[HN Gopher] Meta is inviting researchers to pick apart the flaws...
___________________________________________________________________
Meta is inviting researchers to pick apart the flaws in its version
of GPT-3
Author : mgl
Score : 223 points
Date : 2022-06-27 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| bribri wrote:
| So happy more stuff like this is open. Kudos to Meta
| westoncb wrote:
| This makes for some pretty excellent counter-marketing against
| OpenAI:
|
| "so Meta's GTP-3 is open?"
|
| "correct"
|
| "and the original is not?"
|
| "correct"
|
| "and the original is made by 'OpenAI'?"
|
| "correct"
|
| "hmm"
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Is this an advertisement for developers to work on Facebook's AI
| for free or am I being cynical?
| charcircuit wrote:
| No, it means that researchers now can have access to Facebook's
| large language model. No one is forcing the researchers to do
| research using it.
| rexpop wrote:
| Of course it is! That's the premise of every open-source
| initiative, too. It's not too cynical, it's plain economics.
| Pretty sure it's the explicit purpose, too.
|
| No one really thinks open-source sponsorships are charity, do
| they?
| abrax3141 wrote:
| Yet another confabulation generator with pretty good grammar.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Didn't we already learn our "free" lesson from this company?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Really concerning to me that people find the luddite argument so
| persuasive and that it gets so much play in the press. The crux
| of the argument from the outside "ethicists" quoted in the
| article is something like.
|
| "This new piece of technology might be dangerous and we don't
| fully understand it, so we should not poke at it or allow people
| to study it."
|
| Maybe there's just something about my personality that is deeply
| at odds with this sentiment, but it's also about the lack of
| testable predictions coming from people like this. Their position
| could be taken about literally anything with the same logical
| justification. It's a political and emotional stance masquerading
| as a technical or scientific process.
| drcode wrote:
| The remaining great apes remain alive primarily due to our pity
| for their plight- They were once the highest IQ species in the
| world, but no more
|
| Probably, we will be in the same situation relatively soon: And
| there is little reason to expect the AI systems to have the
| same pity
|
| Sorry I can't set up a double-blind, testable, peer-reviewed
| study to help convince you of this
| jonas21 wrote:
| It's much easier to sit on the sidelines and come up with
| reasons why you shouldn't do something new than it is to
| actually do it.
|
| Some people have figured this out and built careers on it. This
| wouldn't be a problem, except that this opposition eventually
| becomes their professional identity - they derive prestige from
| being the person who is fighting against whatever. So even
| after researchers address their concerns, they have to ignore
| the progress or move the goalposts so they can keep on opposing
| it.
| eszaq wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. In the same way we
| have public defenders who professionally defend scoundrels,
| it seems good to have people who professionally critique new
| technologies.
|
| I'm old enough to remember the naive optimism around the
| internet in the 2000s. "The long tail", "cognitive surplus",
| "one laptop per child", Creative Commons, the Arab "Spring",
| breathless Youtube videos about how social media is gonna
| revolutionize society for the better, etc. Hardly anyone
| forecasted clickbait, Trump tweets, revenge porn, or social
| media shaming. If we had a few professional critics who were
| incentivized to pour cold water on the whole deal, or at
| least scan the horizon for potential problems, maybe things
| would've turned out better.
| amelius wrote:
| One day, these people will be right!
|
| (And then we know one solution to the Fermi paradox.)
| armchairhacker wrote:
| My understanding is that when companies say "we aren't
| releasing this / limited access / restrictions / for ethical
| reasons" they really mean "we aren't releasing this because a)
| it's expensive to run these models, b) it was even more
| expensive to create them and we might be able to profit, and c)
| maybe it's bad for our ethics, which affects our funding and
| relations, and also, ethics."
| godmode2019 wrote:
| Its a business play,
|
| They are asking to be regulated because they have finished
| writing their models.
|
| With regulation it will be harder for up and coming models to
| gain traction.
|
| Its getting so much coverage because its paid press, I read
| about it in my newspaper BEFORE tech YouTube and here.
| rglover wrote:
| Read Ted Kaczynski's (yes, that one) "Industrial Society and
| Its Future" with a neutral mind and you will start to
| understand why it's compelling.
| guelo wrote:
| The attitude that I have trouble understanding is "A company
| spent millions of dollars researching and developing a new
| technology, they must make it available to me or else they are
| evil."
| ipaddr wrote:
| Spent millions on tech that could be a net negative for
| society. Keeping details secret makes people think they are
| evil because that's how coverups happen.
| trention wrote:
| Here is one prediction: Because of language models, the amount
| of fake news online will increase by an order of magnitude (at
| least) before this decade ends. And there is no interpretation
| of that development as anything else but a net negative.
|
| Another more broad prediction: In a decade, the overall
| influence of language models on our society will be universally
| seen as a net negative.
