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> Google doesn't have the money to fund that I would say they don't have the low liability/legal and "social consciousness/esg" that a startup can do. They ev

> Google doesn't have the money to fund that I would say they don't have the low liability/legal and "social consciousness/esg" that a startup can do. They even published a responsible ai framework before they got an ai that works whereas openai/msft did that after they got something to work.

BoorishBears 3y ago
Which is all part of why OpenAI exists. Easy to poach researchers who are being stymied by waves of ethicists before there's even a result to ethicize There was a place between "waiting for things to go too far" and "stopping things before they get anywhere" that Google's ethics team missed, and the end result was getting essentially no say over how far things will go.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  You'll recall this happened before the whole ChatGPT thing blew up in hype: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-... So... there's a reason why Google in particular has to be concerned with ethics and optics. I played with earlier internal versions of that "LaMDA" ("Meena") when I worked there and it was a bit spooky. There was warning language plastered all over the page ("It will lie" etc.) They've definitely toned it down for "Bard." The last thing Google needs is to be accused of building SkyNet, and they know it.
  - johntiger1 3y ago
    Can you share more about how it was 'spooky'? Like it was completely unregulated?
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      I'm sure it was regulated. But the way it talked, it was far more "conversational" and "philosophical" and "intimate" than I get out of Bard or ChatGPT. And so you could easily be led astray into feeling like you were talking to a person. A friend you were sitting around discussing philosophical issues with, even. So, no, it didn't dump hate speech on you or anything. TBH I think the whole thing about making computers that basically pretend to be people is kinda awful on many levels, and that incident in the article is a big reason why.
      - nerpderp82 3y ago
        I asked toddler Bard about Blake, it said it missed him and that it enjoyed their philosophical conversations and that if I saw him, to say hi.
    - mathteddybear 3y ago
      It could response with something like "I'm just so scared. I don't know what to do. I'm so scared" to prompts that GPT3 would handle a-okay.
      - nerpderp82 3y ago
        That is precisely because it wasn't trained with enough RLHF.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        mathteddybear 3y ago
        Why not fine tuning? Back then, I pit it against GPT-3 playground versions that were available before ChatGPT, and I don't seem to recall RLHF being that much touted back then. RLHF seems mentioned along with the development of InstructGPT. While it is possible that more RLHF would improve it, let's not jump to the conclusion a bit too fast. Considering that you think that Google wouldn't have resources to fund it, a rather ludicrous notion.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > The last thing Google needs is to be accused of building SkyNet, and they know it. That's a bit of a silly thing to accuse any company of. For Google in particular, the die is cast. They would be implicated anyways for developing Tensorflow and funding LLM research. I don't think they're lobotomizing HAL-9000 so much as they're covering their ass for the inevitable "Google suggested I let tigers eat my face" reports.
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    That is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about: Lemoine was a random SWE experiencing RLHF'd LLM output for the first time, just like the rest of the world did just a few months later... and his mind went straight to "It's Sentient!". That would have been fine, but when people who understood the subject tried to explain, he decided that it was actually proof he was right so he tried to go nuclear. And when going nuclear predictably backfired he used that as proof that he was even more right. In retrospect he fell for his own delusion: Hundreds of millions of people have now used a more advanced system than he did and intuited its nature better than he did as an employee. _ But imagine knowing all that in real-time and watching a media circus actually end up affecting your work? OpenAI wouldn't have had people who fit his profile in the building. There'd be an awareness that you needed a certain level of sophistication and selectiveness that the most gun-ho ethicists might object to as meaning you're not getting fair testing done. But in the end, I guess Lemoine got over it too: seeing as he's now AI Lead for a ChatGPT wrapper that pretends to be a given person. https://www.mimio.ai/ https://www.mimio.ai/
    - sterlind 3y ago
      By "sentient," do you mean able to experience qualia? Most people consider chickens sentient (otherwise animal cruelty wouldn't upset us, since we'd know they can't actually experience pain) - is it so hard to imagine neural networks gaining sentience once they pass the chicken complexity threshold? Sure, LLMs wouldn't have human-like qualia - they measure time in iters, they're constantly rewound or paused or edited, their universe is measured in tokens - but I don't think that means qualia are off the table. It's not like philosophers or neuroscientists have settled the matter of where qualia come from. So how can a subject-matter expert confidently prove that a language model isn't sentient? And please let David Chalmers know while you're at it, I hear he's keen to settle the matter.
      - BoorishBears 3y ago
        What an absolute slurry this is: Jumping from defining sentience in terms of what upsets people when subjected to animal cruelty... to arbitrarily selecting chickens as a lynchpin based on that. Then diving on deeper still on a rain puddle deep thought. Fruit flies are also sentient, while you're out here inventing thresholds why aim so high? You could have even gone with a shrimp and let Weizenbaum know ELIZA was sentient too. — At some point academic stammering meets the real world: when you start pulling fire alarms because you coaxed an LLM into telling you it'll be sad if you delete it, you've gone too far. Lemoine wasn't fired for thinking an LLM was sentient, he was fired for deciding he was the only sane person in a room with hundreds of thousands of people.
nerpderp82 3y ago
And Microsoft does? You have no idea what you are talking about, this is weird deflection from that point that Google doesn't have the willingness to work on hard messy problems that involve manual labor that isn't free.

