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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#31

Post by pardoned_turkey »

kevinventullo wrote: post #18
ryanjshaw wrote: post #4

Seems like something that should exist as a specialist knowledge team within an existing compliance team i.e. guided by legal concerns primarily.

You might be surprised how often the tail wags the dog in these situations. Lawyers shrug and defer to the policy doomers because they ultimately don’t understand the tech.

I don't think it's about understanding. Lawyers are pretty smart. But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. Even if you think you're on solid legal footing, you're going to miscalculate sooner or later, or run into a hostile regulator. And then, it's on you.

Conversely, there's no real downside to being too conservative, especially if engineers and leadership are entirely deferential to you because they don't understand your field (or are too afraid to speak up.)

Although this is also somewhat true for security, privacy, and safety organizations, their remit tends to include "enabling business." A safety team that defaults to "you shouldn't be doing this" is not going to have much sway. A legal department might.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#33

Post by corethree »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #27
corethree wrote: post #6

Safety for AI is like making safe bullets or safe swords or safe shotguns. The reason why there's so much emphasis on this is liability. That's it. Otherwise there's really no point. It's the psychological aspect of blame that influences the liability. If I wanted to make a dirty bomb it's harder to blame google for it if I found the results through google, easier to blame AI for it if I found the results from an LLM…

Just for the record, people put a lot of effort into making safe bullets and shotguns. Neither is going to go bang unless you make it go bang. Definitely not pointless.

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.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#34

Post by nullc »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Because Meta is releasing their models to the public, I consider them the most ethical company doing AI at scale. Keeping AI models closed under the guise of “ethics”, is I think the most unethical stance as it makes people more dependent on the arbitrary decisions, goals, and priorities of big companies, instead being allowed to define “alignment” for themselves.

Exactly.

I can't speak about meta specifically, but from my exposure "responsible ai" are generally policy doomers with a heavy pro-control pro-limits perspective, or even worse-- psycho cultists that believe the only safe objective for AI work is the development of an electronic god to impose their own moral will on the world.

Either of those options are incompatible with actually ethical behavior, like assuring that the public has access instead of keeping it exclusive to a priesthood that hopes to weaponize the technology against the public 'for the public's own good'.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#35

Post by zooq_ai »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #31
kevinventullo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised how often the tail wags the dog in these situations. Lawyers shrug and defer to the policy doomers because they ultimately don’t understand the tech.

I don't think it's about understanding. Lawyers are pretty smart. But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. Even if you think you're on solid legal footing, you're going to miscalculate sooner or later, or run into a hostile regulator. And then, it's on you. Conversely, there's no real downside to being too conservative, especially if engineers and leadership are entirely de…

This is exactly how Elon Musk crushes competition.

His entire team including legal/hr/finance and not just engineering, has the culture of risk taking. Elon Musk is no genius, but his Material Science Engineering, risk taking and first-principle efficiency is unparalleled.

By focusing on Musk's shitty personality, his critics always gets wrong about why he can still be successful despite Musk being a douchebag

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#36

Post by DannyBee »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #31
kevinventullo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised how often the tail wags the dog in these situations. Lawyers shrug and defer to the policy doomers because they ultimately don’t understand the tech.

I don't think it's about understanding. Lawyers are pretty smart. But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. Even if you think you're on solid legal footing, you're going to miscalculate sooner or later, or run into a hostile regulator. And then, it's on you. Conversely, there's no real downside to being too conservative, especially if engineers and leadership are entirely de…

"But there's no upside to you as a corporate lawyer if you advocate for taking risks. "

This is a great trope, but as anyone who ever worked with me or plenty of others would tell you, this is both totally wrong, and most good corporate lawyers don't operate like this.

Effective corporations have legal departments who see their goal as enabling business as well, and that requires taking risks at times. because the legal world is not a particularly certain one either.

There are certainly plenty of ineffective corporate legal departments out there, but there are plenty of ineffective engineering, security, privacy, product managmenent, etc orgs out there too.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#37

Post by litthr »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #26
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Because Meta is releasing their models to the public, I consider them the most ethical company doing AI at scale. Keeping AI models closed under the guise of “ethics”, is I think the most unethical stance as it makes people more dependent on the arbitrary decisions, goals, and priorities of big companies, instead being allowed to define “alignment” for themselves.

> instead being allowed to define “alignment” for themselves. Yeah, that is the whole point - not wanting bad actors to be able to define "alignment" for themselves. Not sure how that is unethical.

Given the shitshow the current board of open Ai has managed to create out of nothing I'd not trust them with a blunt pair of scissors let alone deciding what alignment is.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#38

Post by systemvoltage »

speedylight wrote: post #10

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.

Is it just the model that needs to be open source?

I thought the big secret sauce is the sources of data that is used to train the models. Without this, the model itself is useless quite literally.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#40

Post by beanjuiceII »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #15
speedylight wrote: post #10

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.

What are you talking about use what? It's all in the open already anyway.. And someone like China even has more data to build from
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