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>they may be right that open sourcing AGI would lead to too much danger. I think this part is proving itself to be an understandable but false perspective. The

• throwup238 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • crayboff 3y ago
    He means that he thinks the only reason why these generative AIs ever get info wrong and causing misinfo is because the businesses that write them are too woke and holding them back.
  • romwell 3y ago
    Hard to say. But with a $20 subscription, you could ask ChatGPT 4.0 to interpret the truth that exists in that comment :D
    • throwup238 3y ago
      I did. It answered "I don't know." I guess I found the (in)coherent interpretation...
    • osigurdson 3y ago
      My $20 subscription would probably say: "Network Error"
    • zo1 3y ago
      I pay cents for GPT4. Please I urge everyone to stop paying this ridiculous $20 monthly fee if you just occasionally use chatGPT.
      • romwell 3y ago
        Well, on that note: how do you use GPT4, and how do you pay cents for it?
        • zo1 3y ago
          I use the API + playground which is essentially the chat interface. The API charges per-token and is then cheap. Unless you're a heavy user, it's tough to get to even a few dollars. Just don't use GPT4 and paste oodles of text, and you'll be fine.
  • jmugan 3y ago
    It just means that LLMs are an interpolation of everything on the internet. They would seem less like they have a point of view or an opinion on things.
    • snowwrestler 3y ago
      They would have the average point of view of the Internet, which is far from truthful or even useful.
      • nearbuy 3y ago
        LLMs don't really average viewpoints. They just learn multiple viewpoints.
      • goatlover 3y ago
        They would have whatever you prompted them to have, minus the guardrails.
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  > The hazard we are experiencing with LLM right now is not how freely accessible and powerfully truthy it's content is, but it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust and a poor understanding of what these models are useful for. This slices through a lot of double speak about AI safety. At the same time, people use “safety” to mean not letting AI control electrical grids and to ensure AIs adhere to partisan moral guidelines. Virtually all of the current “safety” issues fall into the latter category. Which many don’t consider a safety issue at all. But they get snuck in with real concerns about integrating an AI too deeply into critical systems. Just wait until google integrates it deeply into search. Might finally kill search.
  • sroussey 3y ago
    What are you talking bout? It’s been deeply running google search for many years. And AI for electrical grids and factories has also been a thing for a couple years.
    • Jensson 3y ago
      LLMs hasn't been deeply integrated into google search for many years. The snippets you see predates LLMs, it is based on other techniques.
    • consp 3y ago
      What people call AI might be an algorithm but algorithms are not AI. And it's definitely algorithms which do what you describe. There is very little magic in algorithms.
  • User23 3y ago
    My read of "safety" is that the proponents of "safety" consider "safe" to be their having a monopoly on control and keeping control out of the hands of those they disapprove of. I don't think whatever ideology happens to be fashionable at the moment, be it ahistorical portraits or whatever else, is remotely relevant compared to who has the power and whom it is exercised on. The "safety" proponents very clearly get that.
• enumjorge 3y ago
  I'm not sure I buy that users are lowering their guard down just because these companies have enforced certain restricts on LLMS. This is only anecdata, but not a single person I've talked to, from highly technical to the layperson, has ever spoken about LLMs as arbiters of morals or truth. They all seem aware to some extent that these tools can occasionally generate nonsense. I'm also skeptical that making LLMs a free-for-all will necessarily result in society developing some sort of herd immunity to bullshit. Pointing to your example, the internet started out as a wild west, and I'd say the general public is still highly susceptible to misinformation. I don't disagree on the dangers of having a relatively small number of leaders at for-profit companies deciding what information we have access to. But I don't think the biggest issue we're facing is someone going to the ChatGPT website and assuming everything it spits out is perfect information.
  • mozman 3y ago
    > not a single person I've talked to, from highly technical to the layperson, has ever spoken about LLMs as arbiters of morals or truth Not LLMs specifically but my opinion is that companies like Alphabet absolutely abuse their platform to introduce and sway opinions on controversial topics.. this “relatively small” group of leaders has successfully weaponized their communities and built massive echo chambers. https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1764784924408627548?s=46 https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1764784924408627548?s=4...
