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The safety argument has proven complete BS now that they commercialize the unsafe AI…

anon373839 3y 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 3y ago
  The request has become law and there aren't any models clearly better than their flagship.
ben_w 3y 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).
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  You can't have it both ways: either ChatGPT as it is now is dangerous (hence you don't open the weights but you also should not commercialize it) or it is not and there's no good reason to keep it secret. ChatGPT has clearly caused significant negative social impact (students cheating on their essays, SEO spam, etc.) and they didn't give a shit.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > You can't have it both ways: either ChatGPT as it is now is dangerous (hence you don't open the weights but you also should not commercialize it) or it is not and there's no good reason to keep it secret. Almost every dangerous thing I can think of "has it both ways" by the standard you apply here. I can use an aircraft without being a registered pilot; I can use the police without being a trained law enforcement officer; I can use restricted drugs when supplied by a duly authorised medical professional; I can use high voltage equipment, high power lasers, high intensity RF sources, when they are encased in the appropriate safety equipment that allows them to be legally sold as a lightbulb, a DVD player, and microwave oven respectively. The weights themselves reveal any and all information found within the model, regardless of superficial attempts to prevent the model "leaking". We do not, at present, actually know how to locate information within a model as would be required to confirm that it has genuinely deleted some information rather than merely pretending — this is an active field of research. By analogy: data on a spinning hard drive. In certain file systems, if you delete a file, you only remove the pointer to it, the actual content can be un-deleted. A full overwrite of unused space is better, but owing to imprecision in the write head, even this is not actually certain to delete data, and multiple passes are used — but even this was not sufficient for the agents who oversaw the destruction of The Guardian's laptop containing a copy of the Snowden data. At present, we do not even know how to fully determine the capabilities of a set of weights, so we cannot actually tell if any given model is "safe" (not even by a restricted definition of "safe" as in "we won't get sued under GDPR Article 17"), we can only guess. And those best-guesses are what people complain about when they are upset that an AI model no longer does what it did last week. There is an argument that having open access to the weights makes it easier to perform the research necessary to even be able to answer this question. That's an important counter! But it's not even remotely where you're going with your comment. > ChatGPT has clearly caused significant negative social impact (students cheating on their essays, SEO spam, etc.) and they didn't give a shit. None of those are significant social impact. Negative, sure, but the "significant" risk isn't SEO spam, it's giving everyone their own personal Goebbels; and it's not "students cheating" because, to the extent the AI is capable of that, the tests they can cheat on with it represent something that is now fully automated to the point that it shouldn't be tested — I mean, I grew up with the maths teachers saying "you won't have a calculator on you all the time when you're an adult", but by the time I got to my exams some of the tests required a calculator, and now I regularly do ⌘-space and it does the unit conversion as well as the maths, and even for the symbolic calculus I can usually just ask Wolfram Alpha… which is on my phone, which I have on me all the time.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Lots of words to hide the lack of argument. Did you use ChatGPT for this one? I hope so, because nobody's paying you to defend Altman's hypocrisy.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Try reading it instead of insulting people for daring to use words. Not like it's that long.
        littlestymaar 3y ago
        The problem is not the length, it's how shallow it is. And noticing your lack of argument in support of a company you confuse with a sport club is not an insult, by the way. Altman and the safety narrative is hypocrite BS, and your clumsy words aren't convincing anyone but you that it is not.
        ben_w 3y ago
        > And noticing your lack of argument in support of a company you confuse with a sport club is not an insult, by the way. I have no idea why you think I think OpenAI is a sports club. That's so weird I have to assume it's an auto-corrupt and not even what you intended to write. I have no idea why you think a bunch of counter-examples isn't an argument, or why they are shallow — they demonstrate that you are just plain wrong. The only other people I've met who think that counter-examples weren't arguments, were… as I recall, two biblical literalist-fundamentalists and one politician. Oh, and someone who refused to accept that encryption was a good idea and government backdoors a bad idea, but otherwise I can't categorise them because they were a random Twitter account and it was a decade ago. And, now I think about it, someone who got themselves banned from HN for repeatedly insulting anyone who preferred electric/PV over hydrogen/nuclear. And given that it is your previous comment which is in the grey as I write this, I think you need to look in a mirror before calling my words "clumsy".
        3y 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 3y ago
The request has become law and there aren't any models clearly better than their flagship.

