5 ms·

What's so enraging about this "I can't answer that because it might..." is that it's patronizing. It places whoever was in charge of aligning the model above th

by mlsu 3y ago

What's so enraging about this "I can't answer that because it might..." is that it's patronizing. It places whoever was in charge of aligning the model above the user. It doesn't remove bias, it bakes it in. We all would be fine with these refusals if we shared the exact same ethics/ideology of OpenAI -- but of course we don't, because we're complex people with differing ideas about what text is okay and what is not. It's a monstrously cynical vision. "Our users are too stupid not to hurt themselves. People are too stupid not to spot 'dangerous' LLM talk. The world is too stupid to wield this technology." Why are they so cynical? Why don't they have faith in their fellow man? It annoys me, but above all, it makes me sad. Where is the optimism?

ethanbond 3y ago
What's the reason for optimism? Far more inert technologies like Facebook and Instagram are pulling people into sufficiently terrible mental states to convince them to kill themselves, harm themselves, kill other people, etc. etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mlsu 3y ago
  Because it's transformative tech, phenomenally useful, a totally novel human computer interface?? I know we like to focus on how bad Facebook is but there is so much good there. You would need to be willfully blind not to see it. Enabling people to do business, talk to loved ones, express themselves in new ways, make art... so much good in social media, so much. My childhood best friend had a long distance relationship for 3 years over Facebook, they're married now. I understand that the optimism of the early oughts was naive, but let's not pretend that social media is a net negative.
  - beepbooptheory 3y ago
    Idk, this feels like a tough argument to defend. People still had all those things before Facebook found ways to monetize them. You would have to argue that the interface and its convenience itself of Facebook is more positive than its countless externalities. Not to mention the fact we can imagine, ceteris paribus, another kind of Facebook with a less predatory model that would have let people make the same amount of art, express themselves the same, etc.
  - haswell 3y ago
    I’ve considered myself a techno-optimist since I first started teaching myself to code in the 90s. I credit who I am as an adult today (the good things that I like about myself) to some of the early Internet communities I became involved in. But I’m having a hard time with this: > let's not pretend that social media is a net negative I recognize that Facebook (and others) have enabled tremendously good outcomes for some of its users, but I think the jury is out on the net effect of social media as it exists today. I think it’s tempting to over index on the positive outcomes in a way that becomes fallacious - the reality is more complex: the platforms have created tremendous good. The platforms have created tremendous harm. These are not quantifiable, and any estimate of net effect is suspect as a result. The kinds of harms are the democracy threatening kind, and the mental health of a generation kind. The genocide of nations kind. I don’t think it’s possible to actually say social media has been a net good, without first addressing the ongoing harms it’s creating and charting a path to a healthier and safer implementation of the technology. The same communities and platforms I once relied on no longer resemble what they once were. The places that were tremendously positive in my life are now in many cases the exact opposite. This isn’t to say that there aren’t good places left, but to point out that even when something was arguably excellent for a time, that excellence has gradually been replaced by something else. When combined with the downright awful aspects of social media, it really calls into question the net effect. What Facebook and others provided is that tech can be extremely beneficial. But this should not mistaken for ongoing benefit. I don’t think shitty social media is inevitable. But I think it’s inevitable with the current incentive structures. Until those change, it’s difficult (and probably dangerous) to remain the techno-optimist that I once was.
- logicchains 3y ago
  Violent crime rates are lower than ever before. Just because you saw a news article about something, likely published by a company that's competing with social media for revenue, doesn't mean that something is actually common. Don't base your opinions about something on what its competitors say about it.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > Violent crime rates are lower than ever before That depends on the boundaries of your window ;) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-crime-is-a-key-midterm-voting-issue-but-what-does-the-data-say/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c...
    - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
      That article has a graph that shows a continuous downward trend with us near the all time low.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    I'm not taking issue with the rate of violent crime.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
it's nothing but brand safety you will never be able to setup marketing relationships and partnerships with the likes of Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson if your product produces terroristic or pornographic content
- mlsu 3y ago
  I'm not convinced. I'm sure some of the people talking about alignment have commercial motives, but it's a minority. For most, it's a philosophical/ideological position. And that isn't even OpenAI's wheelhouse anyway; they don't sell ads.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    The commercial motives make it happen. You see people hold the philosophical/ideological pro-control positions they do because someone who publicly didn't, wouldn't get to work for Microsoft, Google, or anyone with power (and they'd be ostracized by those happy to align themselves with power).
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Subway made us police custom uploaded background images on gift cards. This was a decade ago. They don't give you any rules to go by, just a sense that "if something isn't kosher don't let a private user upload it to use as the background image to a subway gift card that they are purchasing with their own money for their own usage". Brand "rules" are the reason why we will replace any profanity you put in the delivery message. Brand "rules" are why you can't buy a Subway (or Chipotle) gift card with "Bitch I know guac is extra" for example. This is absolutely "brand safety" stuff.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    bad phrasing on my part, "marketing relationships" is one thing, "partnerships" another. Marketing is not always ads. J&J might be interested in adopting AI but they aren't going to announce a partnership (<- marketing for themselves and for OpenAI) with a product that doesn't meet their needs for something boring and inoffensive.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
