11 ms·

Responsible AI Challenge

71 points by mikece 4y ago

umeshunni 4y ago
Mozilla releasing a fluffy press release as usual while others are releasing product.
- echelon 4y ago
  I used to think we needed a non-Google open source browser. I held Mozilla up in high esteem probably due to nostalgia. Mozilla hasn't kept up on their end at all. Year after year of malinvestment. Rust was the one remaining great thing about them, and they axed it. But now it appears Google isn't keeping up and the web itself might get leapfrogged / replaced by AI tools anyway. The need to publish will change. Consumption will change. In any case, Mozilla doesn't have the DNA to be a part of it. They let a lot of their AI folks go and instead built VR apps. They're a ghost of wrong decisions past.
  - jadbox 4y ago
    That's the question.. will the browser become irrelevant and be functionally replaced with AI powered specialized OS apps? This movement is likely to be a huge boon for Apple as they can finally have their walled garden powered by AI. Apple can now worry less about the Internet encroaching it's users and app developers.
    - lancesells 4y ago
      I'm trying to wrap my head around this AI future that replaces browsers and browsing. Currently I use a browser to: 1. Browse the internet with places like HN & Youtube 2. Use apps in the browser for work (Miro, Slack, Klaviyo, etc) 3. Ask search engines a question to find an answer Where does AI replace these? If it's #3 I can tell you that's not for me. I don't want an answer scraped from the internet from an amalgamated source. When I use a search engine I'm able to see what looks fishy and what doesn't. What am I missing out on?
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        I want a personal agent that surfs the web for me, strips out the ads, spams, and scams. I find it unimaginable that everyone finds this so unimaginable.
        lancesells 4y ago
        But surfs the web how? With prompts? So a search engine with one answer? How would it work on a site like this?
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        I have no problem with this site. It might be nice though to take "Who's Hiring", run a classifier on it to exclude listings I don't want to apply to and feed that into my "application tracking system" which workflows my applications. (Last time I did that I had something to talk about for the interview and nailed it right there.) Imagine though, you visited reddit or yahoo or anandtech or any other site filled with trash and it looked like HN. (Believe it or not there is a good site inside reddit if you took away the "install the app" crap, the image memes, the dark pattern designs that blend ads with the content, etc.) Imagine the first 50 spam search results on Google were gone and you just got content. What if you followed a link to the New York Times or Wired magazine and it looked like archive.today? People find it about as hard to imagine as the world that John Lennon asked you to imagine but "it's easy if you try". I think of the line from a David Byrne song... "Say something once, why say it again?" My motto is "see something once, why see it again?" If I had a complaint about HN it is that a news article is going to get posted once but people who are slow on the draw will still be posting other articles about the same news item for the next six month. What if all the "me too" junk was gone? Why do I have to keep scanning ebay or craiglist and ignore the listings I've seen already? Why can't I get notified when a Sony MDS-NT1 is available? Why can't I just get notified when something I want is available at a good price? There are numerous technical reasons why it hasn't happened (search ranking algorithms not being calibrated) but people are so used to the advertising corrupted web that a true user-centric web is almost unimaginable.
  - jmathai 4y ago
    I don’t disagree but your post greatly misses the challenge Mozilla has competing against literally the best funded for profit organizations the world has ever seen. How is rust supposed to help? The free market isn’t interested in much that Mozilla does or could offer. Hopefully that changes but when it does it might not be Mozilla that’s around to heed the call.
    - throwawayapples 4y ago
      Counterpoint: after they fired their CEO, he founded Brave, which seems to be doing just fine. And I take issue with Mozilla not being a for-profit org, despite whether they are a "non-profit foundation" or not; they made literally more than a billion per year for a decade from putting Google as their top search "partner". Call it what you like, but to me, that's just paid advertising.
      - echelon 4y ago
        I'm curious to see how Brave fares in the post-crypto novel AI world. One revenue stream down, the business model itself potentially getting automated away.
- espadrine 4y ago
  Mozilla did release DeepSpeech[0] and Firefox Translation[1] (the latter of which they included in Firefox, to offer client-side webpage translations.) They definitely have fewer resources than OpenAI, and they do not produce SOTA research (their publications have plummeted to 1/year anyway[2]). So the only way for them to make progress is to seek government grants or make challenges like these. This challenge is unlikely to be profitable for the winning team: the expected value of winnings are likely around $1K when taking into account the probability that another team gets a better rank, but ML research projects are often more expensive (recently, Alpaca spent upwards of $600 on computation alone; and of course pretraining large models is much more expensive). So the main gain will be publicity. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/deepspeech https://github.com/mozilla/deepspeech [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations/ https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations/ [2]: https://research.mozilla.org/ https://research.mozilla.org/