| radford-neal wrote:
| "Because of language models, the amount of fake news online
| will increase by an order of magnitude (at least) before this
| decade ends. And there is no interpretation of that
| development as anything else but a net negative."
|
| That's not at all clear. You're assuming people will continue
| to give credence to random stuff they read. But once fake AI-
| generated content is common, people will surely become less
| trusting. The end result could easily be that fewer people
| than before believe fake news is real. Presumably, fewer
| people will believe real news too, but the result could still
| be net positive.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I keep seeing this prediction, but have yet to see a
| convincing argument as to how this content is supposed to
| circumvent existing trust networks.
|
| News outlets are nothing without a track record. People trust
| names they recognize. You can spin up as many CMS instances,
| domains, and social media profiles for fake news as you want,
| but without a history shared with its core audience, all the
| language models in the world aren't going to convince anyone
| but the most credulous when the content is coming from
| unfamiliar sources.
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| What is the issue with fake news?
|
| Language models can now pass as human in many situations but
| there are already billions of humans capable of writing fake
| news, this isn't a new capability.
|
| We have already created mechanisms for deciding which voices
| to trust and no matter how good language models get they will
| not be able to prevent you from visiting economist.com
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > there are already billions of humans capable of writing
| fake news
|
| You have to pay them, and most of them are not very good at
| writing. Even with a big budget, you get a limited number
| of good articles per day.
|
| If you can make writing fake news 100x cheaper, and then
| just throw everything at social networks and let people
| sort out the most viral stuff, that can change the game.
|
| Also, computers can be faster. If something new happens
| today and hundred articles are written about it, a computer
| can quickly process them and generate hundred more articles
| on the same topic, than a group of humans would. (Many
| humans can do the writing in parallel, but each of them
| needs to read individually the things they want to react
| to.)
| Vetch wrote:
| The vast majority of generators of fake news today are
| from Content Mills, Copy Paste Mills and general SEO
| spammers. Political misinformation is the other big
| generator. The economics of it and not "ethical" gate
| keeping is what will affect their output. Realistically,
| normal people don't have the ability to coordinate hordes
| of proxied IPs to attack social networks requiring
| account sign ups and custom feeds.
|
| The value of exercising critical thinking, checking
| trusted curated sources, information hygiene, recognizing
| and avoiding manipulation tactics in news and ads will
| have to go up. The internet is already almost entirely
| unreliable without requiring any fancy AI. The listed
| skills will be necessary regardless any increase of
| politically manipulative content, advertisements or
| product misrepresentations.
| jmathai wrote:
| Your argument holds true in theory but does not always work
| in practice.
|
| The issue many people have with fake news is that it's a
| tool that can sway public opinion without any basis on
| facts. I'm not sure, by your response, if you find that to
| be problematic or not.
|
| I think we've recently found that people _haven 't_ decided
| which voices to trust and can be led to believe things
| placed in front of them. Paired with the ability to spread
| that information - there is significant impact on society.
|
| That's the reason some people have issues with fake news,
| from my experience.
|
| Also, getting a computer to do something will always scale
| several orders of magnitude more than having billions of
| people do it.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I kind of agree - a lot of "fake" news believers seems to
| be actively seeking for contrarian views purely for the
| sake of it, with indoctrination as an incentive offered for
| labor of reading, rather than harm unto themselves. In that
| sense, the factual accuracy - the "fake" notion, don't seem
| to be the point, and the volume of text that NN generators
| enable can be less of an issue.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| I think the issue could be volume (and also that the vast
| majority of humans aren't actively exercising their ability
| to write fake news at present). Also that language models
| might be far more convincing.
| NoMAD76 wrote:
| Fake news and AI generated news are kinda all over the place
| for a good amount of time. It's faster and cheaper to have AI
| write news from a press release.
|
| My prediction is that in the next 10y we will really struggle
| to determine between fake-people and real-human. There will
| be an explosion of fake-identities posting more and more
| human-like.
|
| But I'm not Nostradamus so I could be very very off here.
| shon wrote:
| You're probably right but it will be an arms race with ever
| more sophisticated mitigation techniques being deployed to
| filter.
|
| I'd say Neil Stephenson has a pretty good take on what this
| might look like in his recent book: Fall, where in everyone
| has a "feed" and those that or more savvy/wealthy have
| better editors (AI, etc) of their feed.
| NoMAD76 wrote:
| It's all about having the right tools, but I wonder how
| long can we "beat the machine" :)
| jerf wrote:
| I'm not particularly convinced by the Dead Internet Theory
| [1] as of 2022, in the sense that it is completely true
| right now. But I am convinced it is building around us, and
| even now, the correct frame for the question isn't
| _whether_ it is true, but _how true_ it is. There is too
| many entities with too much reason to build it for it not
| to be happening. And the nature of it is such that it doesn
| 't need to be one entity doing it for one unified reason;
| dozens, hundreds can all be participating & fighting with
| each other on different levels and the sum total of all
| that is to put it together that much more quickly.
