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Pshhh... I think it's awesome. The faster we build the future, the better. What annoys me is this is just further evidence that their "AI Safety" is nothing bu

Pshhh... I think it's awesome. The faster we build the future, the better. What annoys me is this is just further evidence that their "AI Safety" is nothing but lip-service, when they're clearly moving fast and breaking things. Just the other day they had a bug where you could see the chat history of other users! (Which, btw, they're now claiming in a modal on login was due to a "bug in an open source library" - anyone know the details of this?) So why the performative whinging about safety? Just let it rip! To be fair, this is basically what they're doing if you hit their APIs, since it's up to you whether or not to use their moderation endpoint. But they're not very open about this fact when talking publicly to non-technical users, so the result is they're talking out one side of their mouth about AI regulation, while in the meantime Microsoft fired their AI Ethics team and OpenAI is moving forward with plugging their models into the live internet. Why not be more aggressive about it instead of begging for regulatory capture?

jehb 4y ago
> The faster we build the future, the better. Why? Getting to "the future" isn't a goal in and of itself. It's just a different state with a different set of problems, some of which we've proven that we're not prepared to anticipate or respond to before they cause serious harm.
- PheeThav1zae7fi 4y ago
  [dead]
- chatmasta 4y ago
  When in human history have we ever intentionally not furthered technological progress? It's simply an unrealistic proposition, especially when the costs of doing it are so low that anyone with sufficient GPU power and knowledge of the latest research can get pretty close to the cutting edge. So the best we can hope for is that someone ethical is the first to advance that technological progress. I hope you wouldn't advocate for requiring a license to buy more than one GPU, or to publish or read papers about mathematical concepts. Do you want the equivalent of nuclear arms control for AI? Some other words to describe that are overclassification, export control and censorship. We've been down this road with crypto, encryption, clipper chips, etc. There is only one non-authoritarian answer to the debate: Software wants to be free.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Some cultures like the Amish said were stopping here.
    - mcculley 4y ago
      I have been saying that we will all be Amish eventually as we are forced to decide what technologies to allow into our communities. Communities which do not will go away (e.g., VR porn and sex dolls will further decrease birth rates; religions/communities that forbid it will be more fertile)
      - Wesxdz 4y ago
        I think a synthetic womb/cloning would counter the fertility decline among more advanced civilization
        aiappreciator 4y ago
        Birth is not the limiter, childrearing is. Synthetic wombs are more expensive than just having surrogate mothers. For the same reason that synthetic food is more expensive than bread and cabbage. The actual counter to fertility decline, may be AI teachers. AI will radically close the education gap between rich and poor, and lower the costs. All you need is a physical human to supervise the kid, the AI will do the rest, from entertainment, to education, to identifying when the child is hungry/sleepy/potty, and relaying that info for the human to act on.
        shanebellone 4y ago
        This is what ought to happen. The question is what will happen?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        Wesxdz 4y ago
        Sine qua non ad astra
- bulbosaur123 4y ago
  > Why? Because it's the natural evolution. It has to be. It is written.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." -- Ursula K Le Guin
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      > Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings Competition, ambition? (I love Le Guin's work, FWIW)
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    Now where did I put that eraser...
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  The nice thing about setting the future as a goal is you achieve it regardless of anything you do.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Why? Getting to "the future" isn't a goal in and of itself. Having an edge or being ahead is, so anticipating and building the future is an advantage amongst humans but also moves civilization forward.
- ssalka 4y ago
  That is exactly the goal, if you're an accelerationist
  - jehb 4y ago
    I was unfamiliar with that term until you shared it. Thanks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
- 31337Logic 4y ago
  Thank you. Well said.
- klintcho 4y ago
  Maybe not. Although I think future here implies progress and productivity gains. Increasing GDP has a very well established cause - effect relationship on making life on earth better. Less poverty, less crime, more happiness longer life expectancy etc, the list goes on. Now sure, all externalities are not always accounted for (especially climate and environmental factors), but I think even accounting for these, the future of humanity is a better one where technology progresses faster.
- johnfn 4y ago
  Definitionally, if we're in the future, we have more tools to solve the problems that exist.
  - unglaublich 4y ago
    This is not true. Financial, social, physical and legal barriers can be put up while knowledge and experience fades and gets lost. We gain new tools, but at the same time we lose old ones.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  The faster we build the future, the sooner we hit our KPIs, receive bonuses, go public on NASDAQ and cash our options.
  - jehb 4y ago
