5 ms·

Playing with Fire – ChatGPT

35 points by pagutierrezn 3y ago

tjopies 3y ago
I get the concern expressed, but the fear-mongering is getting a little much these days. Innovation can be scary, and at this time, people are making assumptions based purely on things that we do not know. How this will impact the future of business and technology has yet to be determined. Only time will tell. We must be careful as we chart this new scary world of large language models and Artificial Intelligence and their impacts on humanity, but we do need to slow down on using scare tactics. Please note I do not fault the author or anyone else for this representation of these new technologies. Nonetheless, I find it counterproductive to our discussions about setting guidelines and ensuring accountability in developing these models and their use. Right now, it sounds more like the CRISPR discussion all over again. My 2 cents for what it is worth.
- eternalban 3y ago
  > Only time will tell. The experiments to determine the answers must not be in the sole pervue of corporations. Executives of corporations have fiduciary duty only to the shareholders. So a completely liberal approach to traversing the space of pervasive AI in society, with stated 10% probability for catastrophic results (number is per Sam Altman), can not be left to a decision making process that only seeks to maximize profits. To "be careful as we chart" decisively means it can not be treated as a mere innovation to be subjected to market forces. That's really the only fundamental issue. This isn't a 'product' and 'market' may happily seek a local maxima which then leads to the "10%" failed state. That's it. Address that and we can safely explore away. So not fear mongering. Correctly categorizing.
- KyeRussell 3y ago
  There are similarities, sure. But there are also stark differences. Due to the existence of ChatGPT, the GPT-3 API, and the general viability of natural language prompting, LLMs are now essentially commoditised. They are now in the hands of orders of magnitude more people. Barring sector-specific regulations, people are free to iterate (with varying degrees of care, ethical consideration, and success) at a much faster pace compared with the field of medicine, or even academia in general, where there’s non-zero involvement of ethics committees. At DAYJOB we already have immense domain expertise to tune GPT-3 and prove its reliability in our sector. For giggles I also implemented an incredibly naive approach to a problem we set out to solve, and still ended up with a result that’s considered very impressive, and is usually the sort of thing many companies have spent countless hours working toward. My sector certainly won’t be an edge case. And we all know that everyone and their dog is trying to see how GPT-3 can deliver value. It’s all happening at the same time, and very quickly. As someone that’s generally quite jaded and skeptical of new technologies, my experience in my day job has completely changed my perspective. At this stage I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that this is going to be quite disruptive to labour markets at the very least. And this itself could very well be at the level where it raises serious ethical and societal questions. I’ll happily eat humble pie if I’m wrong.
  - tjopies 3y ago
    The point about this being more generally available for tinkering is fair, and from my experiments and usage, I can state it is impressive as absolute hell. First, however, we need a discussion focused on how we manage work as industry groups on at least trying to manage the proliferation of the technologies.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  >Innovation can be scary, and at this time, people are making assumptions based purely on things that we do not know. Here's the thing. Before chatGPT, it was pretty much a given that society was under more or less zero risk of losing jobs to AI. Now with GPT-4 that zero risk has changed to unknown risk. That is a huge change and it is a change that would be highly unwise to not address. I agree that only time will tell. But as humans we act on predictions of the future. We all have to make a bet on what that future will be. Right now this blog post is writing about a scenario that although speculative is also very realistic. It is, again, unwise to dismiss the possibility of a realistic scenario.
rumblestrut 3y ago
I hate to be “that guy,” but every time I go to a website that is not mobile friendly, I immediately discount it and close the tab. There’s something in my head that thinks, “This writer is out of touch” (even if they are not). I admit my logic may be faulty.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  Reader mode?
  - frizlab 3y ago
    Yeah I don’t even see websites now, only the reader. I do have a tendency to close websites where the reader does not work though.
- stuckkeys 3y ago
  turn on TTS. Quick bitching. jk =p
phillipcarter 3y ago
I don't get the call to action at the end - do a 6 month moratorium on R&D to focus on safety. That 6 month call is driven by people who write fanfic about AI. There's been active research in AI safety for years and years and it hasn't been without controversy, but these groups have done far more to ensure safety in its various forms exists than the fanfic authors. I think that a 6 month pause of "GPT-5" doesn't accomplish anything other than further fuel radicals who buy into the fanfic to take action that harms people who work in AI.
ttpphd 3y ago
Disaster capitalism! Seriously though, if you are interested in addressing the real, presently-timed harms of large language models (and the capitalists who deploy them), this letter is just the thing: Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter Timnit Gebru (DAIR), Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), Angelina McMillan-Major (University of Washington), Margaret Mitchell (Hugging Face) https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023 https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March20...
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  They are stopping only just short of saying that myopism is The One True Faith. (They literally call out "Longtermism" as being elitist and the root of all evil.) I mean, sure, one should look at one's feet from time to time to make sure one doesn't trip. However, these people come across as exclusively myopic and uncompromising in their position at that.
  - ttpphd 3y ago
    It seems to really get to you.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      A little, sure. Both the tone and the literal wording are a bit narrow-minded, aren't they?
      - ttpphd 3y ago
        Well, could you clarify, is it >exclusively myopic or is it >a bit narrow-minded ? I see these women as more open and accurate about the most immediate risks and ethical issues, so I see them as justified in being opinionated and expressing those opinions directly and frankly.
        Kim_Bruning 3y ago
seydor 3y ago
> This year with the introduction of ChatGPT-4 we may have seen the invention of something with the equivalent impact on society of explosives, mass communication, computers, recombinant DNA/CRISPR and nuclear weapons – all rolled into one application. I just can't stand this kind of language. ChatGPT is quite useful but have you tried to ask it something serious that is not twitter worthy? We are not there yet. And in any case, this is not the first superhuman tool that humans made. Nukes have existed for 70 years and probably become much more accessible. Biotech could create thousands of humanity-ending viruses, today. These are fears that we live with and will forever live with, but we can't live lives only in fear.