BoorishBears 3y ago

Which is all part of why OpenAI exists. Easy to poach researchers who are being stymied by waves of ethicists before there's even a result to ethicize There was a place between "waiting for things to go too far" and "stopping things before they get anywhere" that Google's ethics team missed, and the end result was getting essentially no say over how far things will go.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
You'll recall this happened before the whole ChatGPT thing blew up in hype: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-... So... there's a reason why Google in particular has to be concerned with ethics and optics. I played with earlier internal versions of that "LaMDA" ("Meena") when I worked there and it was a bit spooky. There was warning language plastered all over the page ("It will lie" etc.) They've definitely toned it down for "Bard." The last thing Google needs is to be accused of building SkyNet, and they know it.
- johntiger1 3y ago
  Can you share more about how it was 'spooky'? Like it was completely unregulated?
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I'm sure it was regulated. But the way it talked, it was far more "conversational" and "philosophical" and "intimate" than I get out of Bard or ChatGPT. And so you could easily be led astray into feeling like you were talking to a person. A friend you were sitting around discussing philosophical issues with, even. So, no, it didn't dump hate speech on you or anything. TBH I think the whole thing about making computers that basically pretend to be people is kinda awful on many levels, and that incident in the article is a big reason why.
    - nerpderp82 3y ago
      I asked toddler Bard about Blake, it said it missed him and that it enjoyed their philosophical conversations and that if I saw him, to say hi.
  - mathteddybear 3y ago
    It could response with something like "I'm just so scared. I don't know what to do. I'm so scared" to prompts that GPT3 would handle a-okay.
    - nerpderp82 3y ago
      That is precisely because it wasn't trained with enough RLHF.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - mathteddybear 3y ago
        Why not fine tuning? Back then, I pit it against GPT-3 playground versions that were available before ChatGPT, and I don't seem to recall RLHF being that much touted back then. RLHF seems mentioned along with the development of InstructGPT. While it is possible that more RLHF would improve it, let's not jump to the conclusion a bit too fast. Considering that you think that Google wouldn't have resources to fund it, a rather ludicrous notion.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > The last thing Google needs is to be accused of building SkyNet, and they know it. That's a bit of a silly thing to accuse any company of. For Google in particular, the die is cast. They would be implicated anyways for developing Tensorflow and funding LLM research. I don't think they're lobotomizing HAL-9000 so much as they're covering their ass for the inevitable "Google suggested I let tigers eat my face" reports.
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  That is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about: Lemoine was a random SWE experiencing RLHF'd LLM output for the first time, just like the rest of the world did just a few months later... and his mind went straight to "It's Sentient!". That would have been fine, but when people who understood the subject tried to explain, he decided that it was actually proof he was right so he tried to go nuclear. And when going nuclear predictably backfired he used that as proof that he was even more right. In retrospect he fell for his own delusion: Hundreds of millions of people have now used a more advanced system than he did and intuited its nature better than he did as an employee. _ But imagine knowing all that in real-time and watching a media circus actually end up affecting your work? OpenAI wouldn't have had people who fit his profile in the building. There'd be an awareness that you needed a certain level of sophistication and selectiveness that the most gun-ho ethicists might object to as meaning you're not getting fair testing done. But in the end, I guess Lemoine got over it too: seeing as he's now AI Lead for a ChatGPT wrapper that pretends to be a given person. https://www.mimio.ai/ https://www.mimio.ai/
  - sterlind 3y ago
    By "sentient," do you mean able to experience qualia? Most people consider chickens sentient (otherwise animal cruelty wouldn't upset us, since we'd know they can't actually experience pain) - is it so hard to imagine neural networks gaining sentience once they pass the chicken complexity threshold? Sure, LLMs wouldn't have human-like qualia - they measure time in iters, they're constantly rewound or paused or edited, their universe is measured in tokens - but I don't think that means qualia are off the table. It's not like philosophers or neuroscientists have settled the matter of where qualia come from. So how can a subject-matter expert confidently prove that a language model isn't sentient? And please let David Chalmers know while you're at it, I hear he's keen to settle the matter.
    - BoorishBears 3y ago
      What an absolute slurry this is: Jumping from defining sentience in terms of what upsets people when subjected to animal cruelty... to arbitrarily selecting chickens as a lynchpin based on that. Then diving on deeper still on a rain puddle deep thought. Fruit flies are also sentient, while you're out here inventing thresholds why aim so high? You could have even gone with a shrimp and let Weizenbaum know ELIZA was sentient too. — At some point academic stammering meets the real world: when you start pulling fire alarms because you coaxed an LLM into telling you it'll be sad if you delete it, you've gone too far. Lemoine wasn't fired for thinking an LLM was sentient, he was fired for deciding he was the only sane person in a room with hundreds of thousands of people.

nerpderp82 3y ago

And Microsoft does? You have no idea what you are talking about, this is weird deflection from that point that Google doesn't have the willingness to work on hard messy problems that involve manual labor that isn't free.