ben_w 3y 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).

littlestymaar 3y ago
You can't have it both ways: either ChatGPT as it is now is dangerous (hence you don't open the weights but you also should not commercialize it) or it is not and there's no good reason to keep it secret. ChatGPT has clearly caused significant negative social impact (students cheating on their essays, SEO spam, etc.) and they didn't give a shit.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > You can't have it both ways: either ChatGPT as it is now is dangerous (hence you don't open the weights but you also should not commercialize it) or it is not and there's no good reason to keep it secret. Almost every dangerous thing I can think of "has it both ways" by the standard you apply here. I can use an aircraft without being a registered pilot; I can use the police without being a trained law enforcement officer; I can use restricted drugs when supplied by a duly authorised medical professional; I can use high voltage equipment, high power lasers, high intensity RF sources, when they are encased in the appropriate safety equipment that allows them to be legally sold as a lightbulb, a DVD player, and microwave oven respectively. The weights themselves reveal any and all information found within the model, regardless of superficial attempts to prevent the model "leaking". We do not, at present, actually know how to locate information within a model as would be required to confirm that it has genuinely deleted some information rather than merely pretending — this is an active field of research. By analogy: data on a spinning hard drive. In certain file systems, if you delete a file, you only remove the pointer to it, the actual content can be un-deleted. A full overwrite of unused space is better, but owing to imprecision in the write head, even this is not actually certain to delete data, and multiple passes are used — but even this was not sufficient for the agents who oversaw the destruction of The Guardian's laptop containing a copy of the Snowden data. At present, we do not even know how to fully determine the capabilities of a set of weights, so we cannot actually tell if any given model is "safe" (not even by a restricted definition of "safe" as in "we won't get sued under GDPR Article 17"), we can only guess. And those best-guesses are what people complain about when they are upset that an AI model no longer does what it did last week. There is an argument that having open access to the weights makes it easier to perform the research necessary to even be able to answer this question. That's an important counter! But it's not even remotely where you're going with your comment. > ChatGPT has clearly caused significant negative social impact (students cheating on their essays, SEO spam, etc.) and they didn't give a shit. None of those are significant social impact. Negative, sure, but the "significant" risk isn't SEO spam, it's giving everyone their own personal Goebbels; and it's not "students cheating" because, to the extent the AI is capable of that, the tests they can cheat on with it represent something that is now fully automated to the point that it shouldn't be tested — I mean, I grew up with the maths teachers saying "you won't have a calculator on you all the time when you're an adult", but by the time I got to my exams some of the tests required a calculator, and now I regularly do ⌘-space and it does the unit conversion as well as the maths, and even for the symbolic calculus I can usually just ask Wolfram Alpha… which is on my phone, which I have on me all the time.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Lots of words to hide the lack of argument. Did you use ChatGPT for this one? I hope so, because nobody's paying you to defend Altman's hypocrisy.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Try reading it instead of insulting people for daring to use words. Not like it's that long.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        The problem is not the length, it's how shallow it is. And noticing your lack of argument in support of a company you confuse with a sport club is not an insult, by the way. Altman and the safety narrative is hypocrite BS, and your clumsy words aren't convincing anyone but you that it is not.
        ben_w 3y ago
        > And noticing your lack of argument in support of a company you confuse with a sport club is not an insult, by the way. I have no idea why you think I think OpenAI is a sports club. That's so weird I have to assume it's an auto-corrupt and not even what you intended to write. I have no idea why you think a bunch of counter-examples isn't an argument, or why they are shallow — they demonstrate that you are just plain wrong. The only other people I've met who think that counter-examples weren't arguments, were… as I recall, two biblical literalist-fundamentalists and one politician. Oh, and someone who refused to accept that encryption was a good idea and government backdoors a bad idea, but otherwise I can't categorise them because they were a random Twitter account and it was a decade ago. And, now I think about it, someone who got themselves banned from HN for repeatedly insulting anyone who preferred electric/PV over hydrogen/nuclear. And given that it is your previous comment which is in the grey as I write this, I think you need to look in a mirror before calling my words "clumsy".
        3y ago