3 ms·

More than not being entirely sure what the impact is, I don't see any suggestion at what to do about it?

• wesleywt 4mo ago
  Why should the person identifying the problem provide a solution? This doesn't make sense.
  • taeric 4mo ago
    If the criticism can't distill up from "bad things could happen", it just isn't useful to keep paying people to come up with that kind of critique. And it isn't like we stopped paying attention to these concerns, is it? Nor were they completely blind siding us at the time. The question was largely of what to do about them.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4mo ago
      The question also whether large-scale utilization of LLMs (and also the prerequisite increased training processes) should proceed before these issues were addressed. Clearly, we collectively answered "yes" without any actual reasoning (and arguably, without any collective decision making either).
      • taeric 4mo ago
        This feels incoherent. I'm game to agree that there were and are poor decisions being made. But are you proposing that we could have stopped all progress until these vague concerns were addressed? For some of the concerns, like language understanding, I can't bring myself to think that many of the experts out there were doing any better than these models can do today. Quite the contrary. And do you think that that would not have been counter to the concern over diversity of teams working on it? Or concerns over bias going away by having the US attempt to abstain? Good luck with that. It sucks, but China and Russia should stand as stark examples that it turns out you can take strong control over the internet.
    • Enginerrrd 4mo ago
      It’s pretty common in the security world to have a red team and a blue team. There is overlap in the skillset for both, but there are good reasons to have separate people develop each team, and we wouldn’t expect people to have a talent for both. Ideally, we like it if the red team can suggest solutions, but that’s not always their job or expertise and I’ve rarely if ever heard someone express the sentiment you are within that context by suggesting a really good red team person isn’t useful if they can’t fix the holes they find.
      • taeric 4mo ago
        Right, but if one of my teams, red or blue, was just saying "the other teams could be flawed", I would probably push for a new makeup for that team?
      • tptacek 4mo ago
        This is true but it's worth pointing out that the currency of red teaming is the POC, and the authors of the Stochastic Parrots paper don't have one.
• thisisthenewme 4mo ago
  When a researcher discovers that smoking is damaging to the lungs, do they need to provide a solution that allows people to smoke without damaging their lungs? Would their inability to provide a solution take anything away from the research?
  • taeric 4mo ago
    To conflate AI with smoking is just not helpful. At all. Or are you saying that there are acute harms from AI that are being ignored?
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4mo ago
      Acute, chronic - why would it matter? Why is it unhelpful to conflate AI with smoking? And yes, lots of people are saying "there are harms from AI that are being ignored".
      • taeric 4mo ago
        Acute would imply that we should flat out stop. Chronic would imply looking for plans to work on it. Acute and chronic would imply that we should both stop and take action to address damages. What harms from AI are people ignoring?
• camphy 4mo ago
  If you’re referring to a solution to large datasets without not being auditable, she actually did provide a solution. Something to do with data sheets for these training data sets similar to those provided for hardware components. At least, if my memory serves me.
  • taeric 4mo ago
    I was more irked by the diversity of teams developing these concern. Which, feels like a benign enough concern, but not one where you can just stop progress. Worse, I think it is a ridiculously safe bet that the US was home to the most diverse teams you could get for this sort of work. Asking the good faith participants to stop participating would have decreased the stated goal.