- Artistry121 3y ago
  I asked it about how to transition from nation states to local ownership at scale and was very happy with its answer. Better and more comprehensive than anyone I think around me would have answered - in 5 seconds - and it introduced me to new concepts like time banks and community currencies which I could ask follow up questions on. I think it’s truly mind blowing a computer can now simulate some of the best conversations I’ve ever had on a variety of topics.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    How about how to go about rolling back the Citizens United decision? That would be new, useful, but not really twitter-worthy. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
- DrScientist 3y ago
  Excellent point about living in fear. Though take the examples - nuclear weapons or biotech - as you say both have huge potential for harm. However both are regulated and relatively inaccessible to the average person. While training models like ChatGPT is still relatively inaccessible for the average person, using them is potentially not. One of the features of software is the almost zero cost of copying - making proliferation much more of an issue than for nukes or custom made viruses tech [1] ChatGPT is over-hyped of course, but I think the genie and bottle issue is more real here than for military tech or biotech. Having said all that I do think the solution is largely around applying existing laws to these new tools. [1] Ok if they escape, then can self replicate....
eternalban 3y ago
National Academy of Sciences must not only take a leading role here in creating the platform for discussions tasked with advising the government and public, it also must spearhead creating a national MI infrastructure for public use. Department of Energy already runs many high-tech national labratories and we need a Sandia or Los Alamos for AI, for national, public use.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  There's potential for manipulation here by the government. I would qualify your post with open source usage of the model, training algorithms and training data as well.
  - eternalban 3y ago
    That has to be a part of it, of course. Instead of us hoping for Facebook or whoever to grace us with weights for example, or having debates over copyrights, fine, let's have the US government (just like the efforts that gave us the internet ..) put together a program for national academies & labratories, research universities (such as Stanford), and private sector work together. For example such a program can then insure that the most up to date gigantic model X has a public variant with public weights with regulations for usage by public and private interests. And the issue of hoovering of content to create private models becomes moot, or at least far less problematic.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
The best thing we can do to ensure the safety of AI, is to keep make it so a user can run the models on their own hardware. The biggest danger from AI that I see is that they will only be able to be run by large corporations/governments and we the users will be at their mercy with regards to what we are allowed to use them for.
- philote 3y ago
  And right now if you want to use ChatGPT, you have to give "Open"AI your phone number and email.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    tbf it's the only way to avoid people creating an unlimited amount of free account to bypass the free tier limitations. I used midjourney for free until now with an army of discord accounts because they simply didn't have any checks
c54 3y ago
It’s really surprising to me the amount of doubt that’s been voiced over the last few weeks that a technology could possibly be dangerous. For me the perspective is straightforward: even if chatgpt is not it, there is the physical possiblity for a relatively small improvement on human intelligence just like we’re a relatively small improvement on chimps, or on neanderthals. That’s just simple for me to get my head around. Along with that, there are easy to follow “monkey’s paw” scenarios: the easiest way to end poverty is to extinct all humans, the easiest way to end suffering is to extinct life on earth. I can’t quite formulate a straightforward way to eliminate suffering while maximizing my humanist values. This is the alignment problem. We’ve got Yan LeCun saying that slowing down or thinking about safety would just mean the chinese get ahead. He’s also saying we understand LLMs more than we understand airplanes. We’ve got people completely ignoring past examples of technological destruction or technological safety like nonproliferation or Asilomar. We’ve got people saying GPT is simultaneously revolutionary and going to change everything, thus it’s critical we forge forward… but also is too dumb to change anything (makes up info, etc), and thus we should not worry about being concerned with safety. What is it about our field that is so gung ho? Are these all bad faith FOMO arguments? It’s hard to understand. —— The one way i can make sense of it is as a religious experience. Our culture has deep persistent roots in christian eschatological mythology, and of course the coming of a benevolent next wave of intelligence slots into this nicely. Taleb states this clearly[0] that those who are pure of heart will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven. Not a huge fan of this style of accidental religiosity. [0] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1642241685823315972?s=20 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1642241685823315972?s=20
kypro 3y ago
Could someone not worried about AGI, please explain their position? Specifically what makes you so confident that someone won't end up creating an AGI that's unaligned? Or alternative, if you believe an unaligned AGI might be created why are you confident that it won't cause mass destruction? I guess the way I see this is that even if you believe there is a 5-10% chance of AGI could go rouge and say take out global power grids, why is this a chance worth taking? Especially if we can try to slow capability progress as much as possible while funding alignment research?
stuckkeys 3y ago
Great piece. Although, I do not agree with "labs keeping safe" look at what happened with the pandemic. Or perhaps, the safety measures that are currently in place need to be redefined. The world is at conflict, everyone is in a race. Dominance is at play. I think it is silly to even consider the halt of AI development. The faster we reach the maximum output, the quicker we will realize the breaking points.
jaybrendansmith 3y ago
I'm not sure I believe we're quite there yet with GPT4, but let's suppose that we are. All of those other, potentially dangerous technologies mentioned have close government supervision that surrounds them: Nuclear has the Department of Energy, non-proliferation treaties, test ban treaties and much more. Biotech has the FDA and HHS and tons of regulation like GxP, ICH, HIPAA, and much more. But what does Artificial Intelligence have? ITAR? I think the party is over, fellas. It's time for a new Federal department. Let's call it the Artificial Intelligence Administration (AIA). Time to take control of this technology before it takes control of US.