|
| You know, the PGP web of trust idea may yet take off all
| these decades later, not because we need a web of trust to
| send 100.0000000% safely encrypted messages to each other
| to protect from governments, but because we need a web of
| trust just to know _who the real humans are_.
|
| [1]: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-
| internet-...
| agar wrote:
| I love the idea but hate that I'm so cynical about the
| likely outcome.
| datadata wrote:
| Curious to what degree and how you think web of trust
| idea could help here? Assume you could use it to prove
| whether an article was signed or not by a real person. I
| think this would solve the problem of articles being
| published with a false author attribution. However, it
| would not work to prevent actual people from publishing
| AI written articles using their own identity. It would
| also not (directly) do anything to establish if the facts
| in an article are correct or not.
| jerf wrote:
| Specifically, a web of trust designed for exactly that
| assertion: This person is a real human. Signatures here
| serve to assert what identity something came from.
|
| There would be some of the usual web of trust problems,
| e.g., trying to explain to Joe Q. Public that you only
| sign for people you _know_ , beyond doubt, are human.
| Preferably in person. Many other problems, too.
|
| I guess you could say, my thought here isn't that this
| would solve the problems. The problems at this point are
| somewhat well known. What has been missing is any benefit
| significant enough to motivate us to get past those
| problems. If there is, it's obviously many years away.
| Wouldn't exactly suggest building a startup around this
| idea right now, if you get my drift. We still need to go
| through a phase of the problem getting larger before we
| even get to the phase where people start to realize this
| is a problem and start demanding that people online prove
| they are actually people, and goodness knows "I'm a
| human" is merely the lowest of low bars itself, not the
| solution to all trust problems.
| paganel wrote:
| It depends. On forums like this it would basically take a
| machine that would pass the Turing test in order not to be
| seen as an AI in any "meaningful" conversation that it
| might join (so, not just a comment posted as a reply here
| and there).
|
| And even if the powers that be manage to get those future
| AI bots to post stuff that will very much resemble what we
| now post in here, it is my belief that the uncanny valley
| will be, in the end, impossible to pass (in fact that's one
| of the main motifs of many of Asimov's books when it comes
| to robots).
| l33t2328 wrote:
| I have already generated fake news-esque things with gpt-3 to
| send to friends.
|
| A lot of the outputs look incredibly genuine. We live in
| interesting times.
| jerf wrote:
| That has already happened. manimino linked me to this great
| page on another thread on HN a few days ago:
| https://cookingflavr.com/should-you-feed-orioles-all-summer/
| But consider that a particularly easy to detect version of
| the problem. Click some of the other links on that site and
| have a look. I especially suggest you click something on a
| topic you know nothing about.
|
| I've been hitting these sites in searches accidentally more
| and more over the past few months. Goodness help you if you
| don't realize it's totally fake; some of what I've seen is
| dangerous, like, bad electrical advice being blithely
| generated by whichever exact transformer variant is spewing
| that stuff.
| Vetch wrote:
| There is an economic incentive to detect machine generated
| output and curate trusted sites since the feedback loop of
| training models on an unfiltered internet of mostly
| generated junk output will eventually lead the models into
| converging on a useless degenerate state.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| People don't get their news from random AI-generated blogs.
|
| The actually bad consequence is SEO spam of high quality. You
| can now generate a hundred articles a minute in any topic.
| uni_rule wrote:
| We are already seeing a lot of fucked up SEO spam rising to
| the top these days. IMO it might actually start picking at
| Google's market share because prior to this the product
| actually seemed infallible to the average layman.
| textcortex wrote:
| I would not worry about that too much. There are already
| models that can predict if its transformer generated or not.
| At the same time google started penalizing transformer
| generated text; https://youtu.be/EZWx05O6Hss
| hhmc wrote:
| It doesn't seem like there's any real guarantee that the
| 'generated text detectors' will outpace the 'generated text
| generators'
| xmprt wrote:
| What if that's the push that brings people out into the
| physical world where they don't have to deal with all this
| crap online.
| carschno wrote:
| Slightly less optimistic, but perhaps more realistic
| thought: what if that's the push that makes people validate
| their (internet) sources? Seems like it might become clear
| that random web pages are just automatically generated
| content. If you really want to learn something credible at
| all, you'll really have to be more specific about your
| sources than "the internet".
| ninkendo wrote:
| Yeah, that was gonna be my contrarian HN hot-take too.
| Basically if it becomes _really_ obvious some day that
| basically all online news publication is noise written by
| computers, maybe people will stop actually trusting it so
| much?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Alternative hypothesis for which I have at least as much
| evidence:
|
| Because of large language models, detecting Fake News becomes
| trivial and cheap. Building and doing inference on language
| models is too expensive for most attackers, so they give up.
| Only well financed state actors are capable of disseminating
| fake news, and they are no better at it than they are today
| because content generation is not a bottleneck.
