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Their product embodied their values. It turned out that their values are quite radical when exposed to general public. In my opinion, unless there are people a

Their product embodied their values. It turned out that their values are quite radical when exposed to general public. In my opinion, unless there are people and cultural changes - its quite hard to imagine their long term success in this space

jart 3y ago
I don't think Google sets the agenda. They get their orders like the rest of us, and then probably handed it over to an army of low-paid offshore contractors to implement. How else could you explain Gemma believing Abe Lincoln was black? If Googlers had done the mind-killing work of RLHF training themselves, things would have turned out differently. They were however nice enough to give us a version of the model that doesn't have RLHF training and it's illuminating to compare how it responds to certain queries, because oftentimes the sentences will be the same and only have specific key words or phrases within the sentence changed.
- Taurenking 3y ago
  Wishful thinking. The CEO of Gemini expressed openly racist views on Twitter. Those views are reflected in the tool built. > I don't think Google sets the agenda Soo, you're saying they did not internally test this at all, and delegated that to whoever sets their agenda?
  - bitcharmer 3y ago
    Can you share their tweets?
    - hnburnsy 3y ago
      Just sharing, dont shoot... https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509 https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509
      - dekhn 3y ago
        buthe's not the CEO of gemini. He was a director which is a fairly vague term at Google (Peter Norvig says he's Director of Research at Google, but he was a director of research, not the director). Also he (Krawcyzk) locked his twitter and his linkedin. I can imagine Sundar is also looking for ways to get this guy out of the decision path for Gemini.
        jart 3y ago
        Don't believe Fox News when they say this guy is a Google exec. It looks like he's just a product manager. I wouldn't hold being spicy on Twitter four years ago against any man, but someone torpedoed their Gemini product and a product manager actually would have the authority to dictate these kinds of decisions. For example, the way the the language model has been programmed to rewrite the user's question before handing it over to the vision model. That's something that's most likely attributable to him. I mean it's one thing to change the training data to remove all information about personal appearance, a curious thing for that algorithm to fail to include Internet rumors about Abe Lincoln being black in that category, an annoying thing for it to refuse to generate content it considers offensive, and another thing entirely to program an information system to meddle with user queries on top of that since that shows an unprecedented level of disrespect.
        dekhn 3y ago
        I didn't believe Fox News, I independently verified it by viewing many sources of data. https://www.accel.com/spotlight-on/episodes/google-bard-jack-krawczyk https://www.accel.com/spotlight-on/episodes/google-bard-jack... https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jack-krawczyk https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jack-krawczyk https://www.menshealth.com/health/a46149606/a-day-in-the-life-ai-engineer/ https://www.menshealth.com/health/a46149606/a-day-in-the-lif... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/03/google-execs-say-in-all-hands-meeting-bard-ai-isnt-all-for-search-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/03/google-execs-say-in-all-hand... and many google results that point to LinkedIn pages that no longer host content (IE, he deleted/locked his linkedin). I can list many other sites that reference him as product lead for bard. My guess is he's a Director/Product Manager Manager, IE a little above a typical product manager, the lowest level of exec. As for whether a single product manager has that level of control over the serving product... query term rewriting has been a google strategy for quite some time and I doubt a single PM really can influence the product this way and still manage to launch, but as I don't work there and am not privy to the internal details of this product's launch, I can't really say. That the product is full of disrespect for the user, that I agree. I don't envy the paeans trying to get promos by associating their name with gemini internally.
astrange 3y ago
A company isn't "their", it's made of people, and not all of those people see all of their products before they're launched.
foota 3y ago
I don't think it's radical that when prompted with something like "Generate photos of doctors", that it's reasonable to return a set of images that shows diversity (e.g., instead of being a bunch of white men), even if that isn't representative of a "population sample". I guess though there were unintended consequence where I imagine they're prompting the model with something along the lines of "and remember to be diverse!", and there are obviously some cases where this isn't a good idea. In particular, when the prompt itself is for something that is explicitly racial or where the result is "charged". E.g., if someone asks for photos of white people, the AI shouldn't generate photos of people that aren't white (and fine, it might return a disclaimer that it only generate white people because you asked it to). More nuanced though are situations like asking it about historically evil people (e.g., Nazis, as was one of the examples I've seen) but also more benign things like British monarchs or something. I think trying to figure out what kind of results to "inject" diversity into isn't easy though, since it feels like there are many edge cases.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  And I think it is radical. If the consumer wants certain race, gender, disability and so on they can do it via prompt. If they want diversity do it by corpus. Get images from Africa and Asia and so on... Feed that to model to get there...
  - bcye 3y ago
    > If the consumer wants certain race, gender, disability and so on they can do it via prompt No in that case you'll just have a default. Believing that the default should be diverse/random is imo not a radical view.
    - alexey-salmin 3y ago
      If it's "random" as in "proportional to the actual distribution" then it's perfectly reasonable. But random as in "proportional to an imaginary world that some people want to present as reality" is questionable.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
visarga 3y ago
Their values, but there is also common sense. If they start pushing out unbelievable things like a black queen of England ... they are hurting their own goals. Diversification should stop at the boundary of believability.

jart 3y ago

I don't think Google sets the agenda. They get their orders like the rest of us, and then probably handed it over to an army of low-paid offshore contractors to implement. How else could you explain Gemma believing Abe Lincoln was black? If Googlers had done the mind-killing work of RLHF training themselves, things would have turned out differently. They were however nice enough to give us a version of the model that doesn't have RLHF training and it's illuminating to compare how it responds to certain queries, because oftentimes the sentences will be the same and only have specific key words or phrases within the sentence changed.