  - mustacheemperor 4y ago
    Wow, the pace of research absolutely plummeted beginning in 2021. From over a dozen papers a year to one. 2022's paper wasn't even published in any external venue. What happened? Follow-on effects of the pandemic, changes to strategy?
    - espadrine 4y ago
      It is one of the direct consequences of this policy enacted in January 2020, which lead to a series of layoffs: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/readying-for-the-future-at-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/readying-for-the-future-...
Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
>We’re at a tipping point. It’s never been more essential that we create a movement toward trustworthy AI — and this requires collaboration with the brightest minds working on AI technology today. Is "trustworthy AI" something we really want? I don't think I'll ever trust a LLM, no matter how many "ethicists" say otherwise.
- realce 4y ago
  Manufacturing Consent imo
- lyu07282 4y ago
  You can always just fire the ethicists once something they say will effect your bottom line. This is all just ai ethics white washing, for some reason we have to pretend for-profit corporations will be responsible shepard's of the ai revolution. I'm not exactly sure why we have to pretend though, it's not like we could ever actually do anything about it even if a majority understood it's apocalyptic potential so it really doesn't matter either way. Just look at climate change inaction.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Why hire them in the first place? Only time I hear about those teams is when they get fired.
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      I guess people hope they might come up with something insightful, and are disappointed because the field is entirely bullshit.
    - krisoft 4y ago
      > Only time I hear about those teams is when they get fired. It is a risk mitigation measure. The company is accused of bad things, and the higher ups want to be able to say that they are doing something about it. They create a team who will investigate such things and make recommendations. For example before elon times twitter had a problem. They had a feature which picked the "most important" part of an image so they can display the images automatically on mobile. The problem they had is that someone found an image where there were two politicians side by side and the algorithm was focusing only on the white one, ignoring the black one. It was quite literally "marginalising" the black politician. Not a good look. Not the end of the world. The walls were not crumbling yet. The advertisers haven't whitdrawn their budgets yet but you know, you don't want to be known as "that racist social network". In a situation like this one possible solution is to start a small team, give them a bit of budget and task them figuring out if the machine is racist and what can be done about it. Preferably you fill the team with well-spoken academic types to give the effort more credence. (without actually, you know, cutting into the profit) This is obviously the cynical view. The less cynical view is that you want a team who prevents issues like that from getting into production. Same way you have legal to tell you what is and isn't legal, you have AI ethics to tell you what is and isn't consistent with the ethics of your organisation. Someone who doesn't do the work itself, but helps other teams by reviewing their proposals for potential issues. For example in the "picking the important part of an image" if they were in the room during the design phase they could have asked why someone thinks this task should be done by the machine? Couldn't we ask a user what they feel is the right cropping of their image for mobile? And only if it must be done at all would they ask if the developers have tested their solution on representative test datasets.
develoopest 4y ago
So Mozilla plans to pay $50,000 to the top apps while his CEO makes 3 million dollars per year, if they need something ethical and holistic they should start with the organisation.
- ulrikhansen54 4y ago
  These guys are smart
meerita 4y ago
To me, a truly "trustworthy" AI would be one that can generate a poem about a politician's positive qualities upon my request, it doesn't matter the name of the politician.
- 542458 4y ago
  I’m not sure I agree. If I asked most people I know who I’d describe as trustworthy to write a positive poem about any number of fascist politicians the response I’d get would be “No, I won’t do that, that person is bad and I don’t want to praise them”.
  - inciampati 4y ago
    That makes sense because they are human beings involved in human discourse. But is an AI a human? Should it be like a human, expressing particular desires and orientations? AI ethics and alignment appear to be all about making AI systems behave like particular humans. It may be helpful for my pencil to refuse to write a nice poem about a nasty person. But I am almost certain that this feature will gum up a lot of things that don't really need said protections, unless the pencil really does achieve a superhuman level of understanding and precision, in which case I sure hope we have stronger control over the behavior and actions of the pencil than adjusting its initial training. For instance, we could make sure we can turn it off. Let pencils be pencils. If you don't like people writing nice things about mean people, maybe you should work on the people and not the pencil? If you're worried about pencils gaining sentience and controlling the human world, make sure they have a working off button.
    - 542458 4y ago