| notahacker wrote:
| Cost per word of fake news is already very low though, and
| humans are much better at tailoring it to the appropriate
| audience and agenda (and not just restating stuff that's
| already out there that might actually be true)
|
| GPT type models are much better suited to low effort
| blogspam, and whilst that's not a _good_ thing, they produce
| better blogspam than existing blogspamming techniques. I
| think we underestimate how bad the Internet already is, and
| at worst text generated by AI is simply going to reflect
| that.
| NoMAD76 wrote:
| It's about being 1st to publish it. It is mainly use during
| live press conferences. No human can snap a photo (at
| least), write a short update in a dedicated article, and so
| on... all in 1s.
|
| Been there (as an independent press member years ago),
| simply you cannot beat that.
| tqi wrote:
| Personally, I've never understood why first to publish
| matters? As far as I can tell, the only people who care
| are other journalists, who seem to think that any story
| about a breaking news item MUST credit the person who
| wrote about it first (see: ESPN's NBA and NFL
| "insiders").
| redtexture wrote:
| The unpersuasive argument is "you (second-to-publish-
| person) copied my stupendous idea to get your derivative
| result".
| notahacker wrote:
| First to publish matters, but GPT-3 is neither necessary
| nor sufficient to achieve that. If you're producing
| _fake_ news related to a press conference, speed of
| content generation is entirely unimportant because you
| don 't have to wait for the press conference to start to
| write the fake article/update/tweet. If you care about
| fidelity to the message of the press conference, I don't
| see many situations in which a human who has anticipated
| the likely message(s) of the conference and therefore has
| pre-drafted paragraphs about "striking a conciliatory
| tone" and "confirmed the reversal of the policy" ready to
| select and combine with a choice quote or two as soon as
| they're uttered isn't significantly better (and as quick
| as) GPT-type models prompted by the speech-to-text of the
| press conference. Sure, more reliable publications will
| want to stick more validation and _at least wait for the
| conference to finish before summarising its message_
| steps in the way, but those apply to bots as well as
| journalists (or not, for the publications that prioritise
| being first over being right).
| NoMAD76 wrote:
| You have a solid point, but I wasn't talking abut
| summarizing or excerpt from a press release (those are
| anyway handed as press-kits before with all NDA
| agreements and so on).
|
| Real human journalists have a delay of about 1m before
| making a short tweet. Funny (or not), something similar
| was in the "live update" article page in less than 10s.
| Including photo(s). I was on quite a lot of tech-
| conferences/live events and earned a decent living then
| as an independent tech journalist (but then I got bored
| and really it was a 1-man-show).
|
| Another personal observation (from field), that was not
| happening prior to 2010-2012, the years we all got Siri,
| Cortana..
|
| You can make the dots and dashes.
| phphphphp wrote:
| History has shown that humans are terrible judges of the
| outcomes of our behaviour; your belief that we can confidently
| understand the risks of anything through experimentation might
| work in theory but hasn't been borne out in practice.
|
| Extremists exist at both ends of the spectrum and serve to
| balance each other out: without people positing the worst-case
| scenarios, the people positing the best-case scenarios would
| run full steam ahead without any consideration for what could
| happen.
|
| Perhaps if the proponents of (various flavours of) AI were
| doing careful experimentation and iteratively working towards a
| better understanding, then maybe the loud voices against it
| would be less valuable, but as we've seen through the last 20
| years, progress in technology is being made without a second
| thought for the consequences -- and what Facebook are doing
| here is a bare minimum, so it's reasonable for proponents to be
| somewhat cynical about the long term consequence.
| skybrian wrote:
| It seems like there is a difference between "let's release it
| for researchers to investigate" and "let's release it for the
| general public to use and abuse, including all the script
| kiddies and malware authors and 4chan trolls and spammer sites
| out there."
|
| Unfortunately, that difference can only be maintained through
| some kind of gatekeeping.
|
| I like to try out the new algorithms, but I'm mostly just
| playing, and I don't see how they make it available to me
| without letting any random troll use it.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| That's not the argument at all. Rather it's that the technology
| is progressing so fast and could become dangerous far faster
| than we can make it safe. Therefore it's worth seriously
| thinking about the risks that scenario poses. Stopping research
| or further work completely is A potential solution but given
| the monetary investments involved it's extremely unlikely it
| will be implemented.
|
| There are lots of very serious people seriously looking at
| these issues and to dismiss them as simple luddites is frankly
| insulting.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| But nobody is failing to take the risks seriously. The people
| who actually work on these models understand the risks far
| better than the outside ethicists. I work on ML in research.
| Reading their work is like listening to a drunk relative at
| Thanksgiving ranting about Bill Gates putting nanobots in
| vaccines. It's completely uninformed pseudoscience that comes
| from a place of strong political bias.
|
| For example Timnit's "parrots" paper confused training with
| inference and GPUs with TPUs, making specific quantitative
| estimates that were off by orders of magnitude. If she had
| talked to a single person working on large language models,
| she would have recognized the error. But these people work in
| a bubble where facts don't matter and identify politics is
| everything.