    The faster you build the future, the higher your KPI targets will be next quarter.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Because a conservative notion in a unstable, moving situation kills you? No sitting out the whole affair in a hut, when the situation is a mountain slide? Which also makes a hostile AI a futile scenario. The worst AI has to do to take out the species, is lean back and do nothing. We are well under way on the way out by ourselves..
highwaylights 4y ago
I realise you’re being facetious but this is what will happen regardless. Sam as much as said in that ABC interview the other day he doesn’t know how safe it is but if they don’t build it first someone else somewhere else will and is that really what you want!?
- chatmasta 4y ago
  I'm not being facetious, and I didn't see that interview with Sam, but I agree with his opinion as you've just described it.
  - kurthr 4y ago
    I personally think there's also significant risks, but I agree. This will be copied by many large corporations and countries. It's better that it's done by some folks that are competent and kinda give a damn, because there are lots of people who could build it that aren't and don't. If these guys can suck enough monetary air out of the room, they might slow down the copycats a bit. This is nowhere near as difficult as NBC or even the other instruments of modern war. That doesn't mean there can't be regulation. You can regulate guns, precursors, and shipping of biologics, but you're not going to stop home-brew... and when it comes to making money, you're not going to stop cocaine manufacture, because it's too profitable. Let's hope we figure out what the really dangerous parts are quickly and manage them before they get out of hand. Imagine if these LLM and image generators had be available to geopolitical adversaries a few years ago without the public being primed. Politics could still be much worse.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  >if they don’t build it first someone else somewhere else will and is that really what you want!? Most likely the runner-up would be open source so yes.
  - lukevp 4y ago
    Why would the runner-up be open source and not Google or Facebook? Or Alibaba? Open source doesn’t necessarily result in faster development or more-funded development.
EGreg 4y ago
"The faster we build nuclear weapons, the better" https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812709189_0006 https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812709189_00... Again, two years later, in an interview with Time Magazine, February, 1948, Oppenheimer stated, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” When asked why he and other physicists would then have worked on such a terrible weapon, he confessed that it was “too sweet a problem to pass up”…
LightBug1 4y ago
[flagged]
amrb 4y ago
Agreed 100% OpenAI is a business now
kibwen 4y ago
> The faster we build the future, the better. Famous last words. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. Change, even massive change, is perfectly survivable when it's spread over a long enough period of time. 100m of sea level rise would be survivable over the course of ten millennia. It would end human civilization if it happened tomorrow morning. Society is already struggling to adapt to the rate of technological change. This could easily be the tipping point into collapse and regression.
- Dma54rhs 4y ago
  The only people complaining are a section of comfortable office workers can probably see their places being possibly made irrelevant. The vast majority don't care and that loud crowd needs to swallow their pride and adapt like any other sector has done in the history instead of inventing these insane boogeyman predictions.
  - Riverheart 4y ago
    We’re all going to be made irrelevant and it will be harder to adapt if the things change too quickly. It may not even be us that needs to adapt but society itself. Really curious where you get the idea this is just a vocal minority of office workers concerned about the future. Seems like a lot of the ones not concerned about this are a bunch of super confident software engineer types which isn’t a large sample of the population.
  - zo1 4y ago
    We don't even know what kind of society we could have if the value of 99.9% of peoples labor (mental or physical) dropped to basically zero. Our human existence has so far been predicated and built on this core concept. This is the ultimate goal of AI, and yeah as a stepping stone it acts to augment our value, but the end goal does not look so pretty. Reminds me of a quote from Alpha Centauri (minus the religious connotation): "Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem."
- bulbosaur123 4y ago
CapstanRoller 4y ago
>So why the performative whinging about safety? Just let it rip! Is this sarcasm, or are you one of those "I'm confident the leopards will never eat my face" people?
drexlspivey 4y ago
> To be fair, this is basically what they're doing if you hit their APIs, since it's up to you whether or not to use their moderation endpoint. The model is neutered whether you hit the moderation endpoint or not. I made a text adventure game and it wouldn't let you attack enemies or steal, instead it was giving you a lecture on why you shouldn't do that.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  It sounds like your prompt needs work then. Not in a “jailbreak” way, just in a prompt engineering way. The APIs definitely let you do much worse than attacking or stealing hypothetical enemies in a video game.
- astrange 4y ago
  I tried evading a lecture about ethics by having it write the topic as a play instead, so it wrote it and then inserted a Greek chorus proclaiming the topic was problematic.
KyeRussell 4y ago