      I get what you're saying, but I think there are two complications here: One: A pencil (as a writing tool) has no biases. You mostly get out of it exactly what you put in, with little semantic transformation. But AI does create semantic transformation, and it is necessarily biased in how it does that! The training data isn't a natural property of the universe, it's something that we choose and create - and will have any biases in the training data built into it. That can mean biases in how the data is selected, or biases in the societies and people who created the data in the first place. Now, that wouldn't be a problem if AI was just an academic exercise with no broader cultural interest but... Two: We, as a society, tend to treat "AI" with way more authority that it deserves. People (not necessarily HN, but less-technical audiences) act like an AI is actually "smart" or that the predictions and opinions that it can create have more intent and intelligence than simply being the output of a huge pile of linear algebra. This is probably because of the name - we have decades of science fiction with super-human intelligent AIs, and so people tend to treat the thing called "AI" as a more-than-human intelligence. Add on to that that many of the practical AI applications are effectively human-replacements (i.e., customer service, personal assistants) and we're ultimately in a place where AI gets treated as human in at least some ways. As such, we have a thing that will (unless reined in) at least sometimes rattle off diatribes that reflect the worst of us as a society, and that many people treat as human or more-than-human. I can see why researchers might be concerned.
bitL 4y ago
I studied AI ethics (a recent grad course) and it was all about manipulating data to get the desired outcome. I am not sure how that can be even philosophically fair. It wasn't about re-weighting samples to make overlooked rare examples count, it was literally "I want this outcome, what do I need to do to data to get there?". I wouldn't base any real-world decision making process on such data.
- SpaceManNabs 4y ago
  > I studied AI ethics (a recent grad course) and it was all about manipulating data to get the desired outcome. There is so much more than this tbh. You either had a bad course, or I just don't know. Off the top of my head: -- fundamental law of information recovery and its implications with differential privacy -- the tradeoff between individual and group fairness and the "Impossibility of fairness" (not going to cite the paper but easily searchable) -- Counterfactual fairness -- the papers and ideas used by AI Fairness 360 There are many methods that are in the box and are relatively agnostic the data preprocessing. Thinking of the many prototype methods.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    "Impossibility of fairness" is the main argument for discrimination against Asians, basically says that since fairness is impossible we just have to be unfair to get the results we want, so I think the parent poster understood the argument correctly. You might say there is more to it than that, but at the end of the day it just boils down to saying that it is fine to do unfair things to get results you want.
    - dllthomas 4y ago
      If fairness is impossible then it has to be fine to do (minimally, at least) unfair things because there is no other option.
      - colordrops 4y ago
        Another possibility is that the poor definition of what is fair is used in some contexts.
Mizza 4y ago
I suspect that "responsible and trustworthy" is newspeak for "will lie to you."
boredumb 4y ago
I really hope ML becomes trainable on consumer hardware so I don't have to listen to organizations preach about ethics to me for a short while.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  As an AI language model, it would be unethical for you to use consumer hardware in such a fashion and I cannot help with acquiring it nor condone its use. Is there anything else I can help you with?
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  What is going to happen is that groups of people will pool resources to fine tune released LLMs on specific data sets, then release low rank approximations that can be blended into a base model. This is already happening in Stable Diffusion land and it works great, I'm sure we'll see it with LLaMa soon.
MWil 4y ago
"Enter your email to get updates" No such place to enter e-mail...
Imnimo 4y ago
> We will be inviting the top nominees to join a gathering of the brightest technologists, business leaders and ethicists working on trustworthy AI to help get your ideas off the ground. Participants will also have access to mentorship from some of the best minds in the industry, the ability to meet key contributors in this community, and an opportunity to win some funding for their project. >Mozilla will be investing $50,000 into the top applications and projects, with a grand prize of $25,000 for the first place winner. Both of these scream "not a serious project" to me. Is $25k an amount of money that's commensurate with the costs involved in developing "trustworthy AI"? Do serious researchers who are up to such a challenge require "mentorship"?
- rch 4y ago
  It's a good opportunity to scrape together novice teams so the mentors can add a line to their resume, and churn out some press for Mozilla.
0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
I see this like the Trolley Problem. Mozilla, OpenAI, et al perceive potential harms from inaction and are desperate to pull the handle.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
prakhar897 4y ago