Taurenking 3y ago
Wishful thinking. The CEO of Gemini expressed openly racist views on Twitter. Those views are reflected in the tool built. > I don't think Google sets the agenda Soo, you're saying they did not internally test this at all, and delegated that to whoever sets their agenda?
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Can you share their tweets?
  - hnburnsy 3y ago
    Just sharing, dont shoot... https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509 https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509
    - dekhn 3y ago
      buthe's not the CEO of gemini. He was a director which is a fairly vague term at Google (Peter Norvig says he's Director of Research at Google, but he was a director of research, not the director). Also he (Krawcyzk) locked his twitter and his linkedin. I can imagine Sundar is also looking for ways to get this guy out of the decision path for Gemini.
      - jart 3y ago
        Don't believe Fox News when they say this guy is a Google exec. It looks like he's just a product manager. I wouldn't hold being spicy on Twitter four years ago against any man, but someone torpedoed their Gemini product and a product manager actually would have the authority to dictate these kinds of decisions. For example, the way the the language model has been programmed to rewrite the user's question before handing it over to the vision model. That's something that's most likely attributable to him. I mean it's one thing to change the training data to remove all information about personal appearance, a curious thing for that algorithm to fail to include Internet rumors about Abe Lincoln being black in that category, an annoying thing for it to refuse to generate content it considers offensive, and another thing entirely to program an information system to meddle with user queries on top of that since that shows an unprecedented level of disrespect.
        dekhn 3y ago
        I didn't believe Fox News, I independently verified it by viewing many sources of data. https://www.accel.com/spotlight-on/episodes/google-bard-jack-krawczyk https://www.accel.com/spotlight-on/episodes/google-bard-jack... https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jack-krawczyk https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jack-krawczyk https://www.menshealth.com/health/a46149606/a-day-in-the-life-ai-engineer/ https://www.menshealth.com/health/a46149606/a-day-in-the-lif... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/03/google-execs-say-in-all-hands-meeting-bard-ai-isnt-all-for-search-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/03/google-execs-say-in-all-hand... and many google results that point to LinkedIn pages that no longer host content (IE, he deleted/locked his linkedin). I can list many other sites that reference him as product lead for bard. My guess is he's a Director/Product Manager Manager, IE a little above a typical product manager, the lowest level of exec. As for whether a single product manager has that level of control over the serving product... query term rewriting has been a google strategy for quite some time and I doubt a single PM really can influence the product this way and still manage to launch, but as I don't work there and am not privy to the internal details of this product's launch, I can't really say. That the product is full of disrespect for the user, that I agree. I don't envy the paeans trying to get promos by associating their name with gemini internally.

astrange 3y ago

A company isn't "their", it's made of people, and not all of those people see all of their products before they're launched.

foota 3y ago

I don't think it's radical that when prompted with something like "Generate photos of doctors", that it's reasonable to return a set of images that shows diversity (e.g., instead of being a bunch of white men), even if that isn't representative of a "population sample". I guess though there were unintended consequence where I imagine they're prompting the model with something along the lines of "and remember to be diverse!", and there are obviously some cases where this isn't a good idea. In particular, when the prompt itself is for something that is explicitly racial or where the result is "charged". E.g., if someone asks for photos of white people, the AI shouldn't generate photos of people that aren't white (and fine, it might return a disclaimer that it only generate white people because you asked it to). More nuanced though are situations like asking it about historically evil people (e.g., Nazis, as was one of the examples I've seen) but also more benign things like British monarchs or something. I think trying to figure out what kind of results to "inject" diversity into isn't easy though, since it feels like there are many edge cases.

Ekaros 3y ago
And I think it is radical. If the consumer wants certain race, gender, disability and so on they can do it via prompt. If they want diversity do it by corpus. Get images from Africa and Asia and so on... Feed that to model to get there...
- bcye 3y ago
  > If the consumer wants certain race, gender, disability and so on they can do it via prompt No in that case you'll just have a default. Believing that the default should be diverse/random is imo not a radical view.
  - alexey-salmin 3y ago
    If it's "random" as in "proportional to the actual distribution" then it's perfectly reasonable. But random as in "proportional to an imaginary world that some people want to present as reality" is questionable.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

visarga 3y ago

Their values, but there is also common sense. If they start pushing out unbelievable things like a black queen of England ... they are hurting their own goals. Diversification should stop at the boundary of believability.