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It is absolutely critical for our society that this technology, at its full power, be developed open source to the public. That presents dangers to society. Ed

It is absolutely critical for our society that this technology, at its full power, be developed open source to the public. That presents dangers to society. Educating citizens on the ubiquity of human-like text being generated by bots is one challenge. Knowing that bad actors will be able to use these models for evil is another. "Write a convincing 10 page manifesto on the dangers this religious minority poses to societal cohesion" or "tell me a cost effective way to create an IED that won't set off suspected red flags per Texas statutes, and how to deploy it in an urban area for maximum impact". The risk of this technology being contained to Google and governments, on the other hand, is to grant them monopoly on unmatched analysis of data in the history of the world, purely for profit and the continuation of power. Free thought will be crippled via only approved questions being permitted, all queries analyzes and monitored by the central authority. We must all own this technology.

ilaksh 4y ago
Good point on open source. False about "good" and "evil". The most dangerous thing for society is perpetuating the idea of good and evil because that is what motivates war and terrorism. It is used as propaganda to make conflicts into moral issue and justify mass killing. What do you think the terrorists are fighting against? Evil (in their minds). The real problem is that there are different worldviews and political groups, a lack of metacognition about this, and governments or dissident groups using this to enable their propaganda to further their political causes. Worldview and group membership are tied together to a large degree. Also as far as being open source, we already have open source GPT systems. The problem is that the most powerful models require dataset sizes that cannot currently train or run on normal GPU setups. Only a few companies have the infrastructure for it. Eventually we will get more efficient models, and/or possibly a way to do it with decentralized GPU mesh (assuming that's possible), and/or memristor manufacturing will start scaling up which will make it possible to run these large models on consumer hardware someday.
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  interesting, haven't looked into memristors in a while but it seems like that's a real possibility https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnano.2021.645995/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnano.2021.6459...

ilaksh 4y ago

Good point on open source. False about "good" and "evil". The most dangerous thing for society is perpetuating the idea of good and evil because that is what motivates war and terrorism. It is used as propaganda to make conflicts into moral issue and justify mass killing. What do you think the terrorists are fighting against? Evil (in their minds). The real problem is that there are different worldviews and political groups, a lack of metacognition about this, and governments or dissident groups using this to enable their propaganda to further their political causes. Worldview and group membership are tied together to a large degree. Also as far as being open source, we already have open source GPT systems. The problem is that the most powerful models require dataset sizes that cannot currently train or run on normal GPU setups. Only a few companies have the infrastructure for it. Eventually we will get more efficient models, and/or possibly a way to do it with decentralized GPU mesh (assuming that's possible), and/or memristor manufacturing will start scaling up which will make it possible to run these large models on consumer hardware someday.

LesZedCB 4y ago
interesting, haven't looked into memristors in a while but it seems like that's a real possibility https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnano.2021.645995/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnano.2021.6459...