Seems like something that should exist as a specialist knowledge team within an existing compliance team i.e. guided by legal concerns primarily.
Compliance is sorta widely-acknowledged to be useless paperpushing.
Not at a bank
Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#42I 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.
No, the model is useful without the dataset, but its not functionally "open source", because while you can tune it if you have the training code, you can't replicate it or, more important, train it from scratch with a modified, but not completely new, dataset. (And, also, understanding the existing training data helps understand how to structure data to train that particular model, whether its with a new or modified data set from scratch, or for finetuning.)
At least, that's my understanding.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#43Does anyone know what this Responsible AI team did? Were they working on the AI alignment / control issue, or was it more about curtailing politically undesirable model outputs? I feel like the conflation of these two things is unfortunate because the latter will cause people to turn off the former. It's like a reverse motte and bailey.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
People equate likeability with how deserving someone is for their success, so they always say that Musk got lucky
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#45Seems 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.
Or, moreover, legal safety policies are essentially written by the companies that produce the product, by their own definition of safety, and pushed by their own lobbyists to codify into law, effectively giving them monopoly power. Safety is just a vehicle to those ends.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#46I 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.
GNU/Linux is open source. Is it being used responsibly? What is the "it" that no single entity has control over? You have absolutely no control of what your next door neighbor is doing with open source. Hey, if we want alcohol to be made responsibly, everyone should have their own still, made from freely redistributed blueprints. That way no single entity has control.
> GNU/Linux is open source. Is it being used responsibly?
Great example! Yes, linux being open source has been massively beneficial to society. And this is true despite the fact that some bad guys use computers as well.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#47I 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.
Getting the results is nice but that's "shareware" not "free software" (or, for a more modern example, that is like companies submitting firmware binary blobs into mainline Linux). Free software means you have to be able to build the final binary from source. Having 10 TB of text is no problem, but having a data center of GPUs is. Until the training cost comes down there is no way to make it free software.
If I publish a massive quantity of source code — to the point that it’s very expensive to compile — it’s still open source.
If the training data and model training code is available then it should be considered open, even if it’s hard to train.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#48I 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.
GNU/Linux is open source. Is it being used responsibly? What is the "it" that no single entity has control over? You have absolutely no control of what your next door neighbor is doing with open source. Hey, if we want alcohol to be made responsibly, everyone should have their own still, made from freely redistributed blueprints. That way no single entity has control.
> Hey, if we want alcohol to be made responsibly, everyone should have their own still, made from freely redistributed blueprints.
Anyone who wants to can, in fact, find blueprints for making their own still. For example, https://moonshinestillplans.com/ contains plans for a variety of different types of stills and guidance on which type to build based on how you want to use it.
And in fact I think it's good that this site exists, because it's very easy to build a still that appears to work but actually leaves you with a high-methanol end product.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#49Safety 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…
i would disagree. i thjnk the safety concerns and conversations from the companies serving AI services are misguided simply because the companies know what they want to do with it (advertising based on user data and input) but they have no idea how to accurately predict all the unexpected or undesired responses from the AIs. they know there is likely some potential revenue there but they aren’t sure how to make the AI comply with regulations.
they already have processes for manipulating results and have a trained and likely tagged data set of “bad” things the AI shouldn’t return. if they don’t want the ai telling how to do illegal stuff they will just not include that in its dataset. if the ai “learns” this, that’s responsibility of the user likely in the clause. they will simply document how it was trained and true expected results, add clause on “if you don’t wanna see disturbing responses don’t ask disturbing questions for it to find he answer to”, and probably it will be enough unless the ai gets really combative and destructive.
i really don’t thjnk this about safety at all, it’s trying to seed the idea that the ai companies are at all concerned about violating existing privacy regulations that Meta et. al. already are bumping against.
obviously it’s supposition but i thjnk this is far likelier what they’re worried on and what all this “safety” talk is about. they just want plausible deniability to be seeded before the first lawsuits come.
Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team
#50I’m okay with this. They mostly complained about nonsense or nonexistent problems. Maybe they can stop “aligning” their models now
You need alignment for it to do anything useful in the first place; base models are very hard to control. Alignment is just engineering.