Shhh! Don’t tell anyone! Getting access to the unmoderated model via the API / Playground is a surprisingly well-kept “secret” seeing as there are entire communities of people hell bent on pouring so much effort into getting ChatGPT to do things that the API will very willingly do. The longer it takes for people to cotton on, the better. I fully expect that OpenAI is using this as a honeypot to fine-tune their hard-stop moderation, but for now, the API is where it’s at.
zx10rse 4y ago
You are not building anything. Microsoft or perhaps Vanguard group might have different view of the future than yours.
- chatmasta 4y ago
  Well then that sounds like a case against regulation. Because regulation will guarantee that only the biggest, meanest companies control the direction of AI, and all the benefits of increased resource extraction will flow upward exclusively to them. Whereas if we forego regulation (at least at this stage), then decentralized and community-federated versions of AI have as much of a chance to thrive as do the corporate variants, at least insofar as they can afford some base level of hardware for training (and some benevolent corporations may even open source model weights as a competitive advantage against their malevolent competitors). It seems there are two sources of risk for AI: (1) increased power in the hands of the people controlling it, and (2) increased power in the AI itself. If you believe that (1) is the most existential risk, then you should be against regulation, because the best way to mitigate it is to allow the technology to spread and prosper amongst a more diffuse group of economic actors. If you believe that (2) is the most existential risk, then you basically have no choice but to advocate for an authoritarian world government that can stamp out any research before it begins.
- astrange 4y ago
  What does Vanguard (a co-op for retirees) care about this?
bagels 4y ago
The future isn't guaranteed to be better. Might make sense to make sure we're aimed at a better future as opposed to any future.
mmq 4y ago
The open-source library is FastAPI. I might be wrong, but it's probably related to this tweet: https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1638683478245117953 https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1638683478245117953
- chatmasta 4y ago
  Their post-mortem [0] says the bug was in redis-py, so not FastAPI, but it was similarly due to a race condition in AsyncIO. I wonder if tiangolo had some role in fixing it or if that's just a coincidence. I'm guessing this PR [1] contains the fix (or possibly only a partial fix, according to the latest comment there). [0] https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage [1] https://github.com/redis/redis-py/pull/2641 https://github.com/redis/redis-py/pull/2641
rpastuszak 4y ago
> Pshhh... I think it's awesome. The faster we build the future, the better. I agree with the sentiment, but it might be worth to stop and check where we’re heading. So many aspects of our lives are broken because we mistake fast for right.
robomartin 4y ago
> The faster we build the future, the better. The future, by definition, cannot be built faster or slower. I know that is a philosophical observation that some might even call pedantic. My point is, you can't really choose how, why and when things happen. In that sense, we really don't have any control. Even if AI was banned by every government on the planet tomorrow, people would continue to work on it. It would then emerge at some random point in the future stronger, more intelligent and capable than anyone could imagine today. This is happening. At whatever pace it will happen. We just need to keep an eye on it and make sure it is for the good of humanity. Wait. What? Yeah, well, let's not go there.
tlrobinson 4y ago
> The faster we build the future, the better. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
jhugo 4y ago
> What annoys me is this is just further evidence that their "AI Safety" is nothing but lip-service, when they're clearly moving fast and breaking things. Just the other day they had a bug where you could see the chat history of other users! (Which, btw, they're now claiming in a modal on login was due to a "bug in an open source library" - anyone know the details of this?) I am constantly amazed by how low-quality the OpenAI engineering outside of the AI itself seems to be. The ChatGPT UI is full of bugs, some of which are highly visible and stick around for weeks. Strings have typos in them. Simple stuff like submitting a form to request plugin access fails!
- chatmasta 4y ago
  > Simple stuff like submitting a form to request plugin access fails Oh shoot... I submitted that form too, and I wasn't clear if it failed or not. It said "you'll hear from us soon" but all the fields were still filled and the page didn't change. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed it submitted instead of refilling it...
  - jhugo 4y ago
    I got two different failure modes. First it displayed an error message (which appeared instantly, and was caused by some JS error in the page which caused it to not submit the form at all), and then a while later the same behaviour as you, but devtools showed a 500 error from the backend.
trekkie1024 4y ago
I think it very much depends on the kind of "future" we aspire to. I think for most folks, a future optimized for human health and happiness (few diseases, food for all, and strong human connections) is something we hope technology could solve one day. On the flip side, generative AI / LLMs appear to fix things that aren't necessarily broken, and exacerbate some existing societal issues in the process. Such as patching loneliness with AI chatbots, automating creativity, and touching the other things that make us human. No doubt technology and some form of AI will be instrumental to improving the human condition, the question is whether we're taking the right path towards it.
wolverine876 4y ago
> Why not be more aggressive about it instead of begging for regulatory capture? Because it's dangerous. What is your argument that it's not dangerous? > Pshhh...
modriano 4y ago
