As the popularity has exploded, and ethical questions have become increasingly relevant, it is probably worth taking some time to nail certain aspects down before releasing everything to the public for the sake of being first.
Edit: I forgot, NASA trained astronaut!
Add to that a company environment that seems to be built on money-crazed stock option piling engineers and a CEO that seems to have gotten power-crazed.. I mean they grew far too fast I guess..
Altman saga, allowing military use and other small things step by step tarnish your reputation and pushes you to the mediocrity or worse.
Microsoft has many great development stories (read Raymond Chen's blog to be awed), but what they did at the end to other competitors and how they behave removed their luster, permanently for some people.
That would actually increase their standing in my eyes.
Not too far from where I live, Russian bombing is destroying homes of people whose language is similar to mine and whose "fault" is that they don't want to submit to rule from Moscow, direct or indirect.
If OpenAI can somehow help stop that, I am all for it.
I got some bad news for you then.
And, according to UN, Turkey has used AI powered, autonomous littering drones to hit military convoys in Libya [1].
Regardless of us vs. them, AI shouldn't be a part of warfare, IMHO.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how...
[1]: https://www.voanews.com/a/africa_possible-first-use-ai-armed...
I am not saying this is anything but it's definetely tingling my "something's up" senses.
Nor should nuclear weapons, guns, knives, or cudgels.
But we don’t have a way to stop them being used.
- NPR: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/01/1002196245/a-u-n-report-suggests-libya-saw-the-first-battlefield-killing-by-an-autonomous-d
- Lieber Institute: https://lieber.westpoint.edu/kargu-2-autonomous-attack-drone-legal-ethical/
- ICRC: https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/libya-use-lethal-autonomous-weapon-systems
- UN report itself (Search for Kargu): https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=S%2F2021%2F229&Language=E&DeviceType=Desktop&LangRequested=False
- Kargu itself: https://www.stm.com.tr/en/kargu-autonomous-tactical-multi-rotor-attack-uav
If that's the foundation your luster is built on - then it's not really ridiculous.
GPT popularized LLMs to the world with GPT-3, not too long before GPT-4 came out. They made a lot of big, cool changes shortly after GPT-4 - and everyone in their mother announced LLM projects and integrations in that time.
It's been about 9 months now, and not a whole lot has happened in the space.
It's almost as if the law of diminishing returns has kicked in.
I don't think so. In order to be virtuous, one should have some skin in the game. I would respect dedicated pacifists in Kyiv a lot more. I wouldn't agree with them, but at least they would be ready to face pretty stark consequences of their philosophical belief.
Living in the Silicon Valley and proclaiming yourself virtuous pacifist comes at negligible personal cost.
I will check out the links. Thanks a lot.
My experience is limited. I got it to berate me with a jailbreak. I asked it to do so, so the onus is on me to be able to handle the response.
I'm trying to think of unethical things it can do that are not in the realm of "you asked it for that information, just as you would have searched on Google", but I can only think of things like "how to make a bomb", suicide related instructions, etc which I would place in the "sharp knife" category. One has to be able to handle it before using it.
It's been increasingly giving the canned "As an AI language model ..." response for stuff that's not even unethical, just dicey, for example.
Note well: I haven't actually used it myself, so I'm speculating (guessing) rather than saying that this is how it is.
The second that this tech was developed it became literally impossible to stop this from happening. It was a totally foreseeable consequence, but the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions.
Such an absurdly reductive take. Or how about just like nuclear energy and knives, they are incredibly useful, society advancing tools that can also be used to cause harm. It's not as if AI can only be used for warfare. And like pretty much every technology, it ends up being used 99.9% for good, and 0.1% for evil.
If we cared about preventing LLMs from being used for violence, we would have poured more than a tiny fraction our resources into safety/alignment research. We did not. Ergo, we don't care, we just want people to think we care.
I don't have any real issue with using LLMs for military purposes. It was always going to happen.
We may lack the motivation and agreement to ban particular methods of warfare, but the means to enforce that ban exists, and drastically reduces their use.
Unfortunately, no deep piles of gold without deep piles of corpses. It is inevitable, though. Prompted by the US military, other countries have also always pioneered or acquired advance tech, and I don't see why AI would be any different: Never send a human to do a machine's job is as ominous now as it is dystopian as machines increasingly become more human-like.
Do we, though? Sometimes, against smaller misbehaving players. Note that it doesn't necessarily stop them (Iran, North Korea), even though it makes their international position somewhat complicated.
Against the big players (the US, Russia, China), "threat of warfare and prosecution" does not really work to enforce anything. Russia rains death on Ukrainian cities every night, or attempts to do so while being stopped by AA. Meanwhile, Russian oil and gas are still being traded, including in EU.
Keep in mind GPT-3.5 is not an overnight craze. It takes months before normal people even know what it is.
Deepfakes are going to become a concern of everyday life whether you stop OpenAI from generating them or not. The cat is out of the proverbial bag. We as a society need to adjust to treating this sort of content skeptically, and I see no more appropriate way than letting a bunch of fake celebrity porn circulate.
What scares me about deepfakes is not the porn, it's the scams. The scams can actually destroy lives. We need to start ratcheting up social skepticism asap.
To the general public sure but not research which is what produces the models.
The idea that diminishing returns has hit because there hasn't been a new SOTA model in 9 months is ridiculous. Models take months just to train. Open AI sat on 4 for over half a year after training was done just red-teaming it.
It's not like the technology is going to disappear.
People don't participate in murder and they think others shouldn't either.
People don't participate in wars (which are essentially large scale murder) and they think others shouldn't.
Murder happens anyway. War happens anyway.
Yet if someone says 'war bad' people jump and say 'virtue signaling', but no one does that when people say 'murder bad'.
There's some really weird moral entanglement happening in the minds of people that are so eager to call out virtue signaling.
The specific policies of OpenAI or Google or whatnot are irrelevant. The technology is out of the bag.