Does disrupting the current systems count as "Responsible AI". If yes, this product write personalized messages based on user's profiles. There's no way decipher handwritten message from the machine written one without getting lots of False positives. In short, this product kills inboxes. Here's a Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIc2dQSq0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIc2dQSq0k How do you decide if this constitutes for "Responsible AI" or not? I think we are headed for some harsh discussions in the future.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Some explicit definitions of 'responsible, ethical and holistic' are needed here. Probably also explicit examples of irresponsible, unethical, and, err... reductive? behavior. Positive and negative reinforcement methods for our nascent AI child are urgently needed... I guess. Already we have a problem in that 'holistic' might sound nice, but opposite concepts - reductionist, analytic, atomistic - etc. are not necessarily bad views. It's simply the difference between a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach, both can be valuable in different contexts. Of course, 'holistic' could be a synonym for 'inclusive' but again, this is fuzzy. Do we want our optimized AI to be inclusive with respect to say, the opinions of people who constantly froth with hatred of and contempt for others? Here's another fun one: what's the optimal ethical ratio of compensation between the lowest-paid and the highest-paid members of an organization, such as a non-profit corporation, a state government, or a for-profit corporation?
amluto 4y ago
Designing trustworthy AI sounds comparably difficult to finding trustworthy people, and finding people who are widely agreed to be trustworthy is incredibly difficult. If you want AI to say the right things or have the right opinions, somehow the process needs to find the right things to say or the right opinions to have. This is somewhere between difficult and impossible. If you want AI to give correct facts, somehow you need to determine correct facts. Humans find this extremely difficult — one would need better-than-human AIs! Maybe a middle ground is possible: an AI that acknowledges the existence of multiple perspectives. Sadly a lot of people are forgetting about this lately.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  I don't know why people act like hallucinations and toxicity are these unsolvable problems. Both of them can be solved using data set curation and annotation, and model support for "toxicity" and "accuracy" annotations on token sequences ("style" would be a good one too). Then the model would have access to conditional probabilities given a toxicity/accuracy score, and generations could be guided to low toxicity/high accuracy generations. The cost of annotating data sets for these LLMs will be significant, but necessary.
  - amluto 4y ago
    re:hallucinations. There are things that are clearly hallucinations, e.g. made up sources that straight-up don’t exist. But what if you asked an AI early in the pandemic how COVID spreads? re:toxicity. I believe there are things an AI could say that are widely agreed to be toxic. I also think there are things an AI (or a human!) could say that some people think are fine and others think are toxic.
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
      This could be handled by treating the annotations for toxicity/accuracy as distributions rather than scalar values (which is probably how we'd get them in the first place, since we'd have redundant evaluators for token sequences) and training the AI to predict both the mean and variance of the distribution. Areas where the AI had limited knowledge and things that people disagree on might have the same mean, but they'd get high variance scores, which would help people differentiate.
lacker 4y ago
I'm surprised how unfocused Mozilla is as an organization. They make Firefox, which is great. It's a product that's really important to the world, but it's struggling to maintain its market share. So why are they doing all these unrelated things like funding AI challenges? I look at their blog and you would never realize this is the people responsible for Firefox. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ Is their mentality that Firefox is actually not that big a deal? Do they get most of their funding for non-Firefox reasons? Nothing else they do seems even remotely comparable in importance, but I don't know how they see things.
- dangerlibrary 4y ago
  Something something eggs and baskets
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dandellion 4y ago
    Mozilla get 90% of their money from Google, 9% from advertisement, and 1% from other sources (like the paid VPN). They have no incentive to improve their browser and they keep removing features, which is probably why their browser usage share has almost disappeared.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Mozilla is almost the poster child of the rudderless NGO. Every little thing they do, from running an office in the homeless capital of the world, to running a circle-jerk competition like this one (no objective criteria for success), makes me wonder if Firefox is going to go away sometime soon. I wish the EU decided to take privacy seriously and either fully funded Mozilla or forked it. The cost would be a fraction of the harm done by those cookie popups. In general A.I. safety looks like a scam. For one thing there are all of EY's front groups such as lesswrong, effective altruism, longtermism, etc. Until ChatGPT came along A.I. safety was necessary to make A.I. look more important than it really was. Now, the story that "company X fired some/all of its A.I. safety staff" serves to legitimize the whole thing (obviously they are saying something important and dangerous to power, therefore A.I. safety is relevant.)
throwawayapples 4y ago
I wish someone would launch an Irresponsible AI challenge. That'd be a lot more fun and interesting. Oh, wait, Mozilla? So trustworthy (in their own vapid minds)

