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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#331

Post by bad_user »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #324
MaKey wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Concern with AI risk actually originated decades ago, way before current AI hype. Here are some of Eliezer Yudkowsky's papers from 2006/2008: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/yudkowsky.p... https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf I am concerned with AI companies keeping all the power to themselves. The recent announcement from the OpenAI board was encouraging on that front, because it makes…

You keep throwing examples of weapons of mass destruction, meant to evoke emotions.

For better or worse, nuclear weapons have been democratized. Some developing countries still don't have access, but the fact that multiple world powers have nuclear weapons is why we still haven't experienced WW3. We've enjoyed probably the longest period of peace and prosperity, and it's all due to nuclear weapons. Speaking of, Cold War era communists weren't “pursuing profits at all costs” either, which didn't stop them from conducting some of the largest democides in history.

The announcement from OpenAI should give you pause because it's being run by board members that are completely unfit to lead OpenAI. You rarely see this level of incompetence.

PS: I'm not against regulations, as I'm a European. But you're talking about concentrating power in the hands of a few big (US) companies, harming the population and the economy, while China is perfectly capable of developing their own AI, and having engaged successfully in industrial espionage. China is, for this topic, a bogeyman used for restricting the free market.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#332

Post by tticvs »

ben_w wrote: post #319
tticvs wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you not see the massive contradiction in your view that "we should build a world where secrecy doesn't matter" and "we need to make sure that LLMs keep secrets?"

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#333

Post by ganzuul »

intelVISA wrote: post #325
MicolashKyoka wrote: post #318

AI safety is just a rent seeking cult/circus, leeching on the work done by others. Good on Meta for cleaning shop.

AI safety (theatre). Doubles as a makeshift moat. To me, the greatest apocalypse scenario is not some AGI global extinction event but a corporation with an extensive data hoard replete with ample ML and GPU power being able to monopolize a useful service that cannot be matched by the public... that is the true, (and likely imo) AI nightmare we're heading towards.

Can we talk about the intelligence community now? On my papers it says they should be ready to pull the plug on Azure if GPT goes off script, but are they even aware that they are expected to act?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#334

Post by spooky_action »

riversflow wrote: post #329
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concern with AI risk actually originated decades ago, way before current AI hype. Here are some of Eliezer Yudkowsky's papers from 2006/2008: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/yudkowsky.p... https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf I am concerned with AI companies keeping all the power to themselves. The recent announcement from the OpenAI board was encouraging on that front, because it makes…

Am I the only person who has read a bunch of Elizer writings and decided he's a crank?

Right there with you. A very influential crackpot who's read a bit too much sci-fi.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#335

Post by riversflow »

cubefox wrote: post #179
xcdzvyn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Top AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton say that large language models likely have an internal world model and aren't just stochastic parrots. Which means they can do more than just repeating strings from the training distribution. Facilities are a major hurdle for nuclear weapons. For bioweapons they are much less of a problem. The main constraint is competency.

They have no way to test that model though.

> The main constraint is competency.

Oh right, anyone can be a chemist, it requires no skill, that why labs aren't a core part of the course work.

Ai researchers are really good at telling other fields their work, that they have no experience in, is easy.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#336

Post by MacsHeadroom »

cubefox wrote: post #293
wavemode wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wrong, cryptography is used to conceal the communications of people building nuclear weapons. It still should not be regulated.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#337

Post by paxys »

intelVISA wrote: post #325
MicolashKyoka wrote: post #318

AI safety is just a rent seeking cult/circus, leeching on the work done by others. Good on Meta for cleaning shop.

AI safety (theatre). Doubles as a makeshift moat. To me, the greatest apocalypse scenario is not some AGI global extinction event but a corporation with an extensive data hoard replete with ample ML and GPU power being able to monopolize a useful service that cannot be matched by the public... that is the true, (and likely imo) AI nightmare we're heading towards.

Exactly this. We don't need protection from AI, we need protection from corporations. And they sure as hell aren't going to police themselves via internal "safety teams", especially not if it starts to affect their bottom line.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#338

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

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…

I heard that reading is very dangerous. Reading allows people to for example learn how to build bio weapons. In addition, reading can spread ideas that are dangerous. Many people have died because they were influenced by what they read.

It would be much safer if reading were strictly controlled. The companies would have “reading as a service” where regular people could bring their books to have them read. The reader would ensure that the book aligns with the ethics of the company and would refuse to read any work that either does. It align with their ethics or teaches people anything dangerous (like chemistry or physics which can be used to build bombs and other weapons).

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#339

Post by creer »

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…

> At some point AI becomes [...] legal/compliance

AI safety and ethics is not "done". Just like these large companies have large teams working on algorithmic R&D, there is still work to be done in the direction of what AI safety and ethics means, looks like ot can be attached to other systems. It's not, well shouldn't be, about bullshit PR pronouncements.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#340

Post by creer »

jprete wrote: post #251
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…

Assigning ethics and safety to the AI teams in question is a little like assigning user privacy to advertising analytics teams - responsible AI is in direct conflict with their natural goals and will _never_ get any serious consideration. I heard about one specific ratchet effect directly from an AI researcher. The ethics/risk oriented people get in direct internal conflict with the charge-forward people because one…

There has been plenty of serious work done in user privacy separate from advertising analytics. For example in the direction of log and database anonymization (and how surprisingly mathematically difficult it has turned out to be.) You don't have to be cynical about ALL such efforts.
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