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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

#61

Post by andor »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #39
cyanydeez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So more of an ethicist-for-pay than for the challenge of it.

Any ethicist for a corporation is clearly a PR move, right? Like, a pure researcher for a corporation might have some genuine overlap and shared interests where breakthroughs in the research benefit both parties, but an ethicist?? For a legal construct that's defined by and bound to sociopathically pursue profit? Come on now.

Companies are not bound to sociopathically pursue profit. It would be in their long-term interest to care about stakeholders outside the boardroom, and until a certain person with tiny hands started a war on anything remotely "woke", the market rewarded ESG metrics.

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

#62

Post by nixon_why69 »

andor wrote: post #61
nixon_why69 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ethicist for a corporation is clearly a PR move, right? Like, a pure researcher for a corporation might have some genuine overlap and shared interests where breakthroughs in the research benefit both parties, but an ethicist?? For a legal construct that's defined by and bound to sociopathically pursue profit? Come on now.

Companies are not bound to sociopathically pursue profit. It would be in their long-term interest to care about stakeholders outside the boardroom, and until a certain person with tiny hands started a war on anything remotely "woke", the market rewarded ESG metrics.

Your point was true prior to 1980 or so, but it's a cultural average. We've had multiple generations of business leaders now trained on seeing the corporate legal entity as only caring about shareholder value and being proud of it and even perversely principled about it.

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

#64

Post by andor »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #62
andor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are not bound to sociopathically pursue profit. It would be in their long-term interest to care about stakeholders outside the boardroom, and until a certain person with tiny hands started a war on anything remotely "woke", the market rewarded ESG metrics.

Your point was true prior to 1980 or so, but it's a cultural average. We've had multiple generations of business leaders now trained on seeing the corporate legal entity as only caring about shareholder value and being proud of it and even perversely principled about it.

It's true that this is happening a lot. And I think this is one of the reasons why ethicists still want to get involved in these companies: it should be easier to make a company do the right thing from the inside, why else would they hire for these positions? They join with idealism and probably don't get very far in terms of real impact.

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

#66

Post by nixon_why69 »

andor wrote: post #64
nixon_why69 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point was true prior to 1980 or so, but it's a cultural average. We've had multiple generations of business leaders now trained on seeing the corporate legal entity as only caring about shareholder value and being proud of it and even perversely principled about it.

It's true that this is happening a lot. And I think this is one of the reasons why ethicists still want to get involved in these companies: it should be easier to make a company do the right thing from the inside, why else would they hire for these positions? They join with idealism and probably don't get very far in terms of real impact.

> They join with idealism and probably don't get very far in terms of real impact.

I can't disagree with that, reminds me of the quote from the movie Rounders: If you've been at the table for 30 minutes and you don't know who the sucker is, you ARE the sucker.

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

#68

Post by summarybot »

Yesterday I came up with an idea that I sent to some researchers at the different AI labs via email: Rather than train the model on one score, track two scores. The first score is the Short-term-objective-score (STOS) and the other, more important one, is the EAOS Ethically-aligned-outcome-score. Every trajectory can be evaluated on whether or not it has a high enough EAOS to be considered acceptable. If the model does some task and has a very high STOS but very low EAOS, like modifying game code to win at a game rather than playing by the rules, it is unacceptable. Models going forward must all have an ethics evaluation in tandem with objectives evaluation, and only when the ethics value is high enough should actions be considered successes.
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