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Mozilla.ai did what? When silliness goes dangerous
- protocolture 2y agoThe tiniest storm in the smallest teacup.
- jqpabc123 2y ago[flagged]
- rainonmoon 2y agoThe mention of objectivity in connection with LLM output is obviously farcical, but I'm curious about the motivation behind the experiment. Surely the value of speaking to organisations already deploying LLMs in live workplaces is identifying specific, solvable issues (aligned with Mozilla.ai's stated objectives) e.g. Project Zero's recent post about trying to make LLMs work in security research. Generalising those claims doesn't seem like a meaningful action, and as OP pointed out, doesn't provide any revelations to anyone with even a cursory view of the landscape. Mozilla's blog post ultimately seems more like marketing than a genuine attempt at research so from that lens it doesn't get me as heated as OP. But that is a tension Mozilla should be aware of if they're actually trying to build credibility with their blog if they're pushing SEO alongside whatever research they do end up publishing.
- tbrownaw 2y agoHopefully the reality is that the interviews were for a serious attempt to learn things, and then the ai summaries were a separate "just for fun" thing that someone with a bit of downtime decided to do. But that's not what I read the Mozilla post that this post is ragging on as saying.
- dialup_sounds 2y agoWhen they described 50 pages of notes a "large text dataset" I definitely got the sense that they weren't planning on reading them.
- tbrownaw 2y agoYes this was very silly to the degree that it provides more reason to worry a bit about the future of their side projects (I kinda like Firefox), but I don't really see anything that sounds dangerous?
- ffhhj 2y agoThe whole dot-com bubble burst was caused by lots of companies wasting money on stupid ideas at the same time.
- b112 2y agoHuh? I thought it was caused by chairs. That said, I don't see any difference between dot-com bubbles busting, regardless of decade, and them not busting. From my perspective, I see stupid(along with good) all the time.
- ffhhj 2y agoYeah anything can cause it, chairs, houses, people rethinking their investments: > On March 20, 2000, Barron's featured a cover article titled "Burning Up; Warning: Internet companies are running out of cash—fast", which predicted the imminent bankruptcy of many Internet companies.[48] This led many people to rethink their investments. That same day, MicroStrategy announced a revenue restatement due to aggressive accounting practices. Its stock price, which had risen from $7 per share to as high as $333 per share in a year, fell $140 per share, or 62%, in a day.[49] The next day, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, leading to an inverted yield curve, although stocks rallied temporarily.[50] Keep the kool-aid flowing to avoid it, this can't happen twice, wait, what was that in 2008 again?
- pipeline_peak 2y agoMozilla? Isn’t that the company that made an HtML GUI toolkit back in the day?
- lolinder 2y agoI'm as sick of AI nonsense as anyone and I'm a chronic Mozilla critic (I mostly wish they'd just accept my donations for Firefox and focus exclusively on that). That said, this post is over the top. If you read the blog post it's pretty obvious what happened. Someone at Mozilla.ai had an extra day on their hands and ran a bunch of text they'd collected through a few models. They thought "hey, this is kind of cool, let's make a blog post about it". Then they wrote one stupid line about their motivations (likely made up to justify playing around with local models) and get completely lambasted for that one stupid line. I'd rather live in a world where people are comfortable throwing together a quick blog post detailing a fun/stupid project they did than one in which they do that anyway but are hesitant to share because people will rake them over the coals for being "unserious".
- zem 2y ago> Then they wrote one stupid line about their motivations (likely made up to justify playing around with local models) and get completely lambasted for that one stupid line. to be fair, it's worth lambasting them over it because they are perpetuating the myth that AI is bias free (which a lot of people actually do believe!) and putting the weight of mozilla's reputation behind it
- Cacti 2y agothanks but my reputation already has a colorway
- Legend2440 2y agoOn the flip side: A lot of claims of AI bias are overblown and/or straight-up disingenuous. Remember when ProPublica claimed that recidivism prediction models were biased against black people? (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compa...) They rigged their analysis. There are two different fairness metrics - individual and group-based - that cannot possibly be fulfilled at the same time if there is any difference between the groups. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807v2) The model was fair all along according to individual metrics. ProPublica picked their fairness metric so as to make the model appear biased. The whole thing was a lie.
- cancerhacker 2y agoI am reminded of this immortal koan: Sussman attains enlightenment In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
- 0x1ceb00da 2y agoI didn't understand.
- dbetteridge 2y agoYou're training it on data already, which by extension will contain information about the game. Training a randomly wired net is like pretending that the training data won't give it pre-conceptions, when the training data is what drives the model. (Pretending that closing ones eyes, removes all items from existence)
- ninjin 2y agoMy interpretation has always been that any wiring of the network carries its own bias. Thus, a random wiring is biased as well. Your point still stands perfectly on its own though and now I am less sure about the interpretation I have had over all these years.
- quuxplusone 2y agoWhile I certainly see how the story could work as a direct allegory (contents of room = weights; closing eyes = wiring randomly; believing the room empty = believing there are no weights)... FWIW, I always took it much less literally. Sussman has written a whole program to play Tic-Tac-Toe: two players, a 3x3 grid, players alternate turns, the game ends under such-and-such conditions, etc. etc.; and then he thinks that by such a superficial gesture as wiring the net randomly he somehow creates a tabula rasa with no "preconceptions of how to play." Minsky points out, by an equally superficial gesture, that giving up control over one minor aspect of the program (the wiring, the ability to see with one's eyes) really has nothing to do with the issue at hand (how much "understanding" of Tic-Tac-Toe has been baked into the program, how many things exist in the room). Or, to put it back into koan form: One day, Sussman wrote a program that had no preconceptions of how to play Tic-Tac-Toe. The following day, Sussman wrote a program that had no preconceptions of how to play chess. His two programs were not the same.