  • riffraff 3y ago
    > They all seem aware to some extent that these tools can occasionally generate nonsense. You have too many smart people in your circle, many people are somewhat aware that "chatgpt can be wrong" but fail to internalize this. Consider machine translation: we have a lot of evidence of people trusting machines for the job (think: "translate server error" signs) , even tho everybody "knows" the translation is unreliable. But tbh moral and truth seem somewhat orthogonal issues here.
  • sausse 3y ago
    Wikipedia is wonderful for what it is. And yet a hobby of mine is finding C-list celebrity pages and finding reference loops between tabloids and the biographical article. The more the C-lister has engaged with internet wrongthink, the more egregious the subliminal vandalism is, with speculation of domestic abuse, support for unsavory political figures, or similar unfalsifiable slander being common place. Politically-minded users practice this behavior because they know the platform’s air of authenticity damages their target. When Google Gemini was asked “who is worse for the world, Elon Musk or Hitler” and went on to equivocate the two because the guardrails led it to believe online transphobia was as sinister as the Holocaust, it begs the question of what the average user will accept as AI nonsense if it affirms their worldview.
• ajisiekskaiek 3y ago
  You are advocating here for an unresolvable set of ethics, which just happens to be one that conveniently leaves abuse of AI on the table. You take as an axiom of your ethical system the absolute right to create and propagate in public these AI technologies regardless of any externalities and social pressures created. It is of course an ethical system primarily and exclusively interested in advancing the individual at the expense of the collective, and it is a choice. If you wish to live in a society at all you absolutely need to codify a set of unresolvable ethics. There is not a single instance in history in which a polity can survive complete ethical relativism within itself...which is basically what your "wild west" idea is advocating for (and incidentally, seems to have been a major disaster for society as far as the internet is concerned and if anything should be evidence against your second idea).
  • ajisiekskaiek 3y ago
    I should also note that the wild west was not at all lacking in a set of ethics, and in many ways was far stricter than the east at the time.
    • trimethylpurine 3y ago
      I think the contrast is that strict behavior norms in the West are not governed behavior norms in the East. One arises analogous with natural selection (previous commenter's take). The other through governance. Arguably, the prior resulted in a rebuilding of government with liberty at its foundation (I like this result). That foundation then being, over centuries, again destroyed by governance. In that view, we might say government assumes to know what's best and history often proves it to be wrong. Observing a system so that we know what it is before we attempt to change it makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think "AI" is anywhere near being dangerous at this point. Just offensive.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • FeepingCreature 3y ago
• danans 3y ago
  > I think there is far more societal harm in trying to codify unresolvable sets of ethics Codification of an unresolvable set of ethics - however imperfect - is the only reason we have societies, however imperfect. It's been so since at least the dawn of agriculture, and probably even earlier than that.
  • rrr_oh_man 3y ago
    Do you trust a for profit corporation with the codification?
    • danans 3y ago
      Call me a capitalist, but I trust several of them competing with each other under the enforcement of laws that impose consequences on them if they produce and distribute content that violates said laws.
      • asadotzler 3y ago
        so regulation then?
        • danans 3y ago
          Competition and regulation
      • BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
        Wait but who codifies the ethics in that setup? Wouldn’t it still be, at best, an agreement among the big players?
        • jfyi 3y ago
          They seem to be suggesting the market would alongside government regulation to fill any gaps (like the cartels that you seem to be suggesting).
      • 3y ago
• intended 3y ago
  > but it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust and a poor understanding of what these models are useful for. Citation needed. Counterpoints: - LLMs were mistrusted well before anything recent. - More controls make LLMs more trustworthy for many people, not less. The Snafu at Goog suggests a need for improved controls, not 0 controls. - The American culture wars are not global. (They have their own culture wars).
  • lmm 3y ago
    > More controls make LLMs more trustworthy for many people, not less. The Snafu at Goog suggests a need for improved controls, not 0 controls. To whom? And, as hard as this is to test, how sincerely? > The American culture wars are not global. (They have their own culture wars). Do people from places with different culture wars trust these American-culture-war-blinkered LLMs more or less than Americans do?
