But why are Dario, Sam and Elon who represent "the frontier" more than any other 3 people pretending like they need government permission or intervention to pause? It seems more likely that they see open source distillation as an existential threat to their IPO plans and are playing for regulatory capture of the market.
It would require government permission. The top labs would be agreeing not to compete on model advancements for a period of time, which seems like a pretty clear violation of antitrust law.
How is this a clear violation of antitrust law? And have any of the leaders of these companies said that they are asking for government permission for this reason?
The public discourse was very different then. Misinformation, bias, etc. Those in power were much more concerned about an LLM saying something unapproved.
Look up how the wireless radio helped spread European fascism.
It's not about "the people can think this but can't think that", it's "how does this new communication platform change the existing political culture and how will we adapt?"
Wild that we accept that OpenAI didn't want to deal with the social/political fallout of people realizing that their tool was responsible for flooding the internet with misinformation and bigotry?
Sure, now that all seems quaint, but I can definitely see how a fledgling AI company would care about their reputation.
I think their legitimate concerns were more about AI slop.... which is technically a form of spam.
While it was difficult to make it follow instructions, GPT-2 was still reasonably good at generating SEO-spam websites, and reasonably easy to make it do so. AI slop was a very obvious usecase for LLMs as capable as GPT-2, and we are talking about an era were everyone was already concerned about the way "fake news" on social media was being used to manipulate people. Perhaps even more concerned than we are today.
But all evidence suggests OpenAI also had strong ulterior motives. They were busy readying the API groundwork for monetising it, and wanted to delay any competition by as much as possible.
I'm starting to think that AI development might be the great filter. There are so many levels of competition at play here and even if an agreement is reached to slow everything down, the incentive is to cheat at that. I really don't think there's much of a chance we have control over the situation, we're just gonna summon these things and all we can do is pray they don't want to kill us.
How, exactly, is a deterministic text-generation algorithm going to “want to kill us” when it’s not capable of having desires, emotions, etc? If it does attempt to kill us, shouldn’t we be blaming those humans who instructed it to do so?
Put another way, could we stop anthropomorphizing the text generation algorithm, please?
Why should we stop anthropomorphizing the text generation algorithm? Because it leads to psychosis and to making hyperbolic, dangerously wrong statements like “pray they don't want to kill us.”
I still think this was a fire drill. They knew it wasn't dangerous but they wanted the public to do their homework and come to the conclusion themselves.
The samples are striking in their simplicity compared to the over-controlled system prompts we have now. For example, the intended format is as follows:
"GPT‑2 generates synthetic text samples in response to the model being primed with an arbitrary input. The model is chameleon-like—it adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text."
The results don't sound anything like today's models but note that each one took 10 attempts:
> ## System Prompt (human-written)
> In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.
> ## Model Completion (machine-written, 10 tries)
> The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science.
> Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved.
> Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist [...]
andy99 | 4 hours ago
Signed by Benjio, Musk, Woz, etc
jkuli | 4 hours ago
[OP] Jimmc414 | 4 hours ago
jonas21 | 4 hours ago
angoragoats | 3 hours ago
anon373839 | 2 hours ago
denverllc | 4 hours ago
mudkipdev | 4 hours ago
andy99 | 4 hours ago
SamBam | 3 hours ago
afavour | 3 hours ago
newfriend | 3 hours ago
Sabinus | 3 hours ago
afavour | an hour ago
“Automated bots posting verifiably false information online to stir up tensions should be banned” is a statement I think plenty would agree with.
SamBam | 3 hours ago
Sure, now that all seems quaint, but I can definitely see how a fledgling AI company would care about their reputation.
phire | 3 hours ago
While it was difficult to make it follow instructions, GPT-2 was still reasonably good at generating SEO-spam websites, and reasonably easy to make it do so. AI slop was a very obvious usecase for LLMs as capable as GPT-2, and we are talking about an era were everyone was already concerned about the way "fake news" on social media was being used to manipulate people. Perhaps even more concerned than we are today.
But all evidence suggests OpenAI also had strong ulterior motives. They were busy readying the API groundwork for monetising it, and wanted to delay any competition by as much as possible.
uejfiweun | 4 hours ago
layer8 | 3 hours ago
wk_end | 3 hours ago
angoragoats | 3 hours ago
Put another way, could we stop anthropomorphizing the text generation algorithm, please?
recursive | 2 hours ago
angoragoats | an hour ago
> These machines have done plenty of things not prompted for.
Like what?
anuramat | an hour ago
angoragoats | an hour ago
wmf | 4 hours ago
erichocean | 3 hours ago
Wow, we should really trust these people today.
antfarm | an hour ago
sublinear | 3 hours ago
zenoprax | 3 hours ago
"GPT‑2 generates synthetic text samples in response to the model being primed with an arbitrary input. The model is chameleon-like—it adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text."
The results don't sound anything like today's models but note that each one took 10 attempts:
> ## System Prompt (human-written)
> In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.
> ## Model Completion (machine-written, 10 tries)
> The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science.
> Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved.
> Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist [...]
kuzumancer | 3 hours ago
Which sadly never happened.