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It's not that they are arbiters of morality and truth -- it's that they have a _responsibility_ to do the least harm. They spent money and time to train these m

It's not that they are arbiters of morality and truth -- it's that they have a _responsibility_ to do the least harm. They spent money and time to train these models, so it's also up to them to see that they aren't causing issues by making such things widely available. They won't be using the models they train to commit crimes, for example. Someone who gets access to their best models may very well do that. It'd be really funny (lol, no) if Google's abuse team started facing issues because people are making more robust fake user accounts...by using google provided models.

ALittleLight 4y ago
Ahh, how silly of me. Here I was thinking that Google kept their models private because they were hoping to monetize them. But now that you say it, it's obvious that this is just Google being morally responsible. Thanks Google! I'm sorry to be sarcastic. I generally try not to be, but I just can't fathom the level of naivete required to think that mega-corps act out of their moral responsibility rather than their profit-interest.
- kajecounterhack 4y ago
  I'm sorry you feel so cynical about this. It's absolutely true that Google is profit-seeking, that these models are very expensive to build, and that if there's a competitive advantage to be had, Google should probably try to retain it. But even with that all being true, real people (typically some thoughtful researchers) build these models. And my point is: _there really are ethical reasons to keep large generative models trained on flawed data away from the general public until better safeguards are in place._ You can verify this for yourself by reading about ML bias and safety. Don't let cynicism keep you from internalizing that fact. OpenAI didn't make GPT-3 widely available for the same reason. At the end of the day, Google doesn't need an excuse like "we have ethical qualms" to not release the models. Stuff that is really secret sauce you won't hear about until many years later when it's not a competitive advantage anymore. Google _does_ need to cover its ass and not deal with its employees yelling that it helped perpetuate algorithmic racism, or surveillance state, or increased levels of inauthenticity on the internet. When I said "Google has a responsibility" -- I don't mean that the faceless entity feels responsibility, I mean the people who work on the specific things have a responsibility and they do feel & act on that. If you work on lifesaving drugs that could also be dangerous / addictive, it's kind of on you to be thoughtful about how to make them generally available, no?
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    I'm curious what ethical reasons you think require that new technology only be used in secret and without oversight by trillion dollar companies. This is supposed to be AI safety? "Do whatever you want, just make sure you conceal the results and impede progress and understanding." What reasons necessitate keeping image or video generation models private that wouldn't also argue for keeping animation software or picture editing tools private? Should we somehow prevent such tools from getting better or easier or stop people from educating others on how to use them? No, that's crazy. If the tools are so dangerous we can't trust the public to have them then they are way too dangerous to trust Google with them. If it were actually true that Google was developing AI too dangerous for the public, then we should storm the Google headquarters, kill their engineers, and burn their data centers. Of course it's not true. Google is developing image and video generation models and equivalent versions will be open source by the year's end I expect. These models aren't especially dangerous. Yes, people will use them to be racist or mean, same as they use their phones or computers or books or whatever to be those things. As a final note, it's obviously not true that GPT-3 was kept private for the "ethics" reason. I can buy GPT-3 generations now for 2 cents per 1k tokens generated. There is no real oversight into how these generations are used and you could absolutely use them to power social media bots or whatever you are concerned with. The reason they keep GPT-3 private but sell access to it is not because they want to be ethical, but because they want to sell access to it.
    - roca 4y ago
      Keeping GPT-3 behind an API lets OpenAI track how the model is being used and filter outputs they deem potentially harmful.
    - kajecounterhack 4y ago
      > "Do whatever you want, just make sure you conceal the results and impede progress and understanding." This is not a fair characterization of what's going on here. Google spent a ton of money on researchers & training infra (it's wildly expensive even just hardware-wise) to train these models. It's not different from other proprietary technologies -- they don't owe the public anything here. Providing the research findings + methodology in a paper without the implementation & data is a _tradeoff_ as a participant in the field. If someone else implements the model with their money and uses it for nefarious purposes, that's more acceptable than if they directly use Google's _already known to be flawed_ models. > I'm curious what ethical reasons you think require that new technology only be used in secret and without oversight by trillion dollar companies. This is supposed to be AI safety? If I make a chair and I know it's not always safe to sit on, maybe I should not sell that chair. We can talk about this proof-of-concept chair as a research subject, but if you go to build one and use it to prank someone, that's on you. That's all that's going on here. If the model could be used to generate CSAI, maybe Google doesn't want to be part of that. > Google is developing image and video generation models and equivalent versions will be open source by the year's end I expect. These models aren't especially dangerous. Maybe that's the disconnect -- you don't think generative models are dangerous, but they can be, and Google would know because they have entire teams dedicated to AI fairness & safety researching this topic. It's also not trivial to reproduce these models. Given the cost to simply train even if you had the source data, any organization releasing these models has to have a bit of money and skill. The onus will always be on the team building these models to think about what their ethics are and how they want to proceed knowing there may be negative externalities. > Yes, people will use them to be racist or mean, same as they use their phones or computers or books or whatever to be those things. Tools empowering large-scale inauthenticity & disinformation are not comparable to individuals making comments.