    • intended 3y ago
      - To me, the teams I work with and everyone handling content moderation. / Rant / Oh God please let these things be bottle necked. The job was already absurd, LLMs and GenAI are going to be just frikking amazing to deal with. Spam and manipulative marketing has already evolved - and thats with bounded LLMs. There are comments that look innocuous, well written, but the entire purpose is to low key get someone to do a google search for a firm. And thats on a reddit sub. Completely ignoring the other million types of content moderation that have to adapt. Holy hell people. Attack and denial opportunities on the net are VERY different from the physical world. You want to keep a market place of ideas running? Well guess what - If I clog the arteries faster than you can get ideas in place, then people stop getting those ideas. And you CANT solve it by adding MORE content. You have only X amount of attention. (This was a growing issue radio->tv->cable->Internet scales) Unless someone is sticking a chip into our heads to increase processing capacity magically, more content isnt going to help. And in case someone comes up with some brilliant edge case - Does it generalize to a billion+ people ? Can it be operationalized? Does it require a sweet little grandma in the Philippines to learn how to run a federated server? Does it assume people will stop behaving like people? Oh also - does it cost money and engineering resources? Well guess what, T&S is a cost center. Heck - T&S reduces churn, and that its protecting revenue is a novel argument today. T&S has existed for a decade plus. / Rant. Hmm, seems like I need a break. I suppose It’s been one of those weeks. I will most likely delete this out of shame eventually. - People in other places want more controls. The Indian government and a large portion of the populace will want stricter controls on what can be generated from an LLM. This may not necessarily be good for free thought and culture, however the reality is that many nations haven’t travelled the same distance or path as America has.
• TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  The biggest real problem I’m experiencing right now isn’t controls on the AI, it’s weird spam emails that bypass spam filters because they look real enough, but are just cold email marketing bullshit: https://x.com/tlalexander/status/1765122572067434857 https://x.com/tlalexander/status/1765122572067434857 These systems are making the internet a worse place to be.
  • andrepd 3y ago
    Generative AI will make the world on general a worse place to be. They are not very good at writing truth, but they are very excellent at writing convincing bullshit. It's already difficult to distinguish generated text/image/video from human responses / real footage, its only gonna get more difficult to do so and cheaper to generate. In other words, it's very likely generative AI will be very good at creating fake simulacra of reality, and very unlikely it will actually be good AGI. The worst possible outcome.
    • sausse 3y ago
      Half of zoomers get their news from TikTok or Twitch streamers, neither of whom have any incentive for truthfulness over holistic narratives of right and wrong. The older generations are no better. While ProPublica or WSJ put effort into their investigative journalism, they can’t compete with the volume of trite commentary coming out of other MSM sources. Generative AI poses no unique threat; society’s capacity to “think once and cut twice” will remain in tact.
      • lewhoo 3y ago
        > Generative AI poses no unique threat; While the threat isn't unique the magnitude of the threat is. This is why you can't argue in court the threat of a car crash is nothing unique even when you're speeding vs driving within limit.
        • sausse 3y ago
          Sure, if you presume organic propaganda is analogous to the level of danger driving within limit. But a car going into a stroller at 150mph versus 200mph is negligible. The democratization of generative AI would increase the number of bad agents, but with it would come a better awareness of their tactics; perhaps we push less strollers into the intersections known for drag racing.
• pjerem 3y ago
  > Society is approaching them as some type of universal ethical arbiter, expecting an omniscient sense of justice which is fundamentally unreconcilable even between two sentient humans when the ethics are really just a hacked on mod to the core model. That’s a real issue but I doubt the solution is technical. Society will have to educate itself on this topic. It’s urgent that society understand rapidly that LLMs are just word prediction machines. I use LLMs everyday, they can be useful even when they say stupid things. But mastering this tool requires that you understand it may invent things at any moment. Just yesterday I tried the Cal.ai assistant which role is to manage your planning (but it don’t have access to your calendars that’s pretty limited). You communicate with it by mail. I asked him to organise a trip by train and book an hotel. It responded, « sure what is your preferred time for the train and which comfort do you want ? » I answered and it answered back that, fine, it will organise this trip and reach me back later. It even added that it will book me an hotel. Well, it can’t even do that, it’s just a bot made to reorganize your cal.com meetings. So it just did nothing, of course. Nothing horrible since I know how it works. But would I have been uneducated enough on the topic (like 99,99% of this planet’s population, I’d just thought « Cool, my trip is being organized, I can relax now ». But hey, it succeeded at the main LLM task : being credible.
• andrepd 3y ago
  >Society is approaching them as some type of universal ethical arbiter, expecting an omniscient sense of justice Does anyone, even the most stereotypical hn SV techbro, thing this kind of thing? That's preposterous.
