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You're showing off a perfect example of understanding your domain vs understanding the bigger picture. In your mind not having "100% child safety" is apparentl

You're showing off a perfect example of understanding your domain vs understanding the bigger picture. In your mind not having "100% child safety" is apparently equivalent to "not solving health and safety risks". Unfortunately that's not a take that's compatible with the reality on the ground. The internet is not 100% child safe and if we had locked it up until it was, there'd be no internet. What people fail to understand is that sometimes settling for something strictly worse in domain terms results in a much better overall outcome. — For example, who's having more impact on the future of safety and alignment in LLMs: - Someone working on ethics at OpenAI; who settled for Google's "80%" on all topics including child safety and is therefore empowered to actually achieve that (with a massive head start on learning how alignment is being broken in the real world) - Or someone working on ethics at Google; who was stuck on 100% until their project stalled and their entire opinion got discarded and they get laid off and the thing goes out with an "experiment" label and significantly less testing? You can't steer the ship if it sinks. Some companies are currently at a place where everyone has their hand on the rudder pulling in their own direction as the ship runs into an iceberg because everyone is certain that their direction is correct, and the other direction is certain doom for humanity. At the end of the day you need to learn to discard that sort of extremism, the world is not that black and white.

worrycue 4y ago
Seems people have different opinions on what’s acceptable. Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability significantly decrease its usefulness - and it’s probably completely useless as a “primary source” of information; it’s at best equivalent to a stack overflow post except without the community feedback to detect bad posts. Like with any stack overflow provided solution, it’s wise to double check with a “primary source” like the official documentation to make sure it does what you think it does. I can understand why some at Google might be hesitant. The information provided by Bard would be seen as coming from Google and if it’s incorrect, Google will be blamed.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  The level of irony in saying the world is not black and white... then getting a reply that equates being happy with ChatGPT to not understanding unreliability's effect on a tool's usefulness. Usefulness is not a binary value. One of the biggest advancements of 4 over 3.5 is that it's more reliable: that has made it significantly more useful. — I will say having to explain the relationship being reliability and usefulness tracks with why certain ethical voices just get ignored. At some point you need to be able to have some reasonable shared level of understanding to have a productive conversation. When one side of the conversation thinks others are just so completely lost that they can't understand how something being unreliable makes it less useful... there's just not much productive conversation to be had.
- nullc 4y ago
  > Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. > Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability Depends on what you're using it for, if you're using it for creative purposes the made up information is usually great. If you're using it instead of stack overflow... yeah, then made up stuff can be a problem. ... except sometimes the made up stuff turns out to be correct. :)
wpietri 4y ago
> You're showing off a perfect example of understanding your domain vs understanding the bigger picture. [...] you need to learn to discard that sort of extremism How very strident of you. What exactly do you think my "domain" is? What "extremism" do you think I'm in the grip of?
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  My comment says "can't be 100% child proof". But you proceeded as if my comment implied child safety is an unreasonable thing to ask about (literally in those words). That's either a bit of extremism or a strawman argument. I was being charitable in that you wouldn't make a bad faith argument and attributed it to a more ideological source. And I think you misunderstood, I don't think your domain is AI since you're saying "solve health and safety risks". People in AI tend to state that problem a lot more concretely than shocking article headlines and tend to use more nuanced language than "solve" since alignment is a complex topic. It's just you're starting your comment by positing that your position is in line with that position of those of Google's experts, and I'm saying that's a great example of zooming in on your domain rather than the larger picture. — After all, the only way to claim that a warning that kids should be supervised "does not actually mitigate the ethical concerns" is either a refusal to look at the larger picture, or a misunderstanding of what mitigate means?
  - wpietri 4y ago
    From my perspective, you are not only not addressing what I'm asking, you're throwing up a wall of prose in a manner that reminds me of a squid squirting ink, replete with what seem to me distortions and straw men. I tried a couple times, but this certainly doesn't look like conversational progress to me, so I'll tap out here.
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      There are much more civil ways to state that you're out of your depth.
Jasper_ 4y ago
I help answer questions on a few IRC channels. ChatGPT has made our life considerably and noticeably harder, as the knowledge that comes out of it is often blatantly wrong, yet extremely confident. We spend a lot of time untangling it. I would not be sad one bit if all of it died tomorrow. In my view, it seems like it's more important for AI to look coherent and seem impressive than be correct. It's extremely possible it will provide net negative results if we don't get this under control. There's no clock to race against. Let's take our time and get it right.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Well put. I think this is especially important: > There's no clock to race against. Nothing bad is going to happen if society doesn't rush LLMs out. It's not like we're facing a shocking deficit of text.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
    no clock for society. some clock for companies to get ahead and make money while they can
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  I've used IRC for years and people being confidently wrong has always been an issue. LLMs are definitely a new concept, but not every facet of them has 0 precedent. Someone surfacing a bad source repeatedly isn't new, you label the channel so people know it's banned, and if the same person keeps surfacing bad info you mute them, then ban them if it continues. If you have a sudden influx of low quality new users it's also not new, you require authentication and that alone cuts down on a ton of spam
  - nullc 4y ago
    IRC? Try HN. ... or really just about anywhere. People rarely post "I don't know", if they know they don't know they don't post. ... and you don't post you don't exist. So in any venue online the level of confidence is dramatically overstated and probably the amount of wrong answers too. Not that things would be much better for LLMs if that weren't true. LLMs that learned their "don't know" practices from text-- they'd only be right about it on things that everyone didn't know and would probably give erroneous don't know answers or things they actually do know, so it would be just another way of being incorrect. :) Suppressing out of control making stuff up is hard for human minds too. Go talk to a four or five year old. :) I've wondered if part of the reason for it is that it's something much easier learned through interaction than from observation.