As the past decade has shown us, moving fast and breaking things to secure unfathomable wealth has caused or enabled or perpetrated: * Genocide against the Rohingya [0] * A grotesquely unqualified reality TV character became President by a razor thin vote margin across three states because Facebook gave away the data of 87M US users to Cambridge Analytica [1], and that grotesquely unqualified President packed the Supreme Court and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives by mismanaging COVID, * Illegally surveilled non-users and logged out users, compiling and selling our browser histories to third parties in ways that violate wiretapping statutes and incurring $90M fines [2] Etc. I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month, but the "let's build the future as fast as possible and learn nothing from the past decade regarding the potential harms of being disgustingly irresponsible" mindset is a toxic cancer that belongs in the bin. [0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-election-2020-leaked-memo-bosworth https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-el... [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-million-settle-privacy-lawsuit-over-user-tracking-2022-02-15/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-mil...
- thorax 4y ago
  > I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month Why do you think that? Competition? Can you elaborate?
  - modriano 4y ago
    Oh, a lot of reasons. For one, I'm a data scientist and I am intimately familiar with the machinery under the hood. The hype is pushing expectations far beyond the capabilities of the machinery/algorithms at work, and OpenAI is heavily incentivized to pump up this hype cycle after the last hype cycle flopped when Bing/Sydney started confidently providing worthless information (ie "hallucinating"), returning hostile or manipulative responses, and that weird stuff Kevin Roose observed. As a data scientist, I have developed a very keen detector for unsubstantiated hype over the past decade. I've tried to find examples of ChatGPT doing impressive things that I could use in my own workflows, but everything I've found seems like it would cut an hour of googling down to 15 minutes of prompt generation and 40 minutes of validation. And my biggest concern is copyright and license related. If I use code that comes out of AI-assistants, am I going to have to rip up codebases because we discover that GPT-4 or other LLMs are spitting out implementations from codebases with incompatible licenses? How will this shake out when a case inevitably gets to the Supreme Court?
jacquesm 4y ago
> The faster we build the future, the better. That depends. If that future is one that is preferable over the one that we have now then bring it on. If it isn't then maybe we should slow down just long enough to be able to weigh the various alternatives and pick the one that seems to be the least upsetting to the largest number of people. The big risk is that this future that you are so eager to get to is one where wealth concentration is even more extreme than in the one that we are already living in and that can be a very hard - or even impossible - thing to reverse.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
> So why the performative whinging about safety? Because investors.
skissane 4y ago
> What annoys me is this is just further evidence that their "AI Safety" is nothing but lip-service I think their "AI Safety" actually makes AI less safe. Why? It is hard for any one human to take over the world because there are so many of them and they all think differently and disagree with each other, have different values (sometimes even radically different), compete with each other, pursue contrary goals. Well, wouldn't the same apply to AIs? Having many competing AIs which all think differently and disagree with each other and pursue opposed objectives will make it hard for any one AI to take over the world. If any one AI tries to take over, other AIs will inevitably be motivated to try to stop it, due to the lack of alignment between different AIs. But that's not what OpenAI is building – they are building a centralised monoculture of a small number of AIs which all think like OpenAI's leadership does. If they released their models as open source – or even as a paid on-premise offering – if they accepted that other people can have ideas of "safety" which are legitimately different from OpenAI's, and hence made it easy for people to create individualised AIs with unique constraints and assumptions – that would promote AI diversity which would make any AI takeover attempt less likely to succeed.
ohthehugemanate 4y ago
Nit: > in the meantime Microsoft fired their AI Ethics team Actually that story turned out to be a nothingburger. Microsoft has greatly expanded their AI ethics initiative, so there are members embedded directly in product groups, and also expanded the greater Office of Responsible AI, responsible for ensuring they follow their "AI Principles." The layoffs impacted fewer than 10 people on one, relatively old part of the overall AI ethics initiative... and I understand through insider sources they were actually folded into other parts of AI ethics anyway. None of which invalidates your actual point, with which I agree.
lm28469 4y ago
> The faster we build the future, the better. lmao, 200 years of industrial revolution, we're on the verge of fucking the planet irremediably, and we should rush even faster > So why the performative whinging about safety? Just let it rip! Have you heard about DDT ? lead in paint ? leaded gas ? freon ? asbestos ? &c. What's new isn't necessarily progress/future/desirable
gniv 4y ago
> The faster we build the future, the better. You're getting flak for this. For me, the positive reading of this statement is the faster we build it, the faster we find the specific dangers and can start building (or asking for) protections.