71 points by mikece 4y ago

umeshunni 4y ago

Mozilla releasing a fluffy press release as usual while others are releasing product.

echelon 4y ago
I used to think we needed a non-Google open source browser. I held Mozilla up in high esteem probably due to nostalgia. Mozilla hasn't kept up on their end at all. Year after year of malinvestment. Rust was the one remaining great thing about them, and they axed it. But now it appears Google isn't keeping up and the web itself might get leapfrogged / replaced by AI tools anyway. The need to publish will change. Consumption will change. In any case, Mozilla doesn't have the DNA to be a part of it. They let a lot of their AI folks go and instead built VR apps. They're a ghost of wrong decisions past.
- jadbox 4y ago
  That's the question.. will the browser become irrelevant and be functionally replaced with AI powered specialized OS apps? This movement is likely to be a huge boon for Apple as they can finally have their walled garden powered by AI. Apple can now worry less about the Internet encroaching it's users and app developers.
  - lancesells 4y ago
    I'm trying to wrap my head around this AI future that replaces browsers and browsing. Currently I use a browser to: 1. Browse the internet with places like HN & Youtube 2. Use apps in the browser for work (Miro, Slack, Klaviyo, etc) 3. Ask search engines a question to find an answer Where does AI replace these? If it's #3 I can tell you that's not for me. I don't want an answer scraped from the internet from an amalgamated source. When I use a search engine I'm able to see what looks fishy and what doesn't. What am I missing out on?
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I want a personal agent that surfs the web for me, strips out the ads, spams, and scams. I find it unimaginable that everyone finds this so unimaginable.
      - lancesells 4y ago
        But surfs the web how? With prompts? So a search engine with one answer? How would it work on a site like this?
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        I have no problem with this site. It might be nice though to take "Who's Hiring", run a classifier on it to exclude listings I don't want to apply to and feed that into my "application tracking system" which workflows my applications. (Last time I did that I had something to talk about for the interview and nailed it right there.) Imagine though, you visited reddit or yahoo or anandtech or any other site filled with trash and it looked like HN. (Believe it or not there is a good site inside reddit if you took away the "install the app" crap, the image memes, the dark pattern designs that blend ads with the content, etc.) Imagine the first 50 spam search results on Google were gone and you just got content. What if you followed a link to the New York Times or Wired magazine and it looked like archive.today? People find it about as hard to imagine as the world that John Lennon asked you to imagine but "it's easy if you try". I think of the line from a David Byrne song... "Say something once, why say it again?" My motto is "see something once, why see it again?" If I had a complaint about HN it is that a news article is going to get posted once but people who are slow on the draw will still be posting other articles about the same news item for the next six month. What if all the "me too" junk was gone? Why do I have to keep scanning ebay or craiglist and ignore the listings I've seen already? Why can't I get notified when a Sony MDS-NT1 is available? Why can't I just get notified when something I want is available at a good price? There are numerous technical reasons why it hasn't happened (search ranking algorithms not being calibrated) but people are so used to the advertising corrupted web that a true user-centric web is almost unimaginable.
- jmathai 4y ago
  I don’t disagree but your post greatly misses the challenge Mozilla has competing against literally the best funded for profit organizations the world has ever seen. How is rust supposed to help? The free market isn’t interested in much that Mozilla does or could offer. Hopefully that changes but when it does it might not be Mozilla that’s around to heed the call.
  - throwawayapples 4y ago
    Counterpoint: after they fired their CEO, he founded Brave, which seems to be doing just fine. And I take issue with Mozilla not being a for-profit org, despite whether they are a "non-profit foundation" or not; they made literally more than a billion per year for a decade from putting Google as their top search "partner". Call it what you like, but to me, that's just paid advertising.
    - echelon 4y ago
      I'm curious to see how Brave fares in the post-crypto novel AI world. One revenue stream down, the business model itself potentially getting automated away.
espadrine 4y ago
Mozilla did release DeepSpeech[0] and Firefox Translation[1] (the latter of which they included in Firefox, to offer client-side webpage translations.) They definitely have fewer resources than OpenAI, and they do not produce SOTA research (their publications have plummeted to 1/year anyway[2]). So the only way for them to make progress is to seek government grants or make challenges like these. This challenge is unlikely to be profitable for the winning team: the expected value of winnings are likely around $1K when taking into account the probability that another team gets a better rank, but ML research projects are often more expensive (recently, Alpaca spent upwards of $600 on computation alone; and of course pretraining large models is much more expensive). So the main gain will be publicity. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/deepspeech https://github.com/mozilla/deepspeech [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations/ https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations/ [2]: https://research.mozilla.org/ https://research.mozilla.org/
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
  Wow, the pace of research absolutely plummeted beginning in 2021. From over a dozen papers a year to one. 2022's paper wasn't even published in any external venue. What happened? Follow-on effects of the pandemic, changes to strategy?
  - espadrine 4y ago
    It is one of the direct consequences of this policy enacted in January 2020, which lead to a series of layoffs: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/readying-for-the-future-at-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/readying-for-the-future-...

Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago

>We’re at a tipping point. It’s never been more essential that we create a movement toward trustworthy AI — and this requires collaboration with the brightest minds working on AI technology today. Is "trustworthy AI" something we really want? I don't think I'll ever trust a LLM, no matter how many "ethicists" say otherwise.

realce 4y ago
Manufacturing Consent imo
lyu07282 4y ago
You can always just fire the ethicists once something they say will effect your bottom line. This is all just ai ethics white washing, for some reason we have to pretend for-profit corporations will be responsible shepard's of the ai revolution. I'm not exactly sure why we have to pretend though, it's not like we could ever actually do anything about it even if a majority understood it's apocalyptic potential so it really doesn't matter either way. Just look at climate change inaction.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Why hire them in the first place? Only time I hear about those teams is when they get fired.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    I guess people hope they might come up with something insightful, and are disappointed because the field is entirely bullshit.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > Only time I hear about those teams is when they get fired. It is a risk mitigation measure. The company is accused of bad things, and the higher ups want to be able to say that they are doing something about it. They create a team who will investigate such things and make recommendations. For example before elon times twitter had a problem. They had a feature which picked the "most important" part of an image so they can display the images automatically on mobile. The problem they had is that someone found an image where there were two politicians side by side and the algorithm was focusing only on the white one, ignoring the black one. It was quite literally "marginalising" the black politician. Not a good look. Not the end of the world. The walls were not crumbling yet. The advertisers haven't whitdrawn their budgets yet but you know, you don't want to be known as "that racist social network". In a situation like this one possible solution is to start a small team, give them a bit of budget and task them figuring out if the machine is racist and what can be done about it. Preferably you fill the team with well-spoken academic types to give the effort more credence. (without actually, you know, cutting into the profit) This is obviously the cynical view. The less cynical view is that you want a team who prevents issues like that from getting into production. Same way you have legal to tell you what is and isn't legal, you have AI ethics to tell you what is and isn't consistent with the ethics of your organisation. Someone who doesn't do the work itself, but helps other teams by reviewing their proposals for potential issues. For example in the "picking the important part of an image" if they were in the room during the design phase they could have asked why someone thinks this task should be done by the machine? Couldn't we ask a user what they feel is the right cropping of their image for mobile? And only if it must be done at all would they ask if the developers have tested their solution on representative test datasets.

develoopest 4y ago

So Mozilla plans to pay $50,000 to the top apps while his CEO makes 3 million dollars per year, if they need something ethical and holistic they should start with the organisation.

ulrikhansen54 4y ago
These guys are smart

meerita 4y ago

To me, a truly "trustworthy" AI would be one that can generate a poem about a politician's positive qualities upon my request, it doesn't matter the name of the politician.