35 points by pagutierrezn 3y ago

I get the concern expressed, but the fear-mongering is getting a little much these days. Innovation can be scary, and at this time, people are making assumptions based purely on things that we do not know. How this will impact the future of business and technology has yet to be determined. Only time will tell. We must be careful as we chart this new scary world of large language models and Artificial Intelligence and their impacts on humanity, but we do need to slow down on using scare tactics. Please note I do not fault the author or anyone else for this representation of these new technologies. Nonetheless, I find it counterproductive to our discussions about setting guidelines and ensuring accountability in developing these models and their use. Right now, it sounds more like the CRISPR discussion all over again. My 2 cents for what it is worth.

eternalban 3y ago
> Only time will tell. The experiments to determine the answers must not be in the sole pervue of corporations. Executives of corporations have fiduciary duty only to the shareholders. So a completely liberal approach to traversing the space of pervasive AI in society, with stated 10% probability for catastrophic results (number is per Sam Altman), can not be left to a decision making process that only seeks to maximize profits. To "be careful as we chart" decisively means it can not be treated as a mere innovation to be subjected to market forces. That's really the only fundamental issue. This isn't a 'product' and 'market' may happily seek a local maxima which then leads to the "10%" failed state. That's it. Address that and we can safely explore away. So not fear mongering. Correctly categorizing.
KyeRussell 3y ago
There are similarities, sure. But there are also stark differences. Due to the existence of ChatGPT, the GPT-3 API, and the general viability of natural language prompting, LLMs are now essentially commoditised. They are now in the hands of orders of magnitude more people. Barring sector-specific regulations, people are free to iterate (with varying degrees of care, ethical consideration, and success) at a much faster pace compared with the field of medicine, or even academia in general, where there’s non-zero involvement of ethics committees. At DAYJOB we already have immense domain expertise to tune GPT-3 and prove its reliability in our sector. For giggles I also implemented an incredibly naive approach to a problem we set out to solve, and still ended up with a result that’s considered very impressive, and is usually the sort of thing many companies have spent countless hours working toward. My sector certainly won’t be an edge case. And we all know that everyone and their dog is trying to see how GPT-3 can deliver value. It’s all happening at the same time, and very quickly. As someone that’s generally quite jaded and skeptical of new technologies, my experience in my day job has completely changed my perspective. At this stage I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that this is going to be quite disruptive to labour markets at the very least. And this itself could very well be at the level where it raises serious ethical and societal questions. I’ll happily eat humble pie if I’m wrong.
- tjopies 3y ago
  The point about this being more generally available for tinkering is fair, and from my experiments and usage, I can state it is impressive as absolute hell. First, however, we need a discussion focused on how we manage work as industry groups on at least trying to manage the proliferation of the technologies.
Herval_freire 3y ago
>Innovation can be scary, and at this time, people are making assumptions based purely on things that we do not know. Here's the thing. Before chatGPT, it was pretty much a given that society was under more or less zero risk of losing jobs to AI. Now with GPT-4 that zero risk has changed to unknown risk. That is a huge change and it is a change that would be highly unwise to not address. I agree that only time will tell. But as humans we act on predictions of the future. We all have to make a bet on what that future will be. Right now this blog post is writing about a scenario that although speculative is also very realistic. It is, again, unwise to dismiss the possibility of a realistic scenario.