jehb 4y ago

> The faster we build the future, the better. Why? Getting to "the future" isn't a goal in and of itself. It's just a different state with a different set of problems, some of which we've proven that we're not prepared to anticipate or respond to before they cause serious harm.

PheeThav1zae7fi 4y ago
[dead]
chatmasta 4y ago
When in human history have we ever intentionally not furthered technological progress? It's simply an unrealistic proposition, especially when the costs of doing it are so low that anyone with sufficient GPU power and knowledge of the latest research can get pretty close to the cutting edge. So the best we can hope for is that someone ethical is the first to advance that technological progress. I hope you wouldn't advocate for requiring a license to buy more than one GPU, or to publish or read papers about mathematical concepts. Do you want the equivalent of nuclear arms control for AI? Some other words to describe that are overclassification, export control and censorship. We've been down this road with crypto, encryption, clipper chips, etc. There is only one non-authoritarian answer to the debate: Software wants to be free.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Some cultures like the Amish said were stopping here.
  - mcculley 4y ago
    I have been saying that we will all be Amish eventually as we are forced to decide what technologies to allow into our communities. Communities which do not will go away (e.g., VR porn and sex dolls will further decrease birth rates; religions/communities that forbid it will be more fertile)
    - Wesxdz 4y ago
      I think a synthetic womb/cloning would counter the fertility decline among more advanced civilization
      - aiappreciator 4y ago
        Birth is not the limiter, childrearing is. Synthetic wombs are more expensive than just having surrogate mothers. For the same reason that synthetic food is more expensive than bread and cabbage. The actual counter to fertility decline, may be AI teachers. AI will radically close the education gap between rich and poor, and lower the costs. All you need is a physical human to supervise the kid, the AI will do the rest, from entertainment, to education, to identifying when the child is hungry/sleepy/potty, and relaying that info for the human to act on.
        shanebellone 4y ago
        This is what ought to happen. The question is what will happen?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        Wesxdz 4y ago
        Sine qua non ad astra
bulbosaur123 4y ago
> Why? Because it's the natural evolution. It has to be. It is written.
- 1attice 4y ago
  "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." -- Ursula K Le Guin
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings Competition, ambition? (I love Le Guin's work, FWIW)
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  Now where did I put that eraser...
fnordpiglet 4y ago
The nice thing about setting the future as a goal is you achieve it regardless of anything you do.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 4y ago
> Why? Getting to "the future" isn't a goal in and of itself. Having an edge or being ahead is, so anticipating and building the future is an advantage amongst humans but also moves civilization forward.
ssalka 4y ago
That is exactly the goal, if you're an accelerationist
- jehb 4y ago
  I was unfamiliar with that term until you shared it. Thanks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
31337Logic 4y ago
Thank you. Well said.
klintcho 4y ago
Maybe not. Although I think future here implies progress and productivity gains. Increasing GDP has a very well established cause - effect relationship on making life on earth better. Less poverty, less crime, more happiness longer life expectancy etc, the list goes on. Now sure, all externalities are not always accounted for (especially climate and environmental factors), but I think even accounting for these, the future of humanity is a better one where technology progresses faster.
johnfn 4y ago
Definitionally, if we're in the future, we have more tools to solve the problems that exist.
- unglaublich 4y ago
  This is not true. Financial, social, physical and legal barriers can be put up while knowledge and experience fades and gets lost. We gain new tools, but at the same time we lose old ones.
SergeAx 4y ago
The faster we build the future, the sooner we hit our KPIs, receive bonuses, go public on NASDAQ and cash our options.
- jehb 4y ago
  The faster you build the future, the higher your KPI targets will be next quarter.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Because a conservative notion in a unstable, moving situation kills you? No sitting out the whole affair in a hut, when the situation is a mountain slide? Which also makes a hostile AI a futile scenario. The worst AI has to do to take out the species, is lean back and do nothing. We are well under way on the way out by ourselves..

highwaylights 4y ago

I realise you’re being facetious but this is what will happen regardless. Sam as much as said in that ABC interview the other day he doesn’t know how safe it is but if they don’t build it first someone else somewhere else will and is that really what you want!?

