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When we say should be, this assumes some kind of intention, no? Meta making things open is a means, not an end. The end is to weaken competition to position its

When we say should be, this assumes some kind of intention, no? Meta making things open is a means, not an end. The end is to weaken competition to position itself economically. The end is not to make things "open" in and of itself which is what the charter of OpenAI is (was?).

robertlagrant 2y ago
It's better if people are incentivised to do something than that they just decide to, or (as with OpenAI) decide to against incentive.
andersa 2y ago
It never was. During their brief fight with Elon Musk they revealed old emails clearly stating that releasing things openly was only a ruse to attract talent at first and they never intended to do that with good AI models.
- hyperhopper 2y ago
  Do you have a source on this?
  - ronsor 2y ago
    The horse is condemned by its own mouth: https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk > As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).
    - the_other 2y ago
      It's not "science" if it's not shared. It's just "business intelligence".
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        Science doesn't care about sharing. See nukes
        the_other 2y ago
        Nukes are “business intelligence” (or national secrets if you will) plus engineering. The science (atoms, forces, power, energy) was already shared.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > The horse is condemned by its own mouth Words like this suggest a failure of imagination. Given it's their own mouth and they're writing in their own defence, what might be a more generous interpretation?
      - hhjinks 2y ago
        The only more generous interpretation I can see is that OpenAI actually did intend to be open, but only between December 11th 2015 to January 2nd 2016, at which point they had changed their mind.
        ben_w 2y ago
        The paragraph immediately preceding the quotation is: "The article is concerned with a hard takeoff scenario: if a hard takeoff occurs, and a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by opensorucing everything, we make it easy for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff." The article in question appears to be: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/ Which opens with: """H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons: They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city""" and, I hope I'm summarising usefully rather than cherry-picking because it's quite long, also says: """Once again: The decision to make AI findings open source is a tradeoff between risks and benefits. The risk is that in a world with hard takeoffs and difficult control problems, you get superhuman AIs that hurl everybody off cliffs. The benefit is that in a world with slow takeoffs and no control problems, nobody will be able to use their sole possession of the only existing AI to garner too much power. But the benefits just aren’t clear enough to justify that level of risk. I’m still not even sure exactly how the OpenAI founders visualize the future they’re trying to prevent. Are AIs fast and dangerous? Are they slow and easily-controlled? Does just one company have them? Several companies? All rich people? Are they a moderate advantage? A huge advantage? None of those possibilities seem dire enough to justify OpenAI’s tradeoff against safety.""" and """Elon Musk famously said that AIs are “potentially more dangerous than nukes”. He’s right – so AI probably shouldn’t be open source any more than nukes should."" This is what OpenAI and Musk were discussing in the context of responding to "I've seen you […] doing a lot of interviews recently extolling the virtues of open sourcing AI, but I presume you realise that this is not some sort of panacea that will somehow magically solve the safety problem?"
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
karmakaze 2y ago
Meta wants to profit from the use of AI not the making/selling of it. Commoditize Your Complement and all that. Having this understanding of why is enough to be comfortable with alignment. The Meta offerings should be under the umbrella name "FreeAI" analogous to Free Software (e.g. FSF) vs the more commercial leaning Open-Source. Heck everyone should contribute to it and make it a movement so "Free" is both an adjective and a verb.
nolok 2y ago
I agree, except in the case of OpenAI it should be an end, and yet they fail at it spectacularly, and since Altman/Microsoft finished their takeover there is basically no hope of it ever coming back.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The OpenAI charter specifically says "safe". We're all arguing over what that even means for an AI. If you're at all risk adverse, that argument by itself should be a hint that releasing the weights of a model. For example, the last few years have seen a lot of angry comments about how "the algorithm" (for both social media feeds and Google search results) is politically biased. IIRC we don't know the full set of training data (data includes RLHF responses before anyone points me to the Wikipedia page I already read that lists some data sources) how can we be confident that any model from Facebook has not been specifically trained to drive a specific political agenda?
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    The safety argument has proven complete BS now that they commercialize the unsafe AI…
    - anon373839 2y ago
      I can’t believe anyone buys it anymore. It feels like it was just yesterday when they were begging for a pause on training “dangerous” models (where danger was defined as “anything better than our flagship product”).
      - ben_w 2y ago
        The request has become law and there aren't any models clearly better than their flagship.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      "The" safety argument? You think there's only one? "The unsafe AI"? Which one would this be? Would it be the one which so many people on this very website complain has been "lobotomised"? (No matter how much I object to that word in this context, that's what people call it).
hzay 2y ago
The end neither justifies nor undermines the means.
dimask 2y ago
Making things open is a means, not an end, _in general_. The end is what we do with these things. What you call "competition" I would call "monopoly". A healthy, non-monopolic (or such) state of AI would be open by itself.
Barrin92 2y ago
>When we say should be, this assumes some kind of intention, no? I don't think so. It's a company, not a person. Meta doesn't have intentions, just incentives. And if the incentives of a company are aligned with publishing open science and open software that's as good as it gets. I don't require for profit businesses to do good things because they love world peace or are altruistic. Meta making its money from its consumer facing products that nobody is forced to use and having the models out in the open is exactly how it should be.