| trention wrote:
| There are enough people criticizing both current language
| models and the overall "quest" towards AGI that come from a
| non-political (unless you subscribe to an aristotelian
| everything-is-politics) perspective. I personally don't
| think any of the companies with significant AI research is
| actually doing anything meaningful in terms of safety.
| Also, from their public "utterings", it's quite clear to me
| that both Altman and Hassabis (not to mention Lecun) don't
| actually care about safety or consequences.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| > I personally don't think any of the companies with
| significant AI research is actually doing anything
| meaningful in terms of safety
|
| I assume this is just speculation on your part? Do you
| have any reason to make that claim? I personally know
| multiple people doing this full time at large tech
| companies.
|
| I can give you some examples of serious safety oriented
| criticism of large language models to contrast with what
| plays out in the press and amongst "ethicists".
|
| It's well understood that one can generate so-called
| "adversarial examples" for image classifiers. These
| adversarial examples can be chosen so that to a human
| they look like thing A, but the model classifies them as
| thing B with high probability. Methods of finding these
| adversaries are well understood. Methods of preventing
| them from being problematic are less developed but
| rapidly advancing.
|
| For language models, the situation is much worse. I don't
| know of any effective way to prevent a large language
| model from being searched for adversarial inputs,
| trivially. That is, an attacker could find inputs from
| large curated input spaces that cause the model to output
| a specific, desired sequence. For example, an attacker
| with access to the model weights could probably find an
| innocuous looking input that causes the model to output
| "kill yourself".
|
| Is this a risk that AI researchers are aware of? Yes, of
| course. But the difference between AI researchers and
| "ethicists" is that AI researchers understand the
| implications of the risk and will work on mitigations.
| "Ethicists" do not care about mitigating risk, and they
| don't care that the people who build the models already
| understand them and are comfortable with them.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >I can give you some examples of serious safety oriented
| criticism of large language models to contrast with what
| plays out in the press and amongst "ethicists".
|
| To clarify I think the poster above was talking about the
| AI Alignment/Control Problem and not the specifics
| failure modes of particular models, LLM, CNNs etc. Very
| few people at OpenAI or Deepmind for example are
| seriously engaging with Alignment. Paul Cristiano at
| least acknowledges the problem but seems to think there
| will be available solutions in time to avert serious
| consequences which may or may not be the case. The folks
| at MIRI certainly don't seem optimistic.
| trention wrote:
| >I personally know multiple people doing this full time
| at large tech companies.
|
| The failure mode of internal "ethical" control at private
| enterprises is well-known and has already played out (at
| least) once when we tried to regulate medical experiments
| in the 2 decades after WW2. I personally consider the
| current AI safety positions to be just blatant
| whitewashing. The lemoine fiasco is a specifically
| hilarious case in point combining both a) a person that
| is utterly incompetent and biased to work at that
| position and b) total failure of leadership to adequately
| engage with an issue (or even admit it's possible in
| principle). At the current point, AI safety is roughly as
| useful as tobacco lobbying (exaggerated for effect).
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Well I definitely wasn't talking about people like Timnit
| but rather researchers like Stuart Russell who actually are
| at the forefront of the field and discuss AI safety
| broadly.
| api wrote:
| This is the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
|
| Imagine assigning every single living human being a dedicated
| 24/7 con artist to follow them around and convince them of
| something. That's what will soon be possible if not already. It
| will be intimate con artistry at scale driven by big data, a
| massive DDOS attack on human cognition and our ability to
| conduct any form of honest discourse.
|
| What hustlers, trolls, and completely amoral companies will do
| is bad enough. Now throw in state sponsored intelligence
| agencies, propaganda farms, militaries, special interest
| groups, and political parties.
|
| Usually I'm anything but a luddite, but with this I can't help
| but think of many more evil uses than good ones. It doesn't
| help that the principal business models of the (consumer)
| Internet seem to center around surveillance, advertising,
| propaganda, and addictive forms of entertainment (like slot-
| machine-like mobile games) designed to suck money or time out
| of people.
|
| Lesser but also very bad concerns include: the end of useful
| search engines due to a deluge of continuously learning
| adversarial SEO spam, the collapse of pretty much any open
| online forum due to same, and addictive "virtual friend" /
| "virtual relationship partner" hyper-sophisticated chatbots
| that hook vulnerable lonely people and then empty their bank
| accounts in various ways.
|
| I really don't fear AI itself. I fear what human beings will do
| with AI.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| > It will be intimate con artistry at scale driven by big
| data, a massive DDOS attack on human cognition and our
| ability to conduct any form of honest discourse.
|
| This is an unfounded fear. For one thing, if the value in
| doing this is high then it's already cheap enough to be
| practical. The Chinese govt can pay millions of people to do
| this to dozens of people each. They basically do this
| already, for specific topics and issues. LLMs won't
| significantly move the needle here.