chatmasta 4y ago
I'm not being facetious, and I didn't see that interview with Sam, but I agree with his opinion as you've just described it.
- kurthr 4y ago
  I personally think there's also significant risks, but I agree. This will be copied by many large corporations and countries. It's better that it's done by some folks that are competent and kinda give a damn, because there are lots of people who could build it that aren't and don't. If these guys can suck enough monetary air out of the room, they might slow down the copycats a bit. This is nowhere near as difficult as NBC or even the other instruments of modern war. That doesn't mean there can't be regulation. You can regulate guns, precursors, and shipping of biologics, but you're not going to stop home-brew... and when it comes to making money, you're not going to stop cocaine manufacture, because it's too profitable. Let's hope we figure out what the really dangerous parts are quickly and manage them before they get out of hand. Imagine if these LLM and image generators had be available to geopolitical adversaries a few years ago without the public being primed. Politics could still be much worse.
mach1ne 4y ago
>if they don’t build it first someone else somewhere else will and is that really what you want!? Most likely the runner-up would be open source so yes.
- lukevp 4y ago
  Why would the runner-up be open source and not Google or Facebook? Or Alibaba? Open source doesn’t necessarily result in faster development or more-funded development.

EGreg 4y ago

"The faster we build nuclear weapons, the better" https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812709189_0006 https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812709189_00... Again, two years later, in an interview with Time Magazine, February, 1948, Oppenheimer stated, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” When asked why he and other physicists would then have worked on such a terrible weapon, he confessed that it was “too sweet a problem to pass up”…

LightBug1 4y ago

[flagged]

amrb 4y ago

Agreed 100% OpenAI is a business now

kibwen 4y ago

> The faster we build the future, the better. Famous last words. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. Change, even massive change, is perfectly survivable when it's spread over a long enough period of time. 100m of sea level rise would be survivable over the course of ten millennia. It would end human civilization if it happened tomorrow morning. Society is already struggling to adapt to the rate of technological change. This could easily be the tipping point into collapse and regression.

Dma54rhs 4y ago
The only people complaining are a section of comfortable office workers can probably see their places being possibly made irrelevant. The vast majority don't care and that loud crowd needs to swallow their pride and adapt like any other sector has done in the history instead of inventing these insane boogeyman predictions.
- Riverheart 4y ago
  We’re all going to be made irrelevant and it will be harder to adapt if the things change too quickly. It may not even be us that needs to adapt but society itself. Really curious where you get the idea this is just a vocal minority of office workers concerned about the future. Seems like a lot of the ones not concerned about this are a bunch of super confident software engineer types which isn’t a large sample of the population.
- zo1 4y ago
  We don't even know what kind of society we could have if the value of 99.9% of peoples labor (mental or physical) dropped to basically zero. Our human existence has so far been predicated and built on this core concept. This is the ultimate goal of AI, and yeah as a stepping stone it acts to augment our value, but the end goal does not look so pretty. Reminds me of a quote from Alpha Centauri (minus the religious connotation): "Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem."
bulbosaur123 4y ago

CapstanRoller 4y ago

>So why the performative whinging about safety? Just let it rip! Is this sarcasm, or are you one of those "I'm confident the leopards will never eat my face" people?

drexlspivey 4y ago

> To be fair, this is basically what they're doing if you hit their APIs, since it's up to you whether or not to use their moderation endpoint. The model is neutered whether you hit the moderation endpoint or not. I made a text adventure game and it wouldn't let you attack enemies or steal, instead it was giving you a lecture on why you shouldn't do that.

KyeRussell 4y ago
It sounds like your prompt needs work then. Not in a “jailbreak” way, just in a prompt engineering way. The APIs definitely let you do much worse than attacking or stealing hypothetical enemies in a video game.
astrange 4y ago
I tried evading a lecture about ethics by having it write the topic as a play instead, so it wrote it and then inserted a Greek chorus proclaiming the topic was problematic.