ALittleLight 4y ago

Ahh, how silly of me. Here I was thinking that Google kept their models private because they were hoping to monetize them. But now that you say it, it's obvious that this is just Google being morally responsible. Thanks Google! I'm sorry to be sarcastic. I generally try not to be, but I just can't fathom the level of naivete required to think that mega-corps act out of their moral responsibility rather than their profit-interest.

kajecounterhack 4y ago
I'm sorry you feel so cynical about this. It's absolutely true that Google is profit-seeking, that these models are very expensive to build, and that if there's a competitive advantage to be had, Google should probably try to retain it. But even with that all being true, real people (typically some thoughtful researchers) build these models. And my point is: _there really are ethical reasons to keep large generative models trained on flawed data away from the general public until better safeguards are in place._ You can verify this for yourself by reading about ML bias and safety. Don't let cynicism keep you from internalizing that fact. OpenAI didn't make GPT-3 widely available for the same reason. At the end of the day, Google doesn't need an excuse like "we have ethical qualms" to not release the models. Stuff that is really secret sauce you won't hear about until many years later when it's not a competitive advantage anymore. Google _does_ need to cover its ass and not deal with its employees yelling that it helped perpetuate algorithmic racism, or surveillance state, or increased levels of inauthenticity on the internet. When I said "Google has a responsibility" -- I don't mean that the faceless entity feels responsibility, I mean the people who work on the specific things have a responsibility and they do feel & act on that. If you work on lifesaving drugs that could also be dangerous / addictive, it's kind of on you to be thoughtful about how to make them generally available, no?
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I'm curious what ethical reasons you think require that new technology only be used in secret and without oversight by trillion dollar companies. This is supposed to be AI safety? "Do whatever you want, just make sure you conceal the results and impede progress and understanding." What reasons necessitate keeping image or video generation models private that wouldn't also argue for keeping animation software or picture editing tools private? Should we somehow prevent such tools from getting better or easier or stop people from educating others on how to use them? No, that's crazy. If the tools are so dangerous we can't trust the public to have them then they are way too dangerous to trust Google with them. If it were actually true that Google was developing AI too dangerous for the public, then we should storm the Google headquarters, kill their engineers, and burn their data centers. Of course it's not true. Google is developing image and video generation models and equivalent versions will be open source by the year's end I expect. These models aren't especially dangerous. Yes, people will use them to be racist or mean, same as they use their phones or computers or books or whatever to be those things. As a final note, it's obviously not true that GPT-3 was kept private for the "ethics" reason. I can buy GPT-3 generations now for 2 cents per 1k tokens generated. There is no real oversight into how these generations are used and you could absolutely use them to power social media bots or whatever you are concerned with. The reason they keep GPT-3 private but sell access to it is not because they want to be ethical, but because they want to sell access to it.
  - roca 4y ago
    Keeping GPT-3 behind an API lets OpenAI track how the model is being used and filter outputs they deem potentially harmful.
  - kajecounterhack 4y ago
    > "Do whatever you want, just make sure you conceal the results and impede progress and understanding." This is not a fair characterization of what's going on here. Google spent a ton of money on researchers & training infra (it's wildly expensive even just hardware-wise) to train these models. It's not different from other proprietary technologies -- they don't owe the public anything here. Providing the research findings + methodology in a paper without the implementation & data is a _tradeoff_ as a participant in the field. If someone else implements the model with their money and uses it for nefarious purposes, that's more acceptable than if they directly use Google's _already known to be flawed_ models. > I'm curious what ethical reasons you think require that new technology only be used in secret and without oversight by trillion dollar companies. This is supposed to be AI safety? If I make a chair and I know it's not always safe to sit on, maybe I should not sell that chair. We can talk about this proof-of-concept chair as a research subject, but if you go to build one and use it to prank someone, that's on you. That's all that's going on here. If the model could be used to generate CSAI, maybe Google doesn't want to be part of that. > Google is developing image and video generation models and equivalent versions will be open source by the year's end I expect. These models aren't especially dangerous. Maybe that's the disconnect -- you don't think generative models are dangerous, but they can be, and Google would know because they have entire teams dedicated to AI fairness & safety researching this topic. It's also not trivial to reproduce these models. Given the cost to simply train even if you had the source data, any organization releasing these models has to have a bit of money and skill. The onus will always be on the team building these models to think about what their ethics are and how they want to proceed knowing there may be negative externalities. > Yes, people will use them to be racist or mean, same as they use their phones or computers or books or whatever to be those things. Tools empowering large-scale inauthenticity & disinformation are not comparable to individuals making comments.