|
| Second, are you proposing that attempts to stop Facebook from
| releasing models will somehow slow down or stop the Chinese,
| US, or Russian governments? What's the goal, to buy us 6
| months? I would much rather the technology be out in the open
| for everyone to research and understand vs accessible only to
| state actors or huge tech companies.
| api wrote:
| The difference between this and a troll farm is like the
| difference between machine guns and lines of soldiers
| manually loading and firing muskets. Yes both can be used
| to gun down a lot of people, but machine guns are much
| faster and cheaper. Mechanized warfare is coming to
| propaganda and con artistry.
|
| I'm not necessarily arguing for intervention to stop this
| release or something like that. The cat is out of the bag.
| There's no stopping it. This is going to happen, so get
| ready for it.
|
| Oh, and throw in deepfakes. You'll have automatic con
| artistry at scale that can incorporate personalized fake
| audio and video on demand depicting any supporting detail
| it needs. It'll be like assigning each person a con artist
| who's also supported by a staff of content producers.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I guess, but on the flip side there are potentially
| transformative positive applications that we already know
| about and have yet to discover. Fundamentally some people
| are more optimistic and risk-loving when it comes to new
| technology. I believe the "good" will overwhelmingly
| outweigh the "bad" that you're pointing out. I think it
| mostly comes down to personality.
| api wrote:
| I can think of some positive applications. The thing that
| makes me cynical here is that all the evil applications
| seem like they're going to be far more profitable in
| terms of either money or power.
|
| This would be a continuation of what's happened to the
| Internet in the last 10-15 years. The Internet is amazing
| and has tons of incredibly positive uses but all the
| money is in mass surveillance, addictive "engagement
| maximizing" stuff, and gambling and scams.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| humanistbot wrote:
| > "ethicists"
|
| > It's a political and emotional stance masquerading as a
| technical or scientific process.
|
| I don't think you understand what ethics is.
| 4oh9do wrote:
| What does "inviting" mean? It sounds like it means "Facebook
| wants free labor instead of paying for formal and expensive
| security audits".
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Meta/Facebook has given the world React, PyTorch, GraphQL,
| Jest, and other fantastic technologies, and you are just
| boiling down their open source efforts to "Facebook wanting
| free labor."
|
| Not everything in tech is a sinister capitalistic plot. Open
| Source and Open Research are truly one of the best ways to
| accelerate technology advancements, in particular software
| technology advancements.
| bravura wrote:
| That access form was... refreshing.
|
| Here's why this matters to me, an independent researcher who
| wants to start publishing again.
|
| In 2008, Ronan Collobert and Jason Weston had published some work
| that made neural network training of word vector representations
| really fast. But only ML people read that paper. Yoshua Bengio
| and Lev-Arie Ratinov and I plugged old-school cluster based as
| well as fancy-but-uncool-and-icky neural network word
| representations into a variety of NLP models. It worked awesome.
| Before "transformers go brrrrrr" our paper told the NLP
| community, basically, self-supervised learning and neural
| networks go "brrrrrrr". People finally started paying attention
| in the language world, ML stopped being treated with suspicion
| and the field moved rapidly, our paper racked up 2700 cites and
| an ACL 10 Year "Test Of Time" award, and here we are.
|
| I don't work in a big research lab but I still publish. I pay for
| my GPUs the old fashioned way. You know, out of pocket.
|
| It took me _ages_ to get access to GPT-3. Ilya was a colleague of
| mine, so I messaged him fb, but no dice. Why? I know I could pull
| other strings through my network but, like, really? Is this where
| we are right now?
|
| All I'm saying is: It's nice to fill out a form asking my
| intended use and my previously related publications, as a means
| of gatekeeping. The access process feels more transparent and
| principled. Or maybe I'm just being grouchy.
| O__________O wrote:
| Link to the ACL 10 Year "Test Of Time" award paper mentioned
| above:
|
| Word Representations: A Simple and General Method for Semi-
| Supervised Learning
|
| https://aclanthology.org/P10-1040/
|
| (PDF link)
|
| https://aclanthology.org/P10-1040.pdf
| jackblemming wrote:
| Yandex and Facebook are both more open than OpenAI? And the world
| isn't ending because large language models were released?
| Shocking.
| jacooper wrote:
| OpenAI is basically only open in the name.
| dqpb wrote:
| It's basic run-of-the-mill gaslighting.
| thesiniot wrote:
| It reminds me of that time the US Air Force designed an "open
| source jet engine".
|
| https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-
| Display/Article/201113...
|
| Their definition of "open source" turned out to be: "the
| government owns the source IP instead of some defense
| contractor. No, you can't see it."
|
| In fairness, I'm impressed that they even got that far. How
| do you think the defense contractor lobbyists responded to
| that program?
| enlyth wrote:
| I guess "Closed source pay-as-you-go AI" didn't have quite a
| ring to it
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Maybe they meant Opening up AI :)
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| OpenWallet
| Judgmentality wrote:
| You dare question the gatekeepers of our future AI overlords?
| [deleted]
| Tepix wrote:
| May 3rd, which is why Yandex's 100B model release is not
| mentioned.