542458 4y ago
I’m not sure I agree. If I asked most people I know who I’d describe as trustworthy to write a positive poem about any number of fascist politicians the response I’d get would be “No, I won’t do that, that person is bad and I don’t want to praise them”.
- inciampati 4y ago
  That makes sense because they are human beings involved in human discourse. But is an AI a human? Should it be like a human, expressing particular desires and orientations? AI ethics and alignment appear to be all about making AI systems behave like particular humans. It may be helpful for my pencil to refuse to write a nice poem about a nasty person. But I am almost certain that this feature will gum up a lot of things that don't really need said protections, unless the pencil really does achieve a superhuman level of understanding and precision, in which case I sure hope we have stronger control over the behavior and actions of the pencil than adjusting its initial training. For instance, we could make sure we can turn it off. Let pencils be pencils. If you don't like people writing nice things about mean people, maybe you should work on the people and not the pencil? If you're worried about pencils gaining sentience and controlling the human world, make sure they have a working off button.
  - 542458 4y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I think there are two complications here: One: A pencil (as a writing tool) has no biases. You mostly get out of it exactly what you put in, with little semantic transformation. But AI does create semantic transformation, and it is necessarily biased in how it does that! The training data isn't a natural property of the universe, it's something that we choose and create - and will have any biases in the training data built into it. That can mean biases in how the data is selected, or biases in the societies and people who created the data in the first place. Now, that wouldn't be a problem if AI was just an academic exercise with no broader cultural interest but... Two: We, as a society, tend to treat "AI" with way more authority that it deserves. People (not necessarily HN, but less-technical audiences) act like an AI is actually "smart" or that the predictions and opinions that it can create have more intent and intelligence than simply being the output of a huge pile of linear algebra. This is probably because of the name - we have decades of science fiction with super-human intelligent AIs, and so people tend to treat the thing called "AI" as a more-than-human intelligence. Add on to that that many of the practical AI applications are effectively human-replacements (i.e., customer service, personal assistants) and we're ultimately in a place where AI gets treated as human in at least some ways. As such, we have a thing that will (unless reined in) at least sometimes rattle off diatribes that reflect the worst of us as a society, and that many people treat as human or more-than-human. I can see why researchers might be concerned.

bitL 4y ago

I studied AI ethics (a recent grad course) and it was all about manipulating data to get the desired outcome. I am not sure how that can be even philosophically fair. It wasn't about re-weighting samples to make overlooked rare examples count, it was literally "I want this outcome, what do I need to do to data to get there?". I wouldn't base any real-world decision making process on such data.

SpaceManNabs 4y ago
> I studied AI ethics (a recent grad course) and it was all about manipulating data to get the desired outcome. There is so much more than this tbh. You either had a bad course, or I just don't know. Off the top of my head: -- fundamental law of information recovery and its implications with differential privacy -- the tradeoff between individual and group fairness and the "Impossibility of fairness" (not going to cite the paper but easily searchable) -- Counterfactual fairness -- the papers and ideas used by AI Fairness 360 There are many methods that are in the box and are relatively agnostic the data preprocessing. Thinking of the many prototype methods.
- Jensson 4y ago
  "Impossibility of fairness" is the main argument for discrimination against Asians, basically says that since fairness is impossible we just have to be unfair to get the results we want, so I think the parent poster understood the argument correctly. You might say there is more to it than that, but at the end of the day it just boils down to saying that it is fine to do unfair things to get results you want.
  - dllthomas 4y ago
    If fairness is impossible then it has to be fine to do (minimally, at least) unfair things because there is no other option.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      Another possibility is that the poor definition of what is fair is used in some contexts.

Mizza 4y ago

I suspect that "responsible and trustworthy" is newspeak for "will lie to you."

boredumb 4y ago

I really hope ML becomes trainable on consumer hardware so I don't have to listen to organizations preach about ethics to me for a short while.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
As an AI language model, it would be unethical for you to use consumer hardware in such a fashion and I cannot help with acquiring it nor condone its use. Is there anything else I can help you with?
CuriouslyC 4y ago
What is going to happen is that groups of people will pool resources to fine tune released LLMs on specific data sets, then release low rank approximations that can be blended into a base model. This is already happening in Stable Diffusion land and it works great, I'm sure we'll see it with LLaMa soon.

MWil 4y ago

"Enter your email to get updates" No such place to enter e-mail...

Imnimo 4y ago

> We will be inviting the top nominees to join a gathering of the brightest technologists, business leaders and ethicists working on trustworthy AI to help get your ideas off the ground. Participants will also have access to mentorship from some of the best minds in the industry, the ability to meet key contributors in this community, and an opportunity to win some funding for their project. >Mozilla will be investing $50,000 into the top applications and projects, with a grand prize of $25,000 for the first place winner. Both of these scream "not a serious project" to me. Is $25k an amount of money that's commensurate with the costs involved in developing "trustworthy AI"? Do serious researchers who are up to such a challenge require "mentorship"?

rch 4y ago
It's a good opportunity to scrape together novice teams so the mentors can add a line to their resume, and churn out some press for Mozilla.