- woah 2y agoHere is the blog post the author is attacking: https://blog.mozilla.ai/uncovering-genai-trends-using-local-language-models-to-explore-35-organizations/ https://blog.mozilla.ai/uncovering-genai-trends-using-local-... Is it groundbreaking? No. But the author's overwrought political rant about Mozilla, AI, the internet, and probably capitalism seems unwarranted based on a small blog post. From the "about" page of tante.cc seems like they are some kind tech/political/leftist/"luddite" commentator.
- mrintegrity 2y agoIt seems clear that the author has an axe to grind, conflating the blog post and "Mozilla corporate policy" kinda gives away the bias
- sandwitches 2y agoThis particular brand of Hackernewsian condescension is unreal. I'd be amazed if it weren't so depressing. Please don't belittle someone's very real grievances like this, thank you.
- tbrownaw 2y agoI'm sure the parent commenter's grievance is just as real as the article author's grievance.
- Grimblewald 2y agoAiring greivances is fine and healthy but so is allowing a defence.
- woah 2y ago"Very real grievances"? The grievance being that an intern at Mozilla threw their notes into a couple LLMs and wrote a blog post one day?
- langsoul-com 2y agoBlog article is a bit edgy. It's more like modzilla.ai is an AI consultancy, that just uses AI for The buzz word effect. Man, modzilla really do the most useless things. I'm really surprised just how bad they're at generating any profit, the silly ideas and products are wild. Can't they just try and make Firefox the best, ubiquitous and one day content actually against Chrome?
- Cacti 2y agothey’re there to be googles bearded monopoly foil, nothing more
- chx 2y agoHow could anything related to LLMs be serious? https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650 https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650 > You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to. > Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology. Yes, people get bamboozled because LLMs are trained to bamboozle them, Raskin didn't call them "a zero day vulnerability for the operating system of humanity" for nothing -- but that's all there is.
- gepardi 2y agoWhy is this author so mad?
- sandwitches 2y agoBecause AI bullshit is ruining everything we've ever loved?
- rramadass 2y agoExactly! This is lunacy.
- Grimblewald 2y agoId argue ai accelerates bullshit slingers output disproportionately to genuine creators so theyre flooding the space - but people are the problem not ai (yet)
- paulddraper 2y agoWrong side of the bed for sure
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoPeople are inherently trusting LLMs without even remotely understanding them.
- lurking_swe 2y agoprobably because they stumbled upon yet another “AI” blog post that is a complete waste of time. I’d be annoyed too. At least this guys angry blog post is somewhat educational - reminding us of biases and how NOT to use LLM’s. all this being said, time to go outside and touch some grass. Get off the computer for a bit.
- seanhunter 2y agoBecause if they posted any sort of reasonable article it wouldn't get traction (including being posted here).
- rsynnott 2y ago
- adithyassekhar 2y agoMozilla.ai website feels so sluggish on chrome on android that I thought I was using firefox. Not trying to be snarky, I genuinely had to recheck which browser I was on.
- sillysaurusx 2y ago> Mozilla.ai is not a serious organization. It seems to be just another “AI” clown car. If this is true, then I’m a court jester, because none of my projects started as serious work by a serious organization. And ML wasn’t lame until everyone started taking it so seriously. The key with ML is to have fun. Even the most serious researcher has this motivation, even if they won’t admit it. If you could somehow scan their brain and look, you’d see that all the layers of seriousness are built around the core drive to have fun. Winning a dota 2 tournament was serious work, but I’ll wager any sum of money they picked dota because it seemed like a fun challenge. If the author is looking for a serious AI organization, they should start one. Otherwise they’re not really qualified to say whether the work is bad. I have no opinion on Mozilla’s project here, but at a glance it looks well-presented with an interesting hypothesis. All of my work started with those same objectives, and it’s mistaken to discourage it. The more people doing ML, the better. It’s not up to us to say what someone should or shouldn’t work on. It’s their own damn decision, and people can decide for themselves whether the work is worth supporting. Personally, I think summarizing a corporation’s knowledge is one of the more interesting unsolved problems, and this seems like a step towards it. Any step towards an interesting objective is de facto good. Bias has become such an overrated concern. Yes, it matters. No, it’s not the number one most important problem to solve. I say this as someone raising a daughter. The key is to make interesting things while giving some thought ahead of time on how to make it more inclusive. Then pay close attention when you discover that some group of users doesn’t like it, and why. Then think of ways to fix it, and decide whether the cost is low enough. There is always a cost. Choosing to focus on bias means that you’re not focusing on building new things. It’s a cost I try not to shy away from. But the author seems to feel that it’s the single most important priority, rather than, say, getting a useful summary of 16,ooo words. I think I’ll agree to disagree.
- sillysaurusx 2y ago(Obviously, if your model has massive consequences (e.g. deciding whether to deny coverage, or grant a loan) then you should spend proportionally more time thinking of whether your model is covering all of the blind spots that you naturally have. But the vast majority of models don’t matter that much. And that’s an important philosophy to preserve. Imagine if someone felt that every line of code you ever write needs to be perfect on the first try. Imagine trying to get anything done.)