rumblestrut 3y ago

I hate to be “that guy,” but every time I go to a website that is not mobile friendly, I immediately discount it and close the tab. There’s something in my head that thinks, “This writer is out of touch” (even if they are not). I admit my logic may be faulty.

NegativeLatency 3y ago
Reader mode?
- frizlab 3y ago
  Yeah I don’t even see websites now, only the reader. I do have a tendency to close websites where the reader does not work though.
stuckkeys 3y ago
turn on TTS. Quick bitching. jk =p

phillipcarter 3y ago

I don't get the call to action at the end - do a 6 month moratorium on R&D to focus on safety. That 6 month call is driven by people who write fanfic about AI. There's been active research in AI safety for years and years and it hasn't been without controversy, but these groups have done far more to ensure safety in its various forms exists than the fanfic authors. I think that a 6 month pause of "GPT-5" doesn't accomplish anything other than further fuel radicals who buy into the fanfic to take action that harms people who work in AI.

ttpphd 3y ago

Disaster capitalism! Seriously though, if you are interested in addressing the real, presently-timed harms of large language models (and the capitalists who deploy them), this letter is just the thing: Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter Timnit Gebru (DAIR), Emily M. Bender (University of Washington), Angelina McMillan-Major (University of Washington), Margaret Mitchell (Hugging Face) https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023 https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March20...

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
They are stopping only just short of saying that myopism is The One True Faith. (They literally call out "Longtermism" as being elitist and the root of all evil.) I mean, sure, one should look at one's feet from time to time to make sure one doesn't trip. However, these people come across as exclusively myopic and uncompromising in their position at that.
- ttpphd 3y ago
  It seems to really get to you.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    A little, sure. Both the tone and the literal wording are a bit narrow-minded, aren't they?
    - ttpphd 3y ago
      Well, could you clarify, is it >exclusively myopic or is it >a bit narrow-minded ? I see these women as more open and accurate about the most immediate risks and ethical issues, so I see them as justified in being opinionated and expressing those opinions directly and frankly.
      - Kim_Bruning 3y ago

seydor 3y ago

> This year with the introduction of ChatGPT-4 we may have seen the invention of something with the equivalent impact on society of explosives, mass communication, computers, recombinant DNA/CRISPR and nuclear weapons – all rolled into one application. I just can't stand this kind of language. ChatGPT is quite useful but have you tried to ask it something serious that is not twitter worthy? We are not there yet. And in any case, this is not the first superhuman tool that humans made. Nukes have existed for 70 years and probably become much more accessible. Biotech could create thousands of humanity-ending viruses, today. These are fears that we live with and will forever live with, but we can't live lives only in fear.

Artistry121 3y ago
I asked it about how to transition from nation states to local ownership at scale and was very happy with its answer. Better and more comprehensive than anyone I think around me would have answered - in 5 seconds - and it introduced me to new concepts like time banks and community currencies which I could ask follow up questions on. I think it’s truly mind blowing a computer can now simulate some of the best conversations I’ve ever had on a variety of topics.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  How about how to go about rolling back the Citizens United decision? That would be new, useful, but not really twitter-worthy. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
DrScientist 3y ago
Excellent point about living in fear. Though take the examples - nuclear weapons or biotech - as you say both have huge potential for harm. However both are regulated and relatively inaccessible to the average person. While training models like ChatGPT is still relatively inaccessible for the average person, using them is potentially not. One of the features of software is the almost zero cost of copying - making proliferation much more of an issue than for nukes or custom made viruses tech [1] ChatGPT is over-hyped of course, but I think the genie and bottle issue is more real here than for military tech or biotech. Having said all that I do think the solution is largely around applying existing laws to these new tools. [1] Ok if they escape, then can self replicate....

eternalban 3y ago

National Academy of Sciences must not only take a leading role here in creating the platform for discussions tasked with advising the government and public, it also must spearhead creating a national MI infrastructure for public use. Department of Energy already runs many high-tech national labratories and we need a Sandia or Los Alamos for AI, for national, public use.