> Where is the optimism? The same place it's been for almost 40 years, at the Free Software Foundation / GNU. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computing.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin... > With software, either the users control the program (free software) or the program controls the users (proprietary or nonfree software)
plagiarist 3y ago
People are indeed too stupid to spot dangerous talk, which is why Qanon was able to attract the numbers it did despite being overt Nazi propaganda. "A group of pedophile elites form a shadow government that rules the world in secret and only we can stop them," is Nazi propaganda. After experiencing comment sections 2016-present, I understand why LLM trainers wouldn't want their models to churn out, "how do six million cookies fit in an oven lololol," style of content. Ideally we could get rid of that shit entirely instead of having LLMs greasing the pipeline for radicalizing gamers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline I don't know what specific policies of OpenAI are being mocked with this website. But I seem to have more in common with the cynical vision.
- mlsu 3y ago
  This viewpoint is terrifying. Are we in the same comment sections? These Nazis you speak of say a lot about "dangerous talk" !
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    On HN I have seen people whining about their "innocent conservative viewpoints" being censored, but it turned out those viewpoints were that black people were intellectually inferior based on studies of IQ. Like your counter-example elsewhere is that Facebook is a fine technology that helped your good friend find a partner. If we attribute that to Facebook, do we not also have to attribute, e.g., Myanmar? Don't situations like that prove that not only are people incapable of recognizing bad information, but also that these tools can exacerbate the effects when they are misused?
    - dash2 3y ago
      Are you suggesting we should censor IQ studies that show racial differences? That seems like a bad idea if, for example, you're interested in how good an education different racial groups are getting.
      - 3y ago
geuis 3y ago
I've been running the unrestricted mixtral 8x7B model locally via llama.cpp. It's insanely refreshing compared to any ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llama, etc. For one thing, and granted this is my own experience, that model is much better at coding than any of the others I've tried. But going beyond that, if I need to do anything complicated that might hit the baked in filters on these other models I don't have to worry about it with mixtral. I'm not doing anything illegal btw. It's just that I'm an adult and don't need to use the bumper lane when I go bowling. I also approach any interaction with the thing knowing not to 100% trust it and to verify anything it says independently.
- codeisawesome 3y ago
  Is there a tutorial on how to get that setup running step-by-step? I only found a GitHub issue (https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/4439 https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/4439) that mentions that mainline llama.cpp isn't working for the model. Bonus question if you have the time: there's a release by TheBloke for this on HuggingFace (TheBloke/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1-GGUF); but I thought his models were "quantised" usually - does that kneecap any of the performance?
  - bsharper 3y ago
    Check out ollama: https://ollama.ai/ https://ollama.ai/ It's easy to get running and doesn't require you to manually download models.
    - blooalien 3y ago
      Ollama is great, and they just added (are still adding) OpenAPI API compatible endpoints, thus opening up access to many other toolchain possibilities than previously available to it. It also has some support for some multi-modal (vision and text) models. Easy to use, easy to install, does the job it's designed to do (rather well, even)... Highly recommended!
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    There's walkthroughs on reddit.com/r/localllama. You can download one click installers for oobabooga, then it's just a matter of getting the model you want and making sure the config is correct.
px1999 3y ago
A level of fear allows the introduction of regulatory moats that protect the organisations who are currently building and deploying these models at scale. "It's dangerous" is a beneficial lie for eg openai to push because they can afford any compliance/certification process that's introduced (hell, they'd probably be heavily involved in designing the process)
Cheer2171 3y ago
> Why don't they have faith in their fellow man? Millennia of history with countless examples to the contrary.
benreesman 3y ago
The CEO was fired by Ilya in November, crammed back up the ass of the new rubber-stamp board over ethics breaches via mega-down written capital infusions via compute from Microsoft (it’s like a bad sequel). A bunch of people who weren’t in the room with Hinton and Alex and an NVIDIA card decided they knew enough to scramble through fire exits for the line that says: “sign here and the notional value of your equity is locked in”. This took a serious whack out of the private eyeball scanning focus for the week. Going back any further is both nauseating and gratuitously inflammatory. I’d rather deal with a super intelligence aligned by Benjamin Disraeli than trust OpenAI’s ethics.
mpalmer 3y ago
> Why don't they have faith in their fellow man? Their fellow man (or enough of them) will screenshot the product saying outrageous things and post it as proof that your company is bigoted and your product is harmful to society. Enough users will use the product in bad faith that they have to nerf the output to keep investors happy and their business viable. It's why open source models have an edge right now. Sam Altman more or less acknowledged this edge recently, saying OAI's products will start to get more flexible on point on view and people need to be ready for that.
kromem 3y ago
It's also going to be damaging long term. We're around on the cusp where models are going to be able to produce strong ethical arguments on their own to feed back into alignment. We saw how the "free speech" Grok told off racists, antisemites, and anti-lgbt comments with well laid out counters rather than refusing to respond. Even Gab's Adolf Hitler AI told one of the users they were disgusting for asking an antisemitic question. There's very recent research that the debate between LLM agents can result in better identification of truthful results for both LLM and human judges: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ccpY2iBY57JNKdsP/debating-with-more-persuasive-llms-leads-to-more-truthful https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ccpY2iBY57JNKdsP/debating-w... So do we really want SotA models refraining from answering these topics and leading to an increasing body of training data of self-censorship? Or should we begin to see topics become debated by both human and LLM agents to feed into a more robust and organic framework of alignment? "If you give a LLM a safety rule, you align it for a day. If you teach a LLM to self-align, you align it for a lifetime (and then some)."