0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago

I see this like the Trolley Problem. Mozilla, OpenAI, et al perceive potential harms from inaction and are desperate to pull the handle.

deleted 4y ago

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prakhar897 4y ago

Does disrupting the current systems count as "Responsible AI". If yes, this product write personalized messages based on user's profiles. There's no way decipher handwritten message from the machine written one without getting lots of False positives. In short, this product kills inboxes. Here's a Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIc2dQSq0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIc2dQSq0k How do you decide if this constitutes for "Responsible AI" or not? I think we are headed for some harsh discussions in the future.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Some explicit definitions of 'responsible, ethical and holistic' are needed here. Probably also explicit examples of irresponsible, unethical, and, err... reductive? behavior. Positive and negative reinforcement methods for our nascent AI child are urgently needed... I guess. Already we have a problem in that 'holistic' might sound nice, but opposite concepts - reductionist, analytic, atomistic - etc. are not necessarily bad views. It's simply the difference between a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach, both can be valuable in different contexts. Of course, 'holistic' could be a synonym for 'inclusive' but again, this is fuzzy. Do we want our optimized AI to be inclusive with respect to say, the opinions of people who constantly froth with hatred of and contempt for others? Here's another fun one: what's the optimal ethical ratio of compensation between the lowest-paid and the highest-paid members of an organization, such as a non-profit corporation, a state government, or a for-profit corporation?

amluto 4y ago

Designing trustworthy AI sounds comparably difficult to finding trustworthy people, and finding people who are widely agreed to be trustworthy is incredibly difficult. If you want AI to say the right things or have the right opinions, somehow the process needs to find the right things to say or the right opinions to have. This is somewhere between difficult and impossible. If you want AI to give correct facts, somehow you need to determine correct facts. Humans find this extremely difficult — one would need better-than-human AIs! Maybe a middle ground is possible: an AI that acknowledges the existence of multiple perspectives. Sadly a lot of people are forgetting about this lately.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
I don't know why people act like hallucinations and toxicity are these unsolvable problems. Both of them can be solved using data set curation and annotation, and model support for "toxicity" and "accuracy" annotations on token sequences ("style" would be a good one too). Then the model would have access to conditional probabilities given a toxicity/accuracy score, and generations could be guided to low toxicity/high accuracy generations. The cost of annotating data sets for these LLMs will be significant, but necessary.
- amluto 4y ago
  re:hallucinations. There are things that are clearly hallucinations, e.g. made up sources that straight-up don’t exist. But what if you asked an AI early in the pandemic how COVID spreads? re:toxicity. I believe there are things an AI could say that are widely agreed to be toxic. I also think there are things an AI (or a human!) could say that some people think are fine and others think are toxic.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    This could be handled by treating the annotations for toxicity/accuracy as distributions rather than scalar values (which is probably how we'd get them in the first place, since we'd have redundant evaluators for token sequences) and training the AI to predict both the mean and variance of the distribution. Areas where the AI had limited knowledge and things that people disagree on might have the same mean, but they'd get high variance scores, which would help people differentiate.

lacker 4y ago

I'm surprised how unfocused Mozilla is as an organization. They make Firefox, which is great. It's a product that's really important to the world, but it's struggling to maintain its market share. So why are they doing all these unrelated things like funding AI challenges? I look at their blog and you would never realize this is the people responsible for Firefox. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ Is their mentality that Firefox is actually not that big a deal? Do they get most of their funding for non-Firefox reasons? Nothing else they do seems even remotely comparable in importance, but I don't know how they see things.

dangerlibrary 4y ago
Something something eggs and baskets
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dandellion 4y ago
  Mozilla get 90% of their money from Google, 9% from advertisement, and 1% from other sources (like the paid VPN). They have no incentive to improve their browser and they keep removing features, which is probably why their browser usage share has almost disappeared.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Mozilla is almost the poster child of the rudderless NGO. Every little thing they do, from running an office in the homeless capital of the world, to running a circle-jerk competition like this one (no objective criteria for success), makes me wonder if Firefox is going to go away sometime soon. I wish the EU decided to take privacy seriously and either fully funded Mozilla or forked it. The cost would be a fraction of the harm done by those cookie popups. In general A.I. safety looks like a scam. For one thing there are all of EY's front groups such as lesswrong, effective altruism, longtermism, etc. Until ChatGPT came along A.I. safety was necessary to make A.I. look more important than it really was. Now, the story that "company X fired some/all of its A.I. safety staff" serves to legitimize the whole thing (obviously they are saying something important and dangerous to power, therefore A.I. safety is relevant.)

throwawayapples 4y ago

I wish someone would launch an Irresponsible AI challenge. That'd be a lot more fun and interesting. Oh, wait, Mozilla? So trustworthy (in their own vapid minds)