Herval_freire 3y ago
There's potential for manipulation here by the government. I would qualify your post with open source usage of the model, training algorithms and training data as well.
- eternalban 3y ago
  That has to be a part of it, of course. Instead of us hoping for Facebook or whoever to grace us with weights for example, or having debates over copyrights, fine, let's have the US government (just like the efforts that gave us the internet ..) put together a program for national academies & labratories, research universities (such as Stanford), and private sector work together. For example such a program can then insure that the most up to date gigantic model X has a public variant with public weights with regulations for usage by public and private interests. And the issue of hoovering of content to create private models becomes moot, or at least far less problematic.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

The best thing we can do to ensure the safety of AI, is to keep make it so a user can run the models on their own hardware. The biggest danger from AI that I see is that they will only be able to be run by large corporations/governments and we the users will be at their mercy with regards to what we are allowed to use them for.

philote 3y ago
And right now if you want to use ChatGPT, you have to give "Open"AI your phone number and email.
- lm28469 3y ago
  tbf it's the only way to avoid people creating an unlimited amount of free account to bypass the free tier limitations. I used midjourney for free until now with an army of discord accounts because they simply didn't have any checks

c54 3y ago

It’s really surprising to me the amount of doubt that’s been voiced over the last few weeks that a technology could possibly be dangerous. For me the perspective is straightforward: even if chatgpt is not it, there is the physical possiblity for a relatively small improvement on human intelligence just like we’re a relatively small improvement on chimps, or on neanderthals. That’s just simple for me to get my head around. Along with that, there are easy to follow “monkey’s paw” scenarios: the easiest way to end poverty is to extinct all humans, the easiest way to end suffering is to extinct life on earth. I can’t quite formulate a straightforward way to eliminate suffering while maximizing my humanist values. This is the alignment problem. We’ve got Yan LeCun saying that slowing down or thinking about safety would just mean the chinese get ahead. He’s also saying we understand LLMs more than we understand airplanes. We’ve got people completely ignoring past examples of technological destruction or technological safety like nonproliferation or Asilomar. We’ve got people saying GPT is simultaneously revolutionary and going to change everything, thus it’s critical we forge forward… but also is too dumb to change anything (makes up info, etc), and thus we should not worry about being concerned with safety. What is it about our field that is so gung ho? Are these all bad faith FOMO arguments? It’s hard to understand. —— The one way i can make sense of it is as a religious experience. Our culture has deep persistent roots in christian eschatological mythology, and of course the coming of a benevolent next wave of intelligence slots into this nicely. Taleb states this clearly[0] that those who are pure of heart will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven. Not a huge fan of this style of accidental religiosity. [0] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1642241685823315972?s=20 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1642241685823315972?s=20

kypro 3y ago

Could someone not worried about AGI, please explain their position? Specifically what makes you so confident that someone won't end up creating an AGI that's unaligned? Or alternative, if you believe an unaligned AGI might be created why are you confident that it won't cause mass destruction? I guess the way I see this is that even if you believe there is a 5-10% chance of AGI could go rouge and say take out global power grids, why is this a chance worth taking? Especially if we can try to slow capability progress as much as possible while funding alignment research?

stuckkeys 3y ago

Great piece. Although, I do not agree with "labs keeping safe" look at what happened with the pandemic. Or perhaps, the safety measures that are currently in place need to be redefined. The world is at conflict, everyone is in a race. Dominance is at play. I think it is silly to even consider the halt of AI development. The faster we reach the maximum output, the quicker we will realize the breaking points.

jaybrendansmith 3y ago

I'm not sure I believe we're quite there yet with GPT4, but let's suppose that we are. All of those other, potentially dangerous technologies mentioned have close government supervision that surrounds them: Nuclear has the Department of Energy, non-proliferation treaties, test ban treaties and much more. Biotech has the FDA and HHS and tons of regulation like GxP, ICH, HIPAA, and much more. But what does Artificial Intelligence have? ITAR? I think the party is over, fellas. It's time for a new Federal department. Let's call it the Artificial Intelligence Administration (AIA). Time to take control of this technology before it takes control of US.