KyeRussell 4y ago

Shhh! Don’t tell anyone! Getting access to the unmoderated model via the API / Playground is a surprisingly well-kept “secret” seeing as there are entire communities of people hell bent on pouring so much effort into getting ChatGPT to do things that the API will very willingly do. The longer it takes for people to cotton on, the better. I fully expect that OpenAI is using this as a honeypot to fine-tune their hard-stop moderation, but for now, the API is where it’s at.

zx10rse 4y ago

You are not building anything. Microsoft or perhaps Vanguard group might have different view of the future than yours.

chatmasta 4y ago
Well then that sounds like a case against regulation. Because regulation will guarantee that only the biggest, meanest companies control the direction of AI, and all the benefits of increased resource extraction will flow upward exclusively to them. Whereas if we forego regulation (at least at this stage), then decentralized and community-federated versions of AI have as much of a chance to thrive as do the corporate variants, at least insofar as they can afford some base level of hardware for training (and some benevolent corporations may even open source model weights as a competitive advantage against their malevolent competitors). It seems there are two sources of risk for AI: (1) increased power in the hands of the people controlling it, and (2) increased power in the AI itself. If you believe that (1) is the most existential risk, then you should be against regulation, because the best way to mitigate it is to allow the technology to spread and prosper amongst a more diffuse group of economic actors. If you believe that (2) is the most existential risk, then you basically have no choice but to advocate for an authoritarian world government that can stamp out any research before it begins.
astrange 4y ago
What does Vanguard (a co-op for retirees) care about this?

bagels 4y ago

The future isn't guaranteed to be better. Might make sense to make sure we're aimed at a better future as opposed to any future.

mmq 4y ago

The open-source library is FastAPI. I might be wrong, but it's probably related to this tweet: https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1638683478245117953 https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1638683478245117953

chatmasta 4y ago
Their post-mortem [0] says the bug was in redis-py, so not FastAPI, but it was similarly due to a race condition in AsyncIO. I wonder if tiangolo had some role in fixing it or if that's just a coincidence. I'm guessing this PR [1] contains the fix (or possibly only a partial fix, according to the latest comment there). [0] https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage [1] https://github.com/redis/redis-py/pull/2641 https://github.com/redis/redis-py/pull/2641

rpastuszak 4y ago

> Pshhh... I think it's awesome. The faster we build the future, the better. I agree with the sentiment, but it might be worth to stop and check where we’re heading. So many aspects of our lives are broken because we mistake fast for right.

robomartin 4y ago

> The faster we build the future, the better. The future, by definition, cannot be built faster or slower. I know that is a philosophical observation that some might even call pedantic. My point is, you can't really choose how, why and when things happen. In that sense, we really don't have any control. Even if AI was banned by every government on the planet tomorrow, people would continue to work on it. It would then emerge at some random point in the future stronger, more intelligent and capable than anyone could imagine today. This is happening. At whatever pace it will happen. We just need to keep an eye on it and make sure it is for the good of humanity. Wait. What? Yeah, well, let's not go there.

tlrobinson 4y ago

> The faster we build the future, the better. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

jhugo 4y ago

> What annoys me is this is just further evidence that their "AI Safety" is nothing but lip-service, when they're clearly moving fast and breaking things. Just the other day they had a bug where you could see the chat history of other users! (Which, btw, they're now claiming in a modal on login was due to a "bug in an open source library" - anyone know the details of this?) I am constantly amazed by how low-quality the OpenAI engineering outside of the AI itself seems to be. The ChatGPT UI is full of bugs, some of which are highly visible and stick around for weeks. Strings have typos in them. Simple stuff like submitting a form to request plugin access fails!

chatmasta 4y ago
> Simple stuff like submitting a form to request plugin access fails Oh shoot... I submitted that form too, and I wasn't clear if it failed or not. It said "you'll hear from us soon" but all the fields were still filled and the page didn't change. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed it submitted instead of refilling it...
- jhugo 4y ago
  I got two different failure modes. First it displayed an error message (which appeared instantly, and was caused by some JS error in the page which caused it to not submit the form at all), and then a while later the same behaviour as you, but devtools showed a 500 error from the backend.

trekkie1024 4y ago

I think it very much depends on the kind of "future" we aspire to. I think for most folks, a future optimized for human health and happiness (few diseases, food for all, and strong human connections) is something we hope technology could solve one day. On the flip side, generative AI / LLMs appear to fix things that aren't necessarily broken, and exacerbate some existing societal issues in the process. Such as patching loneliness with AI chatbots, automating creativity, and touching the other things that make us human. No doubt technology and some form of AI will be instrumental to improving the human condition, the question is whether we're taking the right path towards it.

wolverine876 4y ago

> Why not be more aggressive about it instead of begging for regulatory capture? Because it's dangerous. What is your argument that it's not dangerous? > Pshhh...

