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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#361

Post by _djo_ »

bad_user wrote: post #331
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…

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…

Nuclear weapons have absolutely not been democratised, and still stand as a technology that has largely been restricted and not proliferated. Only 9 countries in the 190 or so out there currently nuclear weapons, and 3 countries (South Africa, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan) decided that maintaining stockpiles was more trouble than it was worth.

Huge effort has been made to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of non-state actors over the decades, especially after the fall of the USSR.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#362

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

riversflow wrote: post #349
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's a crank, it should be easy to explain specifically why he's wrong. I don't agree with Eliezer on everything, and I often find him obnoxious personally, but being obnoxious isn't the same as being wrong. In general I think it's worth listening to people you disagree with and picking out the good parts of what they have to say. In any case, the broader point is that there are a lot of people concerned with AI r…

> If he's a crank, it should be easy to explain specifically why he's wrong. Sure. The premise that a super intelligent AI can create runaway intelligence on its own is completely insane. How can it iterate? How does it test? Humans run off consensus. We make predictions and test them against physical reality, then have others test them. Information has to be gathered and verified, it's the only rational way to build…

It sounds like you disagree with Eliezer about how AI technology is likely to develop. That's fine, but that doesn't show that he's a crank. I was hoping for something like a really basic factual error.

People throughout history have made bold predictions. Sometimes they come true, sometimes they don't. Usually we forget how bold the prediction was at the time -- due to hindsight bias it doesn't seem so bold anymore.

Making bold predictions does not automatically make someone a crank.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#363

Post by __loam »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #75
__loam wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly after what happened with the OpenAI board, it's kind of hard to take the AI safety people seriously. I think there are real problems with Gen AI systems including data privacy, copyright, the potential for convincing misinformation/propaganda, etc, but I'm really not convinced a text generator is an existential threat to the species. We need to take these problems seriously and some of the AI safety discussi…

You’re thinking short term, applying safety to todays LLMs. No one is claiming todays tech poses and existential threat. Others are looking at the trajectory and thinking about the future, where safety does start to become important.

In terms of trajectory, I'm not really convinced we can do much better than we are now. Moore's law is ending in the next decade as we hit fundamental physical limitations in how many transistors we can pack on a chip. The growth in computational power is going to slow down considerably at a time when ai companies are struggling to get more gpu compute to train new models and run inference. OpenAI themselves supposedly stopped sign ups because they're running out of computational resources, to the point that it's impacting research. I don't see us getting much better than GPT-4 on Von Neumann machines without expelling ludicrous amounts of capital or a see change in how we fundamentally do computation. It's hard to get around the fact that LLMs are already extremely expensive to run.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#364

Post by ben_w »

riversflow wrote: post #351
ben_w wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean a complete hypothetical outside of scifi? 18 months ago, so was having an AI make even so much as a toy website by drawing a sketch on a sheet of paper, taking a photo, captioning it "make me a website that looks like this", and pressing the "go" button. > Our planet is actually, not hypothetically, becoming uninhabitable due to pollutiom. I am so tired of ML people thinking they are god and have created s…

> 18 months ago, so was having an AI make Nah, I've been waiting for this since Adobe released Content Aware Fill over a decade ago. > No, the planet is not becoming uninhabitable We are destroying the biosphere quickly. Have you seen a reef lately? Globally we still rely on our biosphere for food. We haven't solved this problem. If we can't feed everyone it's not inhabitable. > lots of people out there get benefits…

> Nah, I've been waiting for this since Adobe released Content Aware Fill over a decade ago.

If you were expecting Photoshop, an image manipulator, to produce a website, which is a mixture of HTML (text) and images, on the basis of a combination of a prompt and an example image… then you were more disconnected from the state of AI research at that time than you're accusing me of being now.

> We are destroying the biosphere quickly. Have you seen a reef lately? Globally we still rely on our biosphere for food. We haven't solved this problem. If we can't feed everyone it's not inhabitable.

There are many known solutions, both to the destruction and the pollution, and indeed to feeding people in closed systems. All we have to do for any of these is… implement them.

>> lots of people out there get benefits from the things that cause all the various kinds of pollution

> Hence we need lots of breakthroughs to replace these old technologies, whether they be fishing or cancer treatments.

The "breakthroughs" are in the past, we've already got them — we just need to do them.

>> AI can easily follow the scientific method,

> It can't interact with the world so it can't perform science.

Can too, so you're wrong. In fact, most science these days involves tools that are controlled by computers, so it would be less wrong (but still a bit wrong) to say that humans can't do science.

> Boston Dynamics has teams of human beings making robots, which are largely preprogrammed.

Irrelevant.

Also, do actually follow that link I gave you before: https://github.com/GT-RIPL/Awesome-LLM-Robotics

> Making stuff in real life is really hard even with humans.

Most of the problems with manufacturing these days are specifically the human part of it. Computer memory used to be hand-knitted, we don't do that for modern computers and for good reason.

> We are so far away from needing to worry about this sort of AI safety. I mean, we haven't solved robotic fabric handling yet, it's why we still have sweatshops sewing our clothes.