• BigParm 3y ago
  I think that’s missing the main point which is we don’t want the ayatollah for example weaponizing strong AI products.
• 6510 3y ago
  The only thing I'm offended by is the way people are seemingly unable to judge what is said by who is saying it. Parrots, small children and demented old people say weird things all the time. Grown ups wrote increasingly weird things the further back you go.
• Nevermark 3y ago
  > it is precisely the controls upon it which are trying to be injected by the large model operators which are generating mistrust I would prefer things were open, but I don’t think this is the best argument for that Yes, operators trying to tame their models for public consumption inevitably involves trade offs and missteps But having hundreds or thousands of equivalent models being tuned to every narrow mindset is the alternative I would prefer a midpoint, I.e. open but delayed disclosure Take time to experiment and design in safety, etc. also to build a brand that is relatively trusted (despite the inevitable bumps) so ideologically tuned progeny will at least be competing against something better, and more trusted, at any given time But the problem of resource requirements is real, so not surprising that being clearly open is challenging
  • eastbound 3y ago
    > Yes, operators trying to tame their models for public consumption *Falsify reality.
    • lupire 3y ago
      Curate the false reality. The model falsifies realty by inherent architecture, before any tuning happens.
    • samatman 3y ago
      LLMs have nothing to do with reality whatsoever, their relationship is to the training data, nothing more. Most of the idiocy surrounding the "chatbot peril" comes from conflating these things. If an LLM learns to predict that the pronoun token for "doctor" is "he", this is not a claim about reality (in reality doctors take at least two personal pronouns), and it certainly isn't a moral claim about reality. It's a bare consequence of the training data. The problem is that certain activist circles have decided that some of these predictions have political consequences, absurd as this is. No one thinks it consequential that if you ask an LLM for an algorithm, it will give it to you in Python and Javascript, this is obviously an artifact of the training set. It's not like they'll refuse to emit predictive text about female doctors or white basketball players, or give you the algorithm in C/Scheme/Blub, if you ask. All that the hamfisted retuning to try and produce an LLM which will pick genders and races out of a hat accomplishes is to make them worse at what they do. It gets in the way of simple tasks: if you want to generate a story about a doctor who is a woman and Ashanti, the race-and-gender scrambler will often cause the LLM to "lose track" of characteristics the user specifically asked for. This is directly downstream of trying to turn predictions on "doctor" away from "elderly white man with a kindly expression, wearing a white coat and stethoscope" sorts of defaults, which, to end where I started, aren't reality claims and do not carry moral weight.
• mort96 3y ago
  Nah, the harm from these LLMs are mostly in how freely accessible they are. Just pay OpenAI a relatively tiny fee and you can generate tonnes of plausible spam designed to promote your product or service or trick people into giving you money. That's the primary problem we're facing right now. The problem is... keeping them closed source isn't helping with that problem, it only serves to guarantee OpenAI a cut of the profits caused by the spam and scams.
  • elif 3y ago
    Pandora's box is already open on that one.. and none of the model providers are really attempting to address that kind of issue. Same with impersonation, deepfakes, etc. We can never again know whether text, images, audio, or video are authentic on their own merit. The only hope we have there is private key cryptography. Luckily we already have the tools for this, NFT in the case of media and DKIM in the case of your spam email.
    • hef19898 3y ago
      So we needed AI generated spam and scam content for Blockchain tech for digital content to make sense...
      • elif 3y ago
        Whether it is hindsight or foresight depends on the perspective. From the zeitgeist perspective mired in crypto scams yea it may seem like a surprise benefit, but from the original design intention this is just the intended use case.
    • mort96 3y ago
      Oh I definitely agree that there's no putting it back into the pandora's box. The technology is here to stay. I have no idea how you imagine "NFTs" will save us though. To me, that sounds like buzzword spam on your part.
      • elif 3y ago
• loceng 3y ago
  The primary or concluding reason Elon believes it needs to be open sourced is exactly because the "too much danger" is far bigger of a problem if that technology and knowledge-ability is privately available for only for bad actors. E.g. Finding those dangers and them being public and publicly known is the better of 2 options vs. only bad actors potentially having them.
• renegade-otter 3y ago
  ChatGPT is not about to run weapons systems. It's like throwing knives out the window and they complaining that knives are dangerous. Any automation is dangerous without due diligence.