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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#311

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

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.

Let's be honest here, a lot of HN users have a conflict of interest on this topic. AI entrepreneurs trying to get rich from LLMs benefit from LLMs being open source. But the downside risk from e.g. bioweapons is spread across all of society.

It's the same sort of asymmetrical cost/benefit that tobacco companies and greenhouse gas emitters face. Of course if you went to an online forum for oil companies, they'd be hopping mad if they're prevented from drilling, and dismissive of global warming risks. It's no different here.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#312

Post by SpaceNoodled »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #268
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…

Amazon had a similar team in the devices org.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#313

Post by ben_w »

fatherzine wrote: post #270
ben_w wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, I agree there's certainly a risk of that, but OpenAI did show at least some examples from their pre-release red teaming of gpt-4.

What OpenAI showed definitely doesn't convince everyone (see some recent replies to my other comments for an example), though as find the examples sufficiently convincing I am unfortunately unable to see things from the POV of those who don't and therefore can't imagine what would change the minds of doubters.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#314

Post by mattnewton »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #311
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.

Let's be honest here, a lot of HN users have a conflict of interest on this topic. AI entrepreneurs trying to get rich from LLMs benefit from LLMs being open source. But the downside risk from e.g. bioweapons is spread across all of society. It's the same sort of asymmetrical cost/benefit that tobacco companies and greenhouse gas emitters face. Of course if you went to an online forum for oil companies, they'd be hop…

It is worth calling out the motivations of most entrepreneurs here. But I think that analogy you used is very uncharitable - drilling and burning fossil fuels necessarily harms the environment, but the track record on big companies handling alignment/safety in house, rather than open source with the whole research community working on it is still very much up in the air. Sidney (bing assistant) was easy to prompt inject and ask for bad things, and the research that people have been able to do on forcing the output of llama to confirm to certain rules will likely prove invaluable in the future.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#315

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

Roark66 wrote: post #102
cubefox wrote: post #94

Earlier 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

Seriously? This is just silly. Everyone knows the barrier to terrorists using bio weapons is not specialist knowledge, but access to labs, equipment, reagents etc. It's the whole Guttenberg's printing press argument. "Whoaa hold on now, what do you mean you want knowledge to be freely available to the vulgar masses?" The only difference with LLMs is that you do not have to search for this knowledge by yourself, you g…

>Everyone knows the barrier to terrorists using bio weapons is not specialist knowledge, but access to labs, equipment, reagents etc.

An LLM could help you get that access, or help you make do without it.

>It's the whole Guttenberg's printing press argument. "Whoaa hold on now, what do you mean you want knowledge to be freely available to the vulgar masses?"

We're fortunate that intelligent, educated people typically don't choose to become terrorists and criminals.

Every generation of improved LLMs has the potential to expand the set of people who could construct bioweapons.

It's true that technology is typically good and beneficial, but beware the parable of the turkey: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hillennevins/2021/11/24/the-par...

A Thanksgiving turkey could have a wonderful life until late November when it gets slaughtered out of the blue. We can't just count on trends to continue indefinitely -- a famous example would be the 2008 financial crisis, before which people assumed that "housing prices always go up".

It's just common sense to forecast the possibility of extreme risks and think about how to mitigate them. And yes, I favor across the board restrictions on information deemed sensitive. But people publishing open source LLMs should have an obligation to show that what they're releasing will not increase the likelihood of catastrophic risks.

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/yudkowsky.p...

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#316

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

xcdzvyn wrote: post #156
cubefox wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither Wikipedia nor public libraries allow instructions to make weapons of mass destruction.

All of the information AI regurgitates is either already available online as part of its corpus (and therefore the AI plays no particular role in access to that information), or completely made up (which is likely to kill more terrorists than anyone else!) Reiterating other comments, terrorists can't make bioweapons because they lack the facilities and prerequisites, not because they're incompetent.

The "all the info is already online" argument is also an argument against LLMs in general. If you really believe that argument, you shouldn't care one way or another about LLM release. After all, the LLM doesn't tell you anything that's not on Google.

Either the LLM is useful, in which case it could be useful to a terrorist, or it's useless, in which case you won't mind if access is restricted.

Note: I'm not saying it will definitely be useful to a terrorist. I'm saying that companies have an obligation to show in advance that their open source LLM can't help a terrorist, before releasing it.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#317

Post by MaKey »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #311
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.

Let's be honest here, a lot of HN users have a conflict of interest on this topic. AI entrepreneurs trying to get rich from LLMs benefit from LLMs being open source. But the downside risk from e.g. bioweapons is spread across all of society. It's the same sort of asymmetrical cost/benefit that tobacco companies and greenhouse gas emitters face. Of course if you went to an online forum for oil companies, they'd be hop…

> But the downside risk from e.g. bioweapons is spread across all of society.

It gets old hearing about these "risks" in the context of AI. It's just an excuse used by companies to keep as much power as possible to themselves. The real risk is AI being applied in decision making where it affects humans.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#319

Post by ben_w »

tticvs wrote: post #277
ben_w wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ought to be talking about both. A friendly and helpful AI assistant that doesn't have any safety guardrails will give you detailed instructions for how to build and operate a bioweapon lab in the same style it will give you a cake recipe; and it will walk you though the process of writing code to search for dangerous nerve agents with the same apparent eagerness as when you ask for an implementation of Pong writt…

You are spreading dangerous misinformation about LLMs. They cannot reliably generalize outside of their training data ergo if they are able to give detailed enough information to bootstrap a bioweapons this information is already publicly available. Your second point boils down to "this makes fraud easier" which is true of all previous advances in communication technology, let me ask what is your opinion of EU Chat C…

LLMs that are currently public can't. Safety teams are a way to determine if an unrealeased system can or cannot.

> this information is already publicly available.

In a form most people have neither time, nor money, nor the foundational skill necessary to learn.

> let me ask what is your opinion of EU Chat Control?

I could go on for pages about the pros and cons. The TL;DR summary is approximately "both the presence and the absence of perfect secrecy (including but not limited to cryptography) are existential threats to the social, political, and economic systems we currently have; the attacker always has the advantage over the defender[0], so we need to build a world where secrecy doesn't matter, where nobody can be blackmailed, where money can't be stolen. This is going to extremely difficult to get right, especially as we have no useful reference cases to build up on".

[0] extreme example: use an array of high precision atomic clocks to measure the varying gravitational time dilation caused by the mass of your body moving around to infer what you just typed on the keyboard)

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#320

Post by esafak »

nullc wrote: post #34
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 tha…

Do you apply this reasoning with other kinds of weapons too? Because that is how pessimists are treating it: as a weapon in development.
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