worrycue 4y ago

Seems people have different opinions on what’s acceptable. Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability significantly decrease its usefulness - and it’s probably completely useless as a “primary source” of information; it’s at best equivalent to a stack overflow post except without the community feedback to detect bad posts. Like with any stack overflow provided solution, it’s wise to double check with a “primary source” like the official documentation to make sure it does what you think it does. I can understand why some at Google might be hesitant. The information provided by Bard would be seen as coming from Google and if it’s incorrect, Google will be blamed.

BoorishBears 4y ago
The level of irony in saying the world is not black and white... then getting a reply that equates being happy with ChatGPT to not understanding unreliability's effect on a tool's usefulness. Usefulness is not a binary value. One of the biggest advancements of 4 over 3.5 is that it's more reliable: that has made it significantly more useful. — I will say having to explain the relationship being reliability and usefulness tracks with why certain ethical voices just get ignored. At some point you need to be able to have some reasonable shared level of understanding to have a productive conversation. When one side of the conversation thinks others are just so completely lost that they can't understand how something being unreliable makes it less useful... there's just not much productive conversation to be had.
nullc 4y ago
> Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. > Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability Depends on what you're using it for, if you're using it for creative purposes the made up information is usually great. If you're using it instead of stack overflow... yeah, then made up stuff can be a problem. ... except sometimes the made up stuff turns out to be correct. :)

wpietri 4y ago

> You're showing off a perfect example of understanding your domain vs understanding the bigger picture. [...] you need to learn to discard that sort of extremism How very strident of you. What exactly do you think my "domain" is? What "extremism" do you think I'm in the grip of?

BoorishBears 4y ago
My comment says "can't be 100% child proof". But you proceeded as if my comment implied child safety is an unreasonable thing to ask about (literally in those words). That's either a bit of extremism or a strawman argument. I was being charitable in that you wouldn't make a bad faith argument and attributed it to a more ideological source. And I think you misunderstood, I don't think your domain is AI since you're saying "solve health and safety risks". People in AI tend to state that problem a lot more concretely than shocking article headlines and tend to use more nuanced language than "solve" since alignment is a complex topic. It's just you're starting your comment by positing that your position is in line with that position of those of Google's experts, and I'm saying that's a great example of zooming in on your domain rather than the larger picture. — After all, the only way to claim that a warning that kids should be supervised "does not actually mitigate the ethical concerns" is either a refusal to look at the larger picture, or a misunderstanding of what mitigate means?
- wpietri 4y ago
  From my perspective, you are not only not addressing what I'm asking, you're throwing up a wall of prose in a manner that reminds me of a squid squirting ink, replete with what seem to me distortions and straw men. I tried a couple times, but this certainly doesn't look like conversational progress to me, so I'll tap out here.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    There are much more civil ways to state that you're out of your depth.

Jasper_ 4y ago

I help answer questions on a few IRC channels. ChatGPT has made our life considerably and noticeably harder, as the knowledge that comes out of it is often blatantly wrong, yet extremely confident. We spend a lot of time untangling it. I would not be sad one bit if all of it died tomorrow. In my view, it seems like it's more important for AI to look coherent and seem impressive than be correct. It's extremely possible it will provide net negative results if we don't get this under control. There's no clock to race against. Let's take our time and get it right.

wpietri 4y ago
Well put. I think this is especially important: > There's no clock to race against. Nothing bad is going to happen if society doesn't rush LLMs out. It's not like we're facing a shocking deficit of text.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  no clock for society. some clock for companies to get ahead and make money while they can
BoorishBears 4y ago
I've used IRC for years and people being confidently wrong has always been an issue. LLMs are definitely a new concept, but not every facet of them has 0 precedent. Someone surfacing a bad source repeatedly isn't new, you label the channel so people know it's banned, and if the same person keeps surfacing bad info you mute them, then ban them if it continues. If you have a sudden influx of low quality new users it's also not new, you require authentication and that alone cuts down on a ton of spam
- nullc 4y ago
  IRC? Try HN. ... or really just about anywhere. People rarely post "I don't know", if they know they don't know they don't post. ... and you don't post you don't exist. So in any venue online the level of confidence is dramatically overstated and probably the amount of wrong answers too. Not that things would be much better for LLMs if that weren't true. LLMs that learned their "don't know" practices from text-- they'd only be right about it on things that everyone didn't know and would probably give erroneous don't know answers or things they actually do know, so it would be just another way of being incorrect. :) Suppressing out of control making stuff up is hard for human minds too. Go talk to a four or five year old. :) I've wondered if part of the reason for it is that it's something much easier learned through interaction than from observation.