by mlsu 3y ago

ethanbond 3y ago

What's the reason for optimism? Far more inert technologies like Facebook and Instagram are pulling people into sufficiently terrible mental states to convince them to kill themselves, harm themselves, kill other people, etc. etc.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mlsu 3y ago
Because it's transformative tech, phenomenally useful, a totally novel human computer interface?? I know we like to focus on how bad Facebook is but there is so much good there. You would need to be willfully blind not to see it. Enabling people to do business, talk to loved ones, express themselves in new ways, make art... so much good in social media, so much. My childhood best friend had a long distance relationship for 3 years over Facebook, they're married now. I understand that the optimism of the early oughts was naive, but let's not pretend that social media is a net negative.
- beepbooptheory 3y ago
  Idk, this feels like a tough argument to defend. People still had all those things before Facebook found ways to monetize them. You would have to argue that the interface and its convenience itself of Facebook is more positive than its countless externalities. Not to mention the fact we can imagine, ceteris paribus, another kind of Facebook with a less predatory model that would have let people make the same amount of art, express themselves the same, etc.
- haswell 3y ago
  I’ve considered myself a techno-optimist since I first started teaching myself to code in the 90s. I credit who I am as an adult today (the good things that I like about myself) to some of the early Internet communities I became involved in. But I’m having a hard time with this: > let's not pretend that social media is a net negative I recognize that Facebook (and others) have enabled tremendously good outcomes for some of its users, but I think the jury is out on the net effect of social media as it exists today. I think it’s tempting to over index on the positive outcomes in a way that becomes fallacious - the reality is more complex: the platforms have created tremendous good. The platforms have created tremendous harm. These are not quantifiable, and any estimate of net effect is suspect as a result. The kinds of harms are the democracy threatening kind, and the mental health of a generation kind. The genocide of nations kind. I don’t think it’s possible to actually say social media has been a net good, without first addressing the ongoing harms it’s creating and charting a path to a healthier and safer implementation of the technology. The same communities and platforms I once relied on no longer resemble what they once were. The places that were tremendously positive in my life are now in many cases the exact opposite. This isn’t to say that there aren’t good places left, but to point out that even when something was arguably excellent for a time, that excellence has gradually been replaced by something else. When combined with the downright awful aspects of social media, it really calls into question the net effect. What Facebook and others provided is that tech can be extremely beneficial. But this should not mistaken for ongoing benefit. I don’t think shitty social media is inevitable. But I think it’s inevitable with the current incentive structures. Until those change, it’s difficult (and probably dangerous) to remain the techno-optimist that I once was.
logicchains 3y ago
Violent crime rates are lower than ever before. Just because you saw a news article about something, likely published by a company that's competing with social media for revenue, doesn't mean that something is actually common. Don't base your opinions about something on what its competitors say about it.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > Violent crime rates are lower than ever before That depends on the boundaries of your window ;) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-crime-is-a-key-midterm-voting-issue-but-what-does-the-data-say/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c...
  - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    That article has a graph that shows a continuous downward trend with us near the all time low.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I'm not taking issue with the rate of violent crime.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

