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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#81

Post by petters »

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #76

AI is a tool, and there's about as much point as having some team fretting about responsible usage as there is having similar notions in a Bazooka manufacturer. Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka) will always dictate how and where the particular tool is used. Many of these AI Ethics foundations (e.g., DAIR), just seem to advocate rent seeking behavior, scraping out a role for themselves off the backs of o…

If the bazooka manufacturer only offers shooting rockets through an API where they can check the target before launching, they would be able to have some say about which targets are hit.

> Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka)

This is not the user in most cases. So a responsible AI can make sense. I believe you don't think AI can be dangerous, but some people do and from their point of view having a team for this makes sense.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#83

Post by code_biologist »

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #48
kazinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

it's very easy to build a still that appears to work but actually leaves you with a high-methanol end product.

Is it? I've always seen concern about methanol in moonshine but I presume it came from intentional contamination from evil bootleggers. It's difficult to get a wash containing enough methanol to meaningfully concentrate in the first place if you're making whiskey or rum. Maybe with fruit wine and hard cider there's a bit more.

The physics of distillation kind of have your back here too. The lower temperature fractions with acetone and methanol always come out first during distillation (the "heads") and every resource and distiller will tell you to learn the taste and smell, then throw them out. The taste and smell of heads are really distinctive. A slow distillation to more effectively concentrate methanol also makes it easier to separate out. But even if you don't separate the heads from the hearts, the methanol in any traditional wash is dilute enough that it'll only give you a headache.

I think it's extremely hard to build a still that appears to work but creates a high methanol end product.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#84

Post by 123yawaworht456 »

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.

>No one is claiming todays tech poses and existential threat.

really now, friend?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#85

Post by sureglymop »

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #76

AI is a tool, and there's about as much point as having some team fretting about responsible usage as there is having similar notions in a Bazooka manufacturer. Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka) will always dictate how and where the particular tool is used. Many of these AI Ethics foundations (e.g., DAIR), just seem to advocate rent seeking behavior, scraping out a role for themselves off the backs of o…

It's not really the same as a bazooka. These companies usually release AI models, for which the training phase is arguably more important than the usage phase when it comes to ethics. It would be like if the manufacturer pre-calibrated the bazooka for a certain target. Sure, whoever uses it after may still use it in another, unethical way but the point is there is already a bias. It is important to consider ethical implications of the training materials used, especially when scraping the internet for material. Now, is a whole team needed? Maybe not, but you can't dismiss it that easily.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#87

Post by PUSH_AX »

zmgsabst wrote: post #80
PUSH_AX wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All large scale human atrocities required a centralized government imposing on the public a technocratic agenda. “AI safety” advocates are recreating that problem, now with AI spice. How about we don’t create actual problems (technocrats imposing disasters on the public) because we’re fighting the scourge of hypothetical pixies?

> Some large scale human atrocities

FTFY

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#88

Post by google234123 »

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…

Also, if you are on this team, you get promoted based on slowing down other work. Introduce a new review process, impact!

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#89

Post by 123yawaworht456 »

martindbp wrote: post #77
speedylight wrote: post #10

I 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.

I'm not a doomer but I honestly don't understand this argument. If releasing model as open source helps researchers determine if it's safe, what about when it's not deemed safe? Then it's already out there, on the hard drives of half of 4chan. It's much easier and cheaper to fine-tune a model, distil and quantize it and put it on a killer drone, than it is to train it from scratch. On the other hand I totally relate…

what purpose does a LLM serve on a killing drone, exactly?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#90

Post by mdhb »

bcherny wrote: post #20
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, Russia and China get the ability to use it or adapt it for any reason they want without any oversight.

One could argue that open source won’t change much with regard to China and Russia. Both countries have access to LLMs already. And if they didn’t, they would have built their own or gotten access through corporate espionage. What open source does is it helps us better understand & control the tech these countries use. And it helps level up our own homegrown tech. Both of these are good advantages to have.

That last paragraph is an opinion you seem to have just formed as you typed it stated as a fact that doesn’t seem to hold up to even the lightest scrutiny.
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