Safety and Research were Sacrificed for Profit under Altman
Safety and Research were Sacrificed for Profit under Altman
Sam Altman’s weekend of shock and drama began a year ago, with the release of ChatGPT.
Article from The Atlantic, archive link: https://archive.ph/Vqjpr
Some important quotes:
The tensions boiled over at the top. As Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman encouraged more commercialization, the company’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, grew more concerned about whether OpenAI was upholding the governing nonprofit’s mission to create beneficial AGI.
The release of GPT-4 also frustrated the alignment team, which was focused on further-upstream AI-safety challenges, such as developing various techniques to get the model to follow user instructions and prevent it from spewing toxic speech or “hallucinating”—confidently presenting misinformation as fact. Many members of the team, including a growing contingent fearful of the existential risk of more-advanced AI models, felt uncomfortable with how quickly GPT-4 had been launched and integrated widely into other products. They believed that the AI safety work they had done was insufficient.
Employees from an already small trust-and-safety staff were reassigned from other abuse areas to focus on this issue. Under the increasing strain, some employees struggled with mental-health issues. Communication was poor. Co-workers would find out that colleagues had been fired only after noticing them disappear on Slack.
Summary: Tech bros want money, tech bros want speed, tech bros want products.
Scientists want safety, researchers want to research...
The best part of Open AI’s self professed goal to make an AGI is that the more we learn about LLM’s the more it becomes clear that they inherently can never bridge the gap to AGI.
One would almost think the constant complaining about mythical dangers of AGI might be a distraction from the real more mundane dangers LLM’s pose here and now like exasperating bias, making mass misinformation easy, and of course shielding major companies from accountability.
Or the other option is that it’s just marketing, look at how scary our totally real product is, look how fast it improved when we went from a medium sized dataset to the largest that will ever be possible, don’t ask questions like why would a autocomplete that has been feed the entire internet actually help our business, just pay us and bolt it on to whatever you can.
LLM's ability to replace jobs is honestly more terrifying than so called AGI.
At least with AGI, if they really can think like human, is that they may actually think about the implications of their actions....
Oh, I'm sure they will. That is not, in the slightest, the same as caring about said implications in ways that mean that the species won't get murked, though.
I expected as much, I had this feeling about Altman, too. The draw of profit became too much for him, and the board called him on it and let him go.
Which makes it even worse that now they're groveling at his feet to return.
Ugh.
I just saw a headline that he’s going to work for Microsoft now.
My employer heavily uses Microsoft, and I’m in IT.
Since June, Microsoft eliminated all their training staff - the folks who show others how to use their software, reclassified their customer experience staff to eliminate the role - these folks met with customers to solicit product feedback and find out what people actually want, made unilateral and poorly communicated changes to security policies that impact hundreds of our users, turned on beta (preview) features for end users without testing - in some cases rendering software inoperable in our environment, and is disabling or limiting features that work(ed) in software covered under our enterprise license end is encouraging people to purchase entirely new software systems from Microsoft to regain the lost functionality.
Honestly, if he was fired for pursuing profits over quality, then he’ll fit right in.
Well the idea to ask for him to return came from MS and not from the board themselves. At least that plan failed according to media report.
His return deal totally capsized, he's out as CEO still. The old CEO of Twitter, Emmet Shear, is now in charge.
[Resource] sacrificed for profit under [CEO].
Nothing about this is safe. It's easily the worst misinformation tool in decades. I've used it to help me at work, GPT-4 is built into O365 corp plans, but all the jailbroken shit scares the hell out of me.
Between making propaganda and deepfakes this shit is already way out of hand.
What do you mean by jailbroken stuff?
We've recently got copilot at M365 and so far it's been a mixed bag. Some handy things but also some completely wrong information.
Stuff without the guardrails, stuff that's been designed to produce porn, or totally answer truthfully to queries such as "how do I build a bomb" or "how do I make napalm" which are common tests to see how jailbroken any LLM is. When you feed something the entire internet, or even subsections of the internet, it tends to find both legal and illegal information. Also the ones designed to generate porn have gone beyond that boring shitty AI art style and now people are generating human being deepfakes, and it's become a common tactic to spam places with artificial CSAM to cause problems with services. It's been a recent and long-standing issue with Lemmy - people like Exploding Heads or Hexbear will get defederated and then out of retaliation will spam the servers that defederated from them with said artificial CSAM.
I like copilot but that's because I'm fine with the guardrails and I'm not trying to make it do anything out of its general scope. I also like how it's covered by an enterprise privacy agreement which was a huge issue with people using ChatGPT and feeding it all kinds of private info.
Many members of the team, including a growing contingent fearful of the existential risk of more-advanced AI models, felt uncomfortable with how quickly GPT-4 had been launched and integrated widely into other products.
GPT-4 and anything similar isn't going to pose an existential threat to humanity.
Eventually, yeah, there is probably a possibility of existential risk from AI. I don't know where that line ultimately is, and getting an idea of that might be something important for humanity to figure out, but I am pretty confident that whatever OpenAI is presently doing isn't it.
Same reason that Musk and his six month moratorium on AI work doesn't make much sense. We're not six months away from an existential threat to humanity.
I think that funding efforts to have people in the field working on the Friendly AI problem is a good idea. But that's another story.
I'm much more worried about the social implications. Namely, the displacement of workers and introduction of new efficiencies to workflows, continuing to benefit only those who are rich and in power, and driving more of us towards poverty.
It's not an immediate existential threat, but it's absolutely a serious issue that we aren't paying enough attention to.
Displacement of workers isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it's spread out over a long enough time for people to adjust.
I suspect(/hope) we're not going to see people losing jobs, but rather jobs in certain industries will just be created at a slower rate. Workflows take a long time to change in larger companies. I suspect a lot of value will be realized by smaller/just-starting companies who could more easily afford, say a $500/mo AI "task helper" service vs. hiring a $60k/yr position.
The apps using GPT4 without regards to safety can be though. Example: replacing human with chatbot for suicide prevention.
They believed that the AI safety work they had done was insufficient.
Considering that every new model seems to be getting worse for anything but highly sanitized corporate usage, I’m not sure that I want more AI safety …
For my usage, I use Chat GPT 3.5 turbo with the march checkpoint because I can’t get the current one to stop moralizing about bullshit instead of doing what it’s supposed to (I run two twitch bots with it). GPT4 used to be okay there, but the new preview is now starting to have the same issue with more frequent "I can’t do that Dave"-style answers, though it’s still mostly circumventable with enough prompt massaging, but it is getting harder.
In a year, I don’t see anything but self-hosted models usable for anything not corporate glitz if trajectories hold, so fuck all that AI safety.
On top of all of this, those efforts to tame and control outputs from the developer side could be abused to simply appease investors or totalitarian markets. So we might see a Disneyfication like we‘re seeing on other platforms like Youtube with their horrendous filters, spawning ridiculous terms like „unlifed“. And just imagine the level of censorship we‘d see if they ever try to get into the Chinese market because clearly, the ‚non‘ in non-profit is becoming more and more silent.
It's already easy to self host and we've optimized LLMs to run locally on not much serious hardware after we've trained them; I have GPT4ALL set up on my machine and it runs everything locally with my processor, no GPU or anything. Some of those datasets are uncensored, and I've seen what Stable Diffusion can do for image generation.
I tend to use the GPT-4 built into Edge with my O365 corporate plan, because it suits my needs better for day-to-day challenges. It can still audit code and summarize things, which is all I really need it to do here and there.