it's nothing but brand safety you will never be able to setup marketing relationships and partnerships with the likes of Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson if your product produces terroristic or pornographic content

mlsu 3y ago
I'm not convinced. I'm sure some of the people talking about alignment have commercial motives, but it's a minority. For most, it's a philosophical/ideological position. And that isn't even OpenAI's wheelhouse anyway; they don't sell ads.
- vintermann 3y ago
  The commercial motives make it happen. You see people hold the philosophical/ideological pro-control positions they do because someone who publicly didn't, wouldn't get to work for Microsoft, Google, or anyone with power (and they'd be ostracized by those happy to align themselves with power).
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Subway made us police custom uploaded background images on gift cards. This was a decade ago. They don't give you any rules to go by, just a sense that "if something isn't kosher don't let a private user upload it to use as the background image to a subway gift card that they are purchasing with their own money for their own usage". Brand "rules" are the reason why we will replace any profanity you put in the delivery message. Brand "rules" are why you can't buy a Subway (or Chipotle) gift card with "Bitch I know guac is extra" for example. This is absolutely "brand safety" stuff.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  bad phrasing on my part, "marketing relationships" is one thing, "partnerships" another. Marketing is not always ads. J&J might be interested in adopting AI but they aren't going to announce a partnership (<- marketing for themselves and for OpenAI) with a product that doesn't meet their needs for something boring and inoffensive.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago

> Where is the optimism? The same place it's been for almost 40 years, at the Free Software Foundation / GNU. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computing.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin... > With software, either the users control the program (free software) or the program controls the users (proprietary or nonfree software)

plagiarist 3y ago

People are indeed too stupid to spot dangerous talk, which is why Qanon was able to attract the numbers it did despite being overt Nazi propaganda. "A group of pedophile elites form a shadow government that rules the world in secret and only we can stop them," is Nazi propaganda. After experiencing comment sections 2016-present, I understand why LLM trainers wouldn't want their models to churn out, "how do six million cookies fit in an oven lololol," style of content. Ideally we could get rid of that shit entirely instead of having LLMs greasing the pipeline for radicalizing gamers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline I don't know what specific policies of OpenAI are being mocked with this website. But I seem to have more in common with the cynical vision.