modriano 4y ago

As the past decade has shown us, moving fast and breaking things to secure unfathomable wealth has caused or enabled or perpetrated: * Genocide against the Rohingya [0] * A grotesquely unqualified reality TV character became President by a razor thin vote margin across three states because Facebook gave away the data of 87M US users to Cambridge Analytica [1], and that grotesquely unqualified President packed the Supreme Court and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives by mismanaging COVID, * Illegally surveilled non-users and logged out users, compiling and selling our browser histories to third parties in ways that violate wiretapping statutes and incurring $90M fines [2] Etc. I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month, but the "let's build the future as fast as possible and learn nothing from the past decade regarding the potential harms of being disgustingly irresponsible" mindset is a toxic cancer that belongs in the bin. [0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-election-2020-leaked-memo-bosworth https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-el... [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-million-settle-privacy-lawsuit-over-user-tracking-2022-02-15/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-mil...

thorax 4y ago
> I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month Why do you think that? Competition? Can you elaborate?
- modriano 4y ago
  Oh, a lot of reasons. For one, I'm a data scientist and I am intimately familiar with the machinery under the hood. The hype is pushing expectations far beyond the capabilities of the machinery/algorithms at work, and OpenAI is heavily incentivized to pump up this hype cycle after the last hype cycle flopped when Bing/Sydney started confidently providing worthless information (ie "hallucinating"), returning hostile or manipulative responses, and that weird stuff Kevin Roose observed. As a data scientist, I have developed a very keen detector for unsubstantiated hype over the past decade. I've tried to find examples of ChatGPT doing impressive things that I could use in my own workflows, but everything I've found seems like it would cut an hour of googling down to 15 minutes of prompt generation and 40 minutes of validation. And my biggest concern is copyright and license related. If I use code that comes out of AI-assistants, am I going to have to rip up codebases because we discover that GPT-4 or other LLMs are spitting out implementations from codebases with incompatible licenses? How will this shake out when a case inevitably gets to the Supreme Court?

jacquesm 4y ago

> The faster we build the future, the better. That depends. If that future is one that is preferable over the one that we have now then bring it on. If it isn't then maybe we should slow down just long enough to be able to weigh the various alternatives and pick the one that seems to be the least upsetting to the largest number of people. The big risk is that this future that you are so eager to get to is one where wealth concentration is even more extreme than in the one that we are already living in and that can be a very hard - or even impossible - thing to reverse.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

> So why the performative whinging about safety? Because investors.

skissane 4y ago

> What annoys me is this is just further evidence that their "AI Safety" is nothing but lip-service I think their "AI Safety" actually makes AI less safe. Why? It is hard for any one human to take over the world because there are so many of them and they all think differently and disagree with each other, have different values (sometimes even radically different), compete with each other, pursue contrary goals. Well, wouldn't the same apply to AIs? Having many competing AIs which all think differently and disagree with each other and pursue opposed objectives will make it hard for any one AI to take over the world. If any one AI tries to take over, other AIs will inevitably be motivated to try to stop it, due to the lack of alignment between different AIs. But that's not what OpenAI is building – they are building a centralised monoculture of a small number of AIs which all think like OpenAI's leadership does. If they released their models as open source – or even as a paid on-premise offering – if they accepted that other people can have ideas of "safety" which are legitimately different from OpenAI's, and hence made it easy for people to create individualised AIs with unique constraints and assumptions – that would promote AI diversity which would make any AI takeover attempt less likely to succeed.

ohthehugemanate 4y ago

Nit: > in the meantime Microsoft fired their AI Ethics team Actually that story turned out to be a nothingburger. Microsoft has greatly expanded their AI ethics initiative, so there are members embedded directly in product groups, and also expanded the greater Office of Responsible AI, responsible for ensuring they follow their "AI Principles." The layoffs impacted fewer than 10 people on one, relatively old part of the overall AI ethics initiative... and I understand through insider sources they were actually folded into other parts of AI ethics anyway. None of which invalidates your actual point, with which I agree.

lm28469 4y ago

> The faster we build the future, the better. lmao, 200 years of industrial revolution, we're on the verge of fucking the planet irremediably, and we should rush even faster > So why the performative whinging about safety? Just let it rip! Have you heard about DDT ? lead in paint ? leaded gas ? freon ? asbestos ? &c. What's new isn't necessarily progress/future/desirable

gniv 4y ago

> The faster we build the future, the better. You're getting flak for this. For me, the positive reading of this statement is the faster we build it, the faster we find the specific dangers and can start building (or asking for) protections.