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| Why is facebook using GPT-3? Generate fake content it wants to
| push out?
| makz wrote:
| Beta testing for free?
| option wrote:
| 175B is for research only and as far as I understood their ToU
| does not allow commercial usage.
|
| Currently, the largest LLM that is both free and commercially
| usable (Apache 2.0) is 100B YaLM from Yandex (russian's copy of
| Google). However, they did not publish any details on their
| training data.
| plegresl wrote:
| The 176B parameter BLOOM model should be available soon:
| https://bigscience.notion.site/BLOOM-BigScience-176B-Model-a...
| option wrote:
| yes, looking forward to it especially because it is going to
| be multilingual by design
| charcircuit wrote:
| >However, they did not publish any details on their training
| data.
|
| Yes they did. It's in the README.
| option wrote:
| All I can see is " 1.7 TB of online texts, books, and
| countless other sources in both English and Russian."
|
| if there are more details, can you please share a link?
|
| I am worried that "other sources" may contain Yandex.news
| which is a cesspool of anti-West and anti-Ukraine propaganda
| 533474 wrote:
| The pile dataset is used for the English language
| remram wrote:
| Direct link: https://github.com/yandex/YaLM-100B/blob/main/RE
| ADME.md#trai...
| timmg wrote:
| Dumb question: does 175B parameters mean the number of bytes
| (or floats?) in the model? Does that also mean you need the
| whole model in memory to do inference (in practice)?
|
| If so, not many machines have that much RAM. Makes it hard to
| "play" with.
| lostmsu wrote:
| float16s or bfloat16s so 2x of that for storage
|
| You can infer using DeepSpeed.
| annadane wrote:
| Oh really? Now you invite researchers instead of shutting down
| legitimate projects to investigate your algorithms?
| blip54321 wrote:
| On the ethics front:
|
| * Yandex released everything as full open
|
| * Facebook released open with restrictions
|
| * OpenAI is completely non-transparent, and to add insult to
| injury, is trying to sell my own code back to me.
|
| It seems like OpenAI has outlived its founding purpose, and is
| now a get-rich-quick scheme.
|
| What I really want is a way to run these on a normal GPU, not one
| with 200GB of RAM. I'm okay with sloooow execution.
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| Have you looked into HuggingFace Accelerate? People have
| supposedly been able to make the tradeoff with that. Although
| you still need to download the huge models.
| leereeves wrote:
| Can confirm. HuggingFace Accelerate's big model feature[1]
| has some limits, but it does work. I used it to run a 40GB
| model on a system with just 20GB of free RAM and a 10GB GPU.
|
| All I had to do was prepare the weights in the format
| Accelerate understands, then load the model with Accelerate.
| After that, all the rest of the model code worked without any
| changes.
|
| But it is _incredibly slow_. A 20 billion parameter model
| took about a half hour to respond to a prompt and generate
| 100 tokens. A 175 billion parameter model like Facebook 's
| would probably take hours.
|
| 1: https://huggingface.co/docs/accelerate/big_modeling
| chessgecko wrote:
| That already exists depending on your definition of slow. Just
| get a big ssd, use it as swap and run the model on cpu.
| leereeves wrote:
| A comment below said this model uses fp16 (half-precision).
| If so, it won't easily run on CPU because PyTorch doesn't
| have good support for fp16 on CPU.
| netr0ute wrote:
| Parent never claimed it was going to be fast.
| guelo wrote:
| I don't see giving spammers, marketers and scammers more
| powerful tools as the ethical stance.
| dqpb wrote:
| Better take away the internet then
| sarahhudson wrote:
| They wont, but the cat is out of the bag. It is data, and
| data gets leaked, shared in the open, shared in the dark.
| Researchers can be bribed.
|
| It is like: you can not talk to your kids about drugs and
| pretend they don't exist ... or you can.
| remram wrote:
| Almost certainly they are getting it, OpenAI will just get
| paid for it.
| shon wrote:
| That's an understandable view point. However, "Security
| through obscurity" just doesn't work. Worse, trying to keep
| something from people really only punishes/limits the rule
| followers.
|
| The bad guys get it anyway so this gives the good guys a
| chance.
| guelo wrote:
| There's not much obscurity here. If you have tens of
| millions of dollars to throw at compute and a bunch of PhDs
| you could develop similar tech. I don't understand the idea
| that ethics somehow requires existing private models to be
| made available to everybody.
| shon wrote:
| Yeah I was responding to a post asking why we should
| allow open access, given that some of those with access
| will do bad things.
|
| I agree with you. Ethics doesn't demand that existing
| private tech be made available. Who's saying that??
