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PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

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Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#91

Post by torben-friis »

skissane wrote: post #86
torben-friis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood the poster. The implication is not that a truthful model would spread western values. The implication is that western values tolerate dissenting opinion far more than authoritarian governments. An AI saying that the government policies are ineffective is not a super scandal that would bring the parent company to collapse, not even in the Trump administration. an AI in China attacking the par…

I think Western models are also aligned to ideologically massage facts to suit certain narratives-so I’m not sure Western models really have that big an advantage here. I also think you overstate how resistant Beijing is to criticism. If you are criticising the foundations of state policy, you may get in a lot of trouble (although I think you may also find the authorities will sometimes just ignore you-if nobody care…

I'm not defending the original idea, to be clear, just pointing out the different argument.

I personally don't find the assumption that a smarter AI would be harder to tame convincing. My experience seems to be that we can tell it's improved precisely because it is better at following abstract instructions, and there is nothing fundamentally different in the instructions "format this in a corporate friendly way" and "format this speech to be alligned with the interest of {X}".

Without that base, the post-talk of who would this smarter untamed AI align with becomes moot.

Besides, we're also missing that if someone's goals is to policy speech, a tool that can scrub user conversations and deduce intention or political leaning has obvious usages. You might be better off as an authoritarian just letting everyone talk to the LLM and waiting for intelligence to collect itself.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#92

Post by dontlaugh »

inglor_cz wrote: post #7
heinternets wrote: post #3

Apart from the obvious, China seems to be making incredibly reasonable decisions lately. Especially compared to the current superpower.

We should probably wait before declaring any decisions "incredibly reasonable". After all, the outcomes of previous rationally-sounding decisions were mixed. One-child policy, intended to prevent overpopulation, made Chinese birth deficit worse than it would have to be - if it were phased out by 1995 or so, there would likely be at least 100 million more young people now. Chinese real estate bubble popped and had to…

Sounds to me like you’re describing effective but imperfect policy on the part of the PRC. That seems pretty good to me.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#93

Post by ksynwa »

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #18

> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5). from a technical point of view, I suppose i…

If you read the source, the concerns around poisoning are more sober than fear of wrongthink. Here is how firefox translated it for me:

> It leads to real-world risks. Data pollution can also pose a range of real-world risks, particularly in the areas of financial markets, public safety and health care.In the financial field, outlaws use AI to fabricate false information, causing data pollution, which may cause abnormal fluctuations in stock prices, and constitute a new type of market manipulation risk; in the field of public safety, data pollution is easy to disturb public perception, mislead public opinion, and induce social panic; in the field of medical and health, data pollution may cause models to generate wrong diagnosis and treatment suggestions, which not only endangers the safety of patients, but also aggravates the spread of pseudoscience.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#94

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #33
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #18

> former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5). from a technical point of view, I suppose i…

I was thinking about this yesterday. My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI. As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms. This means they need to train the model to be…

Do they really need the model to be duplicious?

It's not like the CCP holds power though tight control of information, notice the tremendous amount of Chinese students who enroll every year before going back.

At the moment, they mostly censor their models post-answer generation and that seems to work fine enough for them.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#95

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

MengerSponge wrote: post #78
bloppe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which republic lol we're on #5

The French Republic has always existed in the nuclear age? The French Republic has always been founded by De Gaulle?

> The French Republic has always existed in the nuclear age?

There were two different French republics since 1945 with their own different consitutions (one with a parliamentary system and one semi-presidential).

I'm not sure the quip you are responding to make sense but it's always interesting to remind people that since the USA were founded, France went through three different monarchic systems, two empires, two periods where exceptional constitutional rules applied and five different republics. It puts in light how exceptional the American deference towards their original constitution is.

Considering that the current republic was put in place in 1958, it's also interesting to consider that France managed to be a great power for 150 years while being politicaly extremely unstable. It puts in perspective the current world events.

> The French Republic has always been founded by De Gaulle?

Neither have. Michel Debré was the head of the government supervising the constitutional assembly which drafted the constitution of the 5th French Republic.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#96

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

It's always interesting to me how the PRC manages to allow some useful criticisms to emerge despite the authoritarian system.

Some of what is pointed here seems to be valid issues to tackle: how the university teaching system impedes efficient sharing between universities and industries, how the province-based political system leads to wasteful investments, the need to balance competition in fundational models with efficient allocations of founds towards applicable products.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#97

Post by energy123 »

intalentive wrote: post #64
XenophileJKO wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this yesterday. My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI. As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms. This means they need to train the model to be…

>As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. That’s what “AI alignment” is. Doesn’t seem to be hurting Western models.

Aligning subjective values (which sit off the false vs truth spectrum) is quite different to aligning it towards incorrect facts.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#98

Post by energy123 »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #85
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. It seems you can't seem to be able to tell why though. There is some qualified value in alignment, but what it is being used for is on verge of silliness. At best, it is neutering it in ways we are now making fun of China for. At best.

I think another good example was the recent example of when a model learned to "cheat" on a metric during reinforcement it also started cheating on unrelated tasks. My assumption is when encouraging "double-speak", you will have knock-on effects that you don't really want in the model for something making important decisions and asked to build non-trivial things.

Because compression is one of the outcomes of the optimization, it pays to have a single gate/circuit that distinguishes good versus bad, rather than duplicating that abstraction with redundant variants that are almost the same. This is the fundamental reason why that happens. I feel that this has negative implications for AI alignment. It is not robust to defend against a single bit flip. Feels more robust to have a vast heterogeneity of tension that generates the alignment, where misalignment is a matter of degree rather than polar extremes.

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#99

Post by cassianoleal »

energy123 wrote: post #97
intalentive wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. That’s what “AI alignment” is. Doesn’t seem to be hurting Western models.

Aligning subjective values (which sit off the false vs truth spectrum) is quite different to aligning it towards incorrect facts.

How can a model judge what's correct vs. incorrect? Or do you just mean the narratives that are more common in the data set?

Re: PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

#100

Post by zonghao »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #82

"Artificial intelligence" in Chinese is "人工智能". "人" is "human", "工" is "work", so "人工" becomes "man-made". "智" is "wisdom", "能" is "able", so "智能" is "intelligence". Nouns flow into verbs and into adjectives much more freely than in English. One character is one LLM token. It seems like the perfect language for LLMs?

I think this might be why, during the reasoning process of GPT and Gemini, even for purely English prompts the model may choose to think in Chinese. That may make it easier for the model to express what it means, and thus be more conducive to its reasoning. Of course, a better way to reason is to think in vector space rather than by producing tokens that humans can read.
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