches, such as defining classes of problems or riddles that humans find doable but LLMs do not. The below is potentially a good candidate. Ultimately, I think a decisive test will be to see whether LLMs can take on great unsolved mathematical conjectures.

------------------------------

User

There are exactly three people in a room: Andrew, Bob, and Chris. Each of them is engaged in an activity. Andrew is reading a book by himself. Bob is playing table-tennis with someone else. What is Chris doing

ChatGPT

Given the information provided:

    Andrew is reading a book by himself.
    Bob is playing table-tennis with someone else.
We can infer that Chris must be doing something as well, but the information given does not specify what Chris is doing. Therefore, we cannot determine Chris's activity based solely on the information provided.

Re: Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

#40
post #38
post #35

I went to a small talk rms gave in London in around 2009. The talk was unmemorable (my fault, likely, not his) but the Q&A afterwards was remarkable: He screamed at people for using 'open source' instead of 'free software' in their questions, raved about the Amazon "Swindle" like a 12-year-old, and talked over and down to everyone. He was often accurate in the core of what he was trying to say, but his attitude was u…

I read the infamous article that tried to cancel Stallman and agreed with most of it. She was wrong at the end when she tried to destroy his legacy and image. Stallman has done a lot, but he's doing more harm than good nowadays. It's mature to know when to step down and give the next generation space to grow.

I read just today that there's no such thing as 'cancel culture', what it is, is 'consequence culture': The observation that it's becoming less accepted that we must protect the rich/famous/powerful just because they're rich/famous/powerful.
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