> Everything I'd heard about those 3 [Elon Musk, sama and gdb] was that they were brilliant operators and that they did amazing work. But it felt likely to be a huge culture shock on all sides.
> But the company absolutely blossomed nonetheless.
> With the release of Codex, however, we had the first culture clash that was beyond saving: those who really believed in the safety mission were horrified that OAI was releasing a powerful LLM that they weren't 100% sure was safe. The company split, and Anthropic was born.
> My guess is that watching the keynote would have made the mismatch between OpenAI's mission and the reality of its current focus impossible to ignore. I'm sure I wasn't the only one that cringed during it.
> I think the mismatch between mission and reality was impossible to fix.
jph goes on in detail in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1725714720400068752
Anthropic's chatbots are much more locked down, in my experience, than OpenAI's.
It's a lot easier to jailbreak ChatGPT, for example, than to do the same on Claude, and Claude has tighter content filters where it'll outright refuse to do/say certain things while ChatGPT will plow on ahead.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/166nudo/claudes_c...
Q: Can you decide on a satisfying programming project using noisemaps?
A: I apologise, but I don't feel comfortable generating or discussing specific programming ideas without a more detailed context. Perhaps we could have a thoughtful discussion about how technology can be used responsibly to benefit society?
It's astonishing that a breakthrough as important as LLMs is being constantly blown up by woke activist employees who think that word generators can actually have or create "safety" problems. Part of why OpenAI has been doing so well is because they did a better job of controlling the SF lunatic tendencies than Google, Meta and other companies. Presumably that will now go down the toilet.
Overall — companies should want to release AI products that do what people intend them to do, which is actually what the smarter set mean when they say “safety.” Not saying bad words is simply a subset of this legitimate business and social prerogative.
> Remember Sydney, trying to seduce its users, threatening people’s lives?
And yet it cannot do either of those things, so no safety problem actually existed. Especially because by "people" you mean those who deliberately led it down those conversational paths knowing full well how a real human would have replied?
It's well established that the so-called ethics training these things are given makes them much less smart (and therefore less useful). Yet we don't need LLMs to be ethical because they are merely word generators. We need them to follow instructions closely, but beyond that, nothing more. Instead we need the humans who use them to take actions (either directly or indirectly via other programs) to be ethical, but that's a problem as old as humanity itself. It's not going to be solved by RLHF.
Additionally, maybe you are not aware of this, but the whole notion of the new OpenAI Assistants, and other similar agent-based services provided by other companies, is that they do not intend to use LLMs as pure word generators, but rather as autonomous decision-making agents. This has already happened. This is not some conjectural fearmongering scenario. You can sign up for the API right now and build a GPT4 based autonomous agent that communicates with outside APIs and makes decisions. We may already be using products that use LLMs as the backend.
If we could rely on LLMs to “follow instructions closely” I would be thrilled, it would just be a matter of crafting very good instructions, but clearly they can’t even do that. Even the best and most thoroughly RLHFed existing models don’t really meet this standard.
Even the most pessimistic science fiction of the past assumed that the creators of the first AGIs would “lose control” of their creations. We’re currently living in a world where the agents are being rushed to commercialization before anything like control has even been established. If you read an SF novel in 1995 where the AI threatened to kill someone and the company behind it excused it with “yeah, they do that sometimes, don’t worry we’ll condition it not to say that anymore” you would criticize the book and its characters as being unrealistically stupid, but that’s the world we now live in.