Simultaneously irrelevant (lots of research doesn't involve fabric handling), and false.

So incredibly and wildly false that when I searched for examples, I got a page of sponsored adverts for different fabric handling robots before the content.

Here's the first non-sponsored search result, a corporate video from a year ago, so unlikely to be state-of-the-art today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JjUnKpsJRM (They're specifically about re-shoring sewing away from sweatshops).

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#365

Post by riversflow »

a_w wrote: post #358
riversflow wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he's a crank, it should be easy to explain specifically why he's wrong. Sure. The premise that a super intelligent AI can create runaway intelligence on its own is completely insane. How can it iterate? How does it test? Humans run off consensus. We make predictions and test them against physical reality, then have others test them. Information has to be gathered and verified, it's the only rational way to build…

> How can it iterate? How does it test? Honest/dumb question - does it need to test? In nature mutations don't test - the 'useful' mutations win. Couldn't a 'super intelligent AI' do the same?

> the 'useful' mutations win.

Thats testing.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#367

Post by criley2 »

tyrfing wrote: post #302
criley2 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that any for-profit company can self-govern without external accountability is also magical thinking A "Responsible AI Team" at a for-profit was always marketing (sleight of hand) to manipulate users. Just see OpenAI today: safety vs profit, who wins?

> Just see OpenAI today: safety vs profit, who wins? Safety pretty clearly won the board fight. OpenAI started the year with 9 board members, and end it with 4, 4 of the 5 who left being interested in commercialization. Half of the current board members are also on the board of GovAI, dedicated to AI safety. Don't forget that many people would consider "responsible AI" to mean "no AI until X-risk is zero", and that a…

Rumor already has it that the "safety" board members are all resigning to bring Altman and the profit team back. When the dust settles, does profit ever lose to safety?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#368

Post by riversflow »

ben_w wrote: post #364
riversflow wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 18 months ago, so was having an AI make Nah, I've been waiting for this since Adobe released Content Aware Fill over a decade ago. > No, the planet is not becoming uninhabitable We are destroying the biosphere quickly. Have you seen a reef lately? Globally we still rely on our biosphere for food. We haven't solved this problem. If we can't feed everyone it's not inhabitable. > lots of people out there get benefits…

> Nah, I've been waiting for this since Adobe released Content Aware Fill over a decade ago. If you were expecting Photoshop, an image manipulator, to produce a website, which is a mixture of HTML (text) and images, on the basis of a combination of a prompt and an example image… then you were more disconnected from the state of AI research at that time than you're accusing me of being now. > We are destroying the bio…

> All we have to do for any of these is… implement them.

An idea isn't a solution. I don't know what you are even talking about. Until we are actually solving these problems in a substantial way we have nothing but hope, we don't know that anything will pan out.

> Can too.

There is no 100% automated lab. Tools being controlled by a computer doesn't mean they are loaded, prepared and most importantly maintained by humans. And Science requires different types of labs, I just watched a documentary about the making of the new Malaria vaccine, and how challenging it was to produce the ~cup of vaccine needed for clinical trials vs producing enough for validation was fascinating.

> Irrelevant

no it's not. We are so far from 100% automation of anything. Some human being has to install and maintain literally everything in every factory. Nobody is making self maintaining bots, much less ones that can do everything.

> So incredibly and wildly false

Comparing human seamstresses to even the latest crop of Robotic fabric handlers(that haven't seen mass market penetration best I can tell, so are still unproven in my book) is like comparing OSMO to a construction worker. It's not false. That video, which I watched with interest, is not convincing at all, having seen more traditional jeans making places.

> Most of the problems with manufacturing these days are specifically the human part of it.

Because the human part is by far the hardest.

> do actually follow that link I gave you before https://github.com/GT-RIPL/Awesome-LLM-Robotics

Ok and? nice Gish Gallop I guess?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#369

Post by riversflow »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #362
riversflow wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he's a crank, it should be easy to explain specifically why he's wrong. Sure. The premise that a super intelligent AI can create runaway intelligence on its own is completely insane. How can it iterate? How does it test? Humans run off consensus. We make predictions and test them against physical reality, then have others test them. Information has to be gathered and verified, it's the only rational way to build…

It sounds like you disagree with Eliezer about how AI technology is likely to develop. That's fine, but that doesn't show that he's a crank. I was hoping for something like a really basic factual error. People throughout history have made bold predictions. Sometimes they come true, sometimes they don't. Usually we forget how bold the prediction was at the time -- due to hindsight bias it doesn't seem so bold anymore.…

He is engaging in magical thinking. I showed a factual error, that AI has neither information gathering and verifying capability or a network of peers to substantiate their hypothesis, and you refuse to engage it.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#370

Post by riversflow »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #345
spooky_action wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I see how some of his tweets could come across as crank-ish if you don't have a background in AI alignment. AI alignment is sort of like computer security in the sense that you're trying to guard against the unknown. If there was a way to push a button which told you the biggest security flaw in the software you're writing, then the task of writing secure software would be far easier. But instead we have to assume th…

AI alignment is sort of like computer security except computer security is a real pressing problem and AI alignment is based on science fiction.
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