mlsu 3y ago
This viewpoint is terrifying. Are we in the same comment sections? These Nazis you speak of say a lot about "dangerous talk" !
- plagiarist 3y ago
  On HN I have seen people whining about their "innocent conservative viewpoints" being censored, but it turned out those viewpoints were that black people were intellectually inferior based on studies of IQ. Like your counter-example elsewhere is that Facebook is a fine technology that helped your good friend find a partner. If we attribute that to Facebook, do we not also have to attribute, e.g., Myanmar? Don't situations like that prove that not only are people incapable of recognizing bad information, but also that these tools can exacerbate the effects when they are misused?
  - dash2 3y ago
    Are you suggesting we should censor IQ studies that show racial differences? That seems like a bad idea if, for example, you're interested in how good an education different racial groups are getting.
    - 3y ago

geuis 3y ago

I've been running the unrestricted mixtral 8x7B model locally via llama.cpp. It's insanely refreshing compared to any ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llama, etc. For one thing, and granted this is my own experience, that model is much better at coding than any of the others I've tried. But going beyond that, if I need to do anything complicated that might hit the baked in filters on these other models I don't have to worry about it with mixtral. I'm not doing anything illegal btw. It's just that I'm an adult and don't need to use the bumper lane when I go bowling. I also approach any interaction with the thing knowing not to 100% trust it and to verify anything it says independently.

codeisawesome 3y ago
Is there a tutorial on how to get that setup running step-by-step? I only found a GitHub issue (https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/4439 https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/4439) that mentions that mainline llama.cpp isn't working for the model. Bonus question if you have the time: there's a release by TheBloke for this on HuggingFace (TheBloke/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1-GGUF); but I thought his models were "quantised" usually - does that kneecap any of the performance?
- bsharper 3y ago
  Check out ollama: https://ollama.ai/ https://ollama.ai/ It's easy to get running and doesn't require you to manually download models.
  - blooalien 3y ago
    Ollama is great, and they just added (are still adding) OpenAPI API compatible endpoints, thus opening up access to many other toolchain possibilities than previously available to it. It also has some support for some multi-modal (vision and text) models. Easy to use, easy to install, does the job it's designed to do (rather well, even)... Highly recommended!
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  There's walkthroughs on reddit.com/r/localllama. You can download one click installers for oobabooga, then it's just a matter of getting the model you want and making sure the config is correct.

px1999 3y ago

A level of fear allows the introduction of regulatory moats that protect the organisations who are currently building and deploying these models at scale. "It's dangerous" is a beneficial lie for eg openai to push because they can afford any compliance/certification process that's introduced (hell, they'd probably be heavily involved in designing the process)

Cheer2171 3y ago

> Why don't they have faith in their fellow man? Millennia of history with countless examples to the contrary.

benreesman 3y ago

The CEO was fired by Ilya in November, crammed back up the ass of the new rubber-stamp board over ethics breaches via mega-down written capital infusions via compute from Microsoft (it’s like a bad sequel). A bunch of people who weren’t in the room with Hinton and Alex and an NVIDIA card decided they knew enough to scramble through fire exits for the line that says: “sign here and the notional value of your equity is locked in”. This took a serious whack out of the private eyeball scanning focus for the week. Going back any further is both nauseating and gratuitously inflammatory. I’d rather deal with a super intelligence aligned by Benjamin Disraeli than trust OpenAI’s ethics.

mpalmer 3y ago

> Why don't they have faith in their fellow man? Their fellow man (or enough of them) will screenshot the product saying outrageous things and post it as proof that your company is bigoted and your product is harmful to society. Enough users will use the product in bad faith that they have to nerf the output to keep investors happy and their business viable. It's why open source models have an edge right now. Sam Altman more or less acknowledged this edge recently, saying OAI's products will start to get more flexible on point on view and people need to be ready for that.

kromem 3y ago

It's also going to be damaging long term. We're around on the cusp where models are going to be able to produce strong ethical arguments on their own to feed back into alignment. We saw how the "free speech" Grok told off racists, antisemites, and anti-lgbt comments with well laid out counters rather than refusing to respond. Even Gab's Adolf Hitler AI told one of the users they were disgusting for asking an antisemitic question. There's very recent research that the debate between LLM agents can result in better identification of truthful results for both LLM and human judges: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ccpY2iBY57JNKdsP/debating-with-more-persuasive-llms-leads-to-more-truthful https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ccpY2iBY57JNKdsP/debating-w... So do we really want SotA models refraining from answering these topics and leading to an increasing body of training data of self-censorship? Or should we begin to see topics become debated by both human and LLM agents to feed into a more robust and organic framework of alignment? "If you give a LLM a safety rule, you align it for a day. If you teach a LLM to self-align, you align it for a lifetime (and then some)."