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OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

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Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#331

Post by estearum »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #323
estearum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) exceed local productivity, or else there will be widespread vacancies and landlords will reduce their rents. Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) fall below local productivity, or else landlords will simply raise their rents. Go talk to a landlord about how they site prices. Step 1. Look up income of your target demographic Step 2. Eat 30% of their income Can you show me a place…

> Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) exceed local productivity Manipulating the real estate market via direct economic manipulation, collusion, or regulatory capture is so common that the entire concept of manipulating the market to earn higher profits is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking . It's not just that it can, it's that it does so often it's taught in Econ 101. That you don't know this implies…

No, what's happening here is you misunderstood the quoted text, silly.

The claim is not that rents are always at their optimal or most efficient level - they're not! The claim is that you cannot (at meaningful scale) charge people who earn $1,000/month in income $2,000/month in rent to live in a place. They will have to move.

Did you take any arithmetic classes?

And any case, you should stop mind-reading. You're bad at it. I'm not a Randian nor a right-winger nor a libertarian nor free-market idealist.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#332

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

madrox wrote: post #305
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Are trolley problems making it hard to make money?

Because leaving that to emergent behavior is silly. Why is the idea of training models on ethical reasoning so strange?

Because it's not going to make the investors richer, which is what most alignment work focuses on -- how do you make its output palatable enough to avoid embarrassing customers. The entire focus of the AI industry is pumping up the dollars coming into the company, and if you're not contributing to the bottom line, your neck is on the line.

You haven't explained why investors make more money by spending money on people to solve trolley problems.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#333

Post by 4L3XV33 »

madrox wrote: post #330
unknownfuture wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Your disdain is showing. That you jump immediately to criticizing AI ethicists as counting angels on pins and implying that's why they left OpenAI rather than OpenAI not being a place where AI ethics is a priority is, well, let's say generous to these AI la…

I don't really have any particular disdain for AI ethics. I think the field is changing from one of high theory to high application. People good at one are not usually good at the other, and says nothing about OpenAI's view of AI ethics as a priority...merely the people in the field and how they relate to the greater industry.

Agree with this. Discussing abstract ethics strategy is very different from planning ethics logistics.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#334

Post by dragonwriter »

madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field.

Funny thing, right around the beginning of the big AI takeoff, all the AI ethics people who visibly thought their job was something other than marketing got driven out of the big firms, and often the industry entirely, because they were in the way.

So, if too many think their job is marketing a few years later, well, there is a reason for that.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#335

Post by madrox »

NBJack wrote: post #260
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

I regret to say such a book may end up as a pamphlet. I don't see much going into it.

I find that hard to believe. Between AI doomerism and the drama at Google years ago between some researchers and Jeff Dean alone you can get at least 500 pages.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#336

Post by dragonwriter »

quickthrowman wrote: post #272
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

I think AI ethicists will be pushed out entirely after (before?) the money really starts rolling in. Ethical concerns interfere with profit margins.

They were. Like, right before the big public-use-of-AI wave.

Those left are the ones not seen as troublesome then (or those who have entered the field under them.)

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#337

Post by Avicebron »

madrox wrote: post #329
Avicebron wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 1) ethics aren't universal. It's perfectly easy to frame ethics for the outcome you want depending on your a priori assumptions. 2) it's blatantly obvious that the business "needs" will supersede any ethical concerns or the ethics will be framed in a way that aligns with the primary goal of gaining money and power.

I don't see either of those as reasons not to train on it. Training isn't zero sum. You don't need to take something out to train ethics, and whether you explicitly train it or not, models will take ethical stances. Your second point actually argues in favor of training because that is still an ethical stance. I think a lot of people confuse ethics training with "don't be evil"

When you put it like that, it's actually probably worse to train it on a subset of ethics curated by the people doing the training, aligning with their world view and interests. If the model learned ethics just from raw training it would at least be statistically in line with it's training corpus.

Manually training on "approved" ethical stances sounds a lot like censorship.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#338

Post by madrox »

4L3XV33 wrote: post #333
madrox wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really have any particular disdain for AI ethics. I think the field is changing from one of high theory to high application. People good at one are not usually good at the other, and says nothing about OpenAI's view of AI ethics as a priority...merely the people in the field and how they relate to the greater industry.

Agree with this. Discussing abstract ethics strategy is very different from planning ethics logistics.

Maybe if I put it that way there'd be less controversy in the replies

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#339

Post by throwway120385 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #124
RobotToaster wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever feel like your job is useless, remember that raytheon has an ethics team.

Wouldn't that be probably one of the most important places to have an ethics team? I'd be much more worried if my local water treatment plant or local bar had an ethics team, and people working there probably would feel slightly more useless than Raytheon's ethics team, which I'm sure feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile.

You build internal teams to outsource certain kinds of work to. So when a company has an "ethics" team what it's really saying is that everyone who works at the company is expected to behave unethically, and that team has been brought in to provide an ethical framework and to control how unethical everyone is expected to be. Try it with things like program management, product management, and so on. These groups get added when the company outgrows the "everyone does a little bit of everything" phase and the company executives no longer want everyone in the company to wear those hats.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#340

Post by madrox »

dragonwriter wrote: post #334
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Funny thing, right around the beginning of the big AI takeoff, all the AI ethics people who visibly thought their job was something other than marketing got driven out of the big firms, and often the industry entirely, because they were in the way. So, if t…

I think it interesting that Bakalar was at Meta for six years before joining OpenAI. A lot changed across the industry in those six years, and in the meantime I wouldn't be surprised if all Bakalar learned was how to play Meta politics.
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