robertlagrant 2y ago

It's better if people are incentivised to do something than that they just decide to, or (as with OpenAI) decide to against incentive.

andersa 2y ago

It never was. During their brief fight with Elon Musk they revealed old emails clearly stating that releasing things openly was only a ruse to attract talent at first and they never intended to do that with good AI models.

hyperhopper 2y ago
Do you have a source on this?
- ronsor 2y ago
  The horse is condemned by its own mouth: https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk > As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).
  - the_other 2y ago
    It's not "science" if it's not shared. It's just "business intelligence".
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Science doesn't care about sharing. See nukes
      - the_other 2y ago
        Nukes are “business intelligence” (or national secrets if you will) plus engineering. The science (atoms, forces, power, energy) was already shared.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > The horse is condemned by its own mouth Words like this suggest a failure of imagination. Given it's their own mouth and they're writing in their own defence, what might be a more generous interpretation?
    - hhjinks 2y ago
      The only more generous interpretation I can see is that OpenAI actually did intend to be open, but only between December 11th 2015 to January 2nd 2016, at which point they had changed their mind.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        The paragraph immediately preceding the quotation is: "The article is concerned with a hard takeoff scenario: if a hard takeoff occurs, and a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by opensorucing everything, we make it easy for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff." The article in question appears to be: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/ Which opens with: """H.G. Wells’ 1914 sci-fi book The World Set Free did a pretty good job predicting nuclear weapons: They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands…before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city""" and, I hope I'm summarising usefully rather than cherry-picking because it's quite long, also says: """Once again: The decision to make AI findings open source is a tradeoff between risks and benefits. The risk is that in a world with hard takeoffs and difficult control problems, you get superhuman AIs that hurl everybody off cliffs. The benefit is that in a world with slow takeoffs and no control problems, nobody will be able to use their sole possession of the only existing AI to garner too much power. But the benefits just aren’t clear enough to justify that level of risk. I’m still not even sure exactly how the OpenAI founders visualize the future they’re trying to prevent. Are AIs fast and dangerous? Are they slow and easily-controlled? Does just one company have them? Several companies? All rich people? Are they a moderate advantage? A huge advantage? None of those possibilities seem dire enough to justify OpenAI’s tradeoff against safety.""" and """Elon Musk famously said that AIs are “potentially more dangerous than nukes”. He’s right – so AI probably shouldn’t be open source any more than nukes should."" This is what OpenAI and Musk were discussing in the context of responding to "I've seen you […] doing a lot of interviews recently extolling the virtues of open sourcing AI, but I presume you realise that this is not some sort of panacea that will somehow magically solve the safety problem?"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

karmakaze 2y ago

Meta wants to profit from the use of AI not the making/selling of it. Commoditize Your Complement and all that. Having this understanding of why is enough to be comfortable with alignment. The Meta offerings should be under the umbrella name "FreeAI" analogous to Free Software (e.g. FSF) vs the more commercial leaning Open-Source. Heck everyone should contribute to it and make it a movement so "Free" is both an adjective and a verb.

nolok 2y ago

I agree, except in the case of OpenAI it should be an end, and yet they fail at it spectacularly, and since Altman/Microsoft finished their takeover there is basically no hope of it ever coming back.

ben_w 2y ago
The OpenAI charter specifically says "safe". We're all arguing over what that even means for an AI. If you're at all risk adverse, that argument by itself should be a hint that releasing the weights of a model. For example, the last few years have seen a lot of angry comments about how "the algorithm" (for both social media feeds and Google search results) is politically biased. IIRC we don't know the full set of training data (data includes RLHF responses before anyone points me to the Wikipedia page I already read that lists some data sources) how can we be confident that any model from Facebook has not been specifically trained to drive a specific political agenda?
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  The safety argument has proven complete BS now that they commercialize the unsafe AI…
  - anon373839 2y ago
    I can’t believe anyone buys it anymore. It feels like it was just yesterday when they were begging for a pause on training “dangerous” models (where danger was defined as “anything better than our flagship product”).
    - ben_w 2y ago
      The request has become law and there aren't any models clearly better than their flagship.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    "The" safety argument? You think there's only one? "The unsafe AI"? Which one would this be? Would it be the one which so many people on this very website complain has been "lobotomised"? (No matter how much I object to that word in this context, that's what people call it).

hzay 2y ago

The end neither justifies nor undermines the means.

dimask 2y ago

Making things open is a means, not an end, _in general_. The end is what we do with these things. What you call "competition" I would call "monopoly". A healthy, non-monopolic (or such) state of AI would be open by itself.

Barrin92 2y ago

>When we say should be, this assumes some kind of intention, no? I don't think so. It's a company, not a person. Meta doesn't have intentions, just incentives. And if the incentives of a company are aligned with publishing open science and open software that's as good as it gets. I don't require for profit businesses to do good things because they love world peace or are altruistic. Meta making its money from its consumer facing products that nobody is forced to use and having the models out in the open is exactly how it should be.