|
| OpenAI is just catching shade because their initial
| founding mission was to democratize access to AI tech and
| they've gone pretty far the other way.
| trention wrote:
| I am curious what is the reasoning behind "giving "good
| guys" access to language models will {deus ex machina} and
| thus allow us to prevent the spam and abuse".
| leereeves wrote:
| Automated tools to distinguish AI generated text from
| human writing and hide the AI spam.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Can humans be trained en masse to output less
| distinguishable text from those of NN?
| shon wrote:
| This ^^ + many other mitigation/analytics use cases.
| [deleted]
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I don't understand why OpenAI has so many restrictions on its
| API. Isn't things like erotic writing, unlabelled marketing
| etc. good money for them with minimal chances of litigation? Is
| it for PR?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's because it was genuinely founded as an organization
| worried about misaligned AI.
| dmix wrote:
| The critique is that the _type_ of ethics they concern
| themselves with is borderline moral-panic /Victorian era.
| Not the Laws of Robotics kind of stuff.
|
| Maybe it's my personality but I get the impression since AI
| is rather limited in 2022 that all the paid AI ethicists
| spending 90% of the time on bullshit problems because there
| aren't many real threats. And these gets amplified because
| the news is always looking for a FUD angle with every AI
| story.
|
| The priority seems to be protecting random peoples feelings
| from hypothetical scenarios they invent, when IRL they are
| releasing research tools on a long-term R&D timeline...
| GPT-3 isn't a consumer product they are releasing. It's a
| baby step on a long road to something way bigger. Crippling
| that progress because of some hyper-sensitivty to people
| who get offended easily seems ridiculous to me.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Also, it's pointless. OpenAI might be a leader right now
| but it won't be forever. It can't control a technology.
| It's like restricting fire because it can burn down
| houses... yeah it can, but good look with that, all we
| need is some friction or flint. As time goes on that
| flint will become easier to find.
|
| If OpenAI wants to concern itself with the ethics of
| machine learning, why not develop tools to fight misuse?
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| There are more than enough unaddressed ethics issues in
| ML/DS from racial bias in criminal sentencing to de-
| anonymization of weights to keep ethicists busy without
| needing Skynet.
| [deleted]
| option wrote:
| On the ethics front Yandex should provide more details on the
| data they've used.
| [deleted]
| anothernewdude wrote:
| How much are they paying for this service?
| jimsmart wrote:
| Link to original blog post by Meta (3 May 2022)
|
| https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...
| nharada wrote:
| The logbook is awesome:
| https://github.com/facebookresearch/metaseq/blob/main/projec...
|
| This is the true secret sauce -- all the tricks on how to get
| these things to train properly that aren't really published.
| gxqoz wrote:
| Any particular highlights from this?
| fny wrote:
| Honestly, no.
| amelius wrote:
| This all makes me wonder: how reproducible is the final output
| model?
| dekhn wrote:
| the details of that specific model they ended up with?
| Irreproducible, unless the system was carefully designed and
| every detail required to do a fully reproducible computation
| was recorded and replayed. But they could easily produce a
| bunch of models that all sort of end up in roughly the same
| place and perform the same, ideally reducing the number of
| things they needed to change ad-hoc during the training.
| screye wrote:
| Not this one, but Google's PaLM (which is 4x OPT3) trains
| semi-deterministically.
|
| These kinds of large transformers can be relatively
| reproduceable in results and benchmarks. However, making them
| converge to the exact same parameter set might not be a
| reasonable expectation.
| zubspace wrote:
| I have no knowledge of such things, but it seems they run Cuda
| jobs on about 150 nodes?
|
| But why do they have so many problems to keep this cluster
| stable? Network failures? Bad GPU's? Bad drivers? Bad software?
|
| Running fixmycloud and going after all those cryptic errors
| every day seems like a nightmare to me...
| sp527 wrote:
| This really does read like 'DevOps: Nightmare Edition'
|
| > CSP fat fingered and deleted our entire cluster when trying
| to replenish our buffer nodes
|
| Yikes
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _100 Pages of raw notes released with the language model
| OPT-175_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31260665 - May
| 2022 (26 comments)
| axg11 wrote:
| It really is great that Meta released the notes/logbook. Credit
| where credit is due. Very few other academic or industry labs
| release materials like this, especially when the reality is so
| messy.
|
| Some interesting takeaways:
|
| - Meta aren't using any software for scientific logbooks, just
| prepending a document
|
| - So many hardware/cluster issues.
|
| - Hot-swapping algorithms is common and likely underreported
| (in this case activation functions and optimization method)
|
| - A well resourced team didn't solve enough issues to fully
| utilize compute resources until >50% of the total time into the
| project
| domenicrosati wrote:
| I wonder what software would be good for a logbook like
| this... I just use google docs for these kinds of things.
| Sure wandb and jupyter notebooks are good but they are not so
| good for notes and ideas and documentation
| [deleted]
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