[HN Gopher] OpenAssistant Conversations - Democratizing Large La...
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       OpenAssistant Conversations - Democratizing Large Language Model
       Alignment [pdf]
        
       Author : pps
       Score  : 130 points
       Date   : 2023-04-15 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ykilcher.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ykilcher.com)
        
       | donfuzius wrote:
       | It's awesome that the OpenAssistant project made it this far with
       | a lot of crowed-sourced input. Congrats to the whole team that
       | works really hard trying to create a truly open LLM.
       | 
       | One thing that puzzles me though, is that for the GPT-3.5
       | comparison, the model used is trained using both OpenAssistant
       | and alpaca data, which is not free due to the OpenAI license used
       | to generate the data. Isn't that defeating the purpose?
       | 
       | "... Completions were generated using pythia-12b-deduped fine-
       | tuned on the OpenAssistant and Alpaca [9] dataset as well as
       | gpt-3.5-turbo using the OpenAI API..."
        
       | saranormous wrote:
       | this is awesome. is there good research explaining methodology of
       | feedback collection/desired dataset (beyond just relative human
       | preference?)
        
       | kalium-xyz wrote:
       | Awesome how they shaped the authors their names into a heart
        
       | frog59059 wrote:
       | really excited!
        
       | visarga wrote:
       | This makes Turbo GPT 3.5 level AI free, private and finetuneable.
       | OpenAI exclusivity shrinks now to GPT-4. That's why I don't think
       | they will be able to keep a large market share in LLMs, any level
       | of AI is going to get open and free soon. SOTA models are also
       | easy to distill by API, very hard to defend against using chat
       | logs as training data for other models.
       | 
       | Once we all got one running, maybe in the OS, maybe in the
       | browser, or as a separate app, then I see bad days ahead for
       | online advertising. Ads are simply omitted when the bot solves a
       | specific task for the user. We got infinitely tuneable and
       | efficient filters for everything that gets in front of our eyes,
       | and we will need these AI assistants to fight back the onslaught
       | of AI spam bots. We can make the internet a beautiful garden
       | again if we control the filters and the UI.
        
         | armchairhacker wrote:
         | The problem is that for-profit businesses like OpenAI have more
         | money and compute than even millions of volunteers. I
         | definitely believe we'll get an open GPT-4 eventually, but by
         | then OpenAI will have GPT-5, and so on.
         | 
         | It's a shame really: the ultimate cause is the massive amount
         | of wealth inequality we have today. If private entities and
         | governments didn't have so much resources compared to
         | individuals, I'm certain an open-source AI would be the
         | biggest, because open-source has intrinsic benefits over
         | closed-source: you have many people all working on the same
         | project vs. multiple siloed groups, and anyone not affiliated
         | with the private service is biased to use and support the open
         | one. This is why the best operating systems, programming
         | languages, and other software are all open-source: more money
         | != better software, you don't need money to build software as
         | much as you need intelligence and work ethic. But with AI, the
         | #1 limiting factor is web-scraping required to get all of the
         | data, and GPUs to train a model with it (maybe also money to
         | pay Mechanical-Turk workers for simple classification; but
         | perhaps enough volunteers could beat this, plus it seems like
         | unskilled classification is becoming less important since the
         | models can do this on their own).
         | 
         | That's not to say open-source AI won't be great, and I also
         | think most places will use it. Especially if OpenAI is too
         | expensive and/or disallows what they are trying to do. It does
         | put pressure on OpenAI to be more lenient with pricing and
         | acceptable use, and also to keep improving. But unless we
         | address the massive wealth inequality, which is why LAION has
         | substantially less funding than not just OpenAI but also some
         | of the other startups, it's going to always lag behind.
        
           | pleasantpeasant wrote:
           | Won't open-source AIs have their code stolen by the private
           | AIs? There's no one stopping open-source AIs being used
           | within private AIs.
        
           | huijzer wrote:
           | Although FOSS is great, extreme wealth inequality has to be
           | fixed by the government and not by open source developers.
        
         | KolmogorovComp wrote:
         | Side question, but how do these models are benchmarked, and how
         | is this subfield evolving these days? I have seen many papers
         | relying on standard student tests performance, but they don't
         | seem very accurate since LLAMA-based models perform almost as
         | good as chatGPT (3/3.5) despite being apparently being an order
         | of magnitude worse in practice.
        
         | pleasantpeasant wrote:
         | I can't wait for an ad companies to force you to watch a 10
         | second video ad before it gives you a result for your query.
         | 
         | It's only a matter of time before these AI companies start
         | pairing up with ad companies(if they already haven't). Google
         | could easily put ad videos every 10 queries or something. You
         | already see these limited free tokens/credits/querie on AI art
         | sites.
         | 
         | How long until they put some ads in-between queries?
        
         | kmod wrote:
         | Do you have any evidence that this is GPT-3.5 level, or are you
         | just repeating what they said? We have an abundance of claimed
         | capabilities already; that's not what's lacking.
        
           | bugglebeetle wrote:
           | I tried a few prompts I use in production stuff and it failed
           | on all of them and hallucinated quite a bit more. All of
           | these models are optimized for the gimmicky chatbot stuff
           | that seems impressive to a casual user, but not for
           | comparable capabilities to GPT-3.5. I wish what the parent
           | said was true because it would save me money!
        
             | akiselev wrote:
             | Which open model comes closest to GPT-3.5 in your
             | production workload, if you don't mind me asking?
        
               | bugglebeetle wrote:
               | None of them really, because I use complex prompts with
               | task breakdowns that no other models beside OpenAI's seem
               | capable of processing. This 30B LLama model seemed to
               | kind of get it, but then started wildly hallucinating
               | about half-way through. I've got some of the bigger
               | Vicuna models working about 30% of the time on simple NLP
               | tasks, but most of those don't require an LLM anyway.
               | They might perform better if you fine-tune them for
               | whatever particular job, but that kind of defeats the
               | purpose. The advantage of LLMs is supposed to be their
               | generalized capabilities.
        
           | WhatIsDukkha wrote:
           | Section E of the paper we are "discussing" here.
        
         | skilled wrote:
         | What beautiful garden? Are you completely ignoring the fact
         | that OpenAI is made possible because it scraped the entire Web
         | (the actual garden) and made a query index out of it?
         | 
         | Do you not have any respect for people who actually spent their
         | time and creativity to provide the information necessary for
         | this model to even work?
         | 
         | Ignorance is bliss I guess.
        
           | sebzim4500 wrote:
           | >Do you not have any respect for people who actually spent
           | their time and creativity to provide the information
           | necessary for this model to even work?
           | 
           | We all stand on the shoulders of giants, the authors of this
           | content did not grow up in a concrete box isolated from the
           | works of earlier generations.
        
           | boredemployee wrote:
           | >> Do you not have any respect for people who actually spent
           | their time and creativity to provide the information
           | necessary for this model to even work?
           | 
           | The worrying is legit and cute but let's face that at this
           | moment no one is giving a f.
           | 
           | All we see are people worried that all the AI agents will
           | take their jobs and/or how to make money out of that.
        
             | skilled wrote:
             | You're right. I myself don't care either, but not because I
             | don't understand how it happened. I don't because there is
             | nothing I can say or do that would make OpenAI suddenly
             | change their direction.
        
           | scubbo wrote:
           | > Do you not have any respect for people who actually spent
           | their time and creativity to provide the information
           | necessary for this model to even work?
           | 
           | Yes, which is why I'm delighted to be able to filter out the
           | advertizing spam that subhuman scum traffic alongside the
           | outputs of creativity.
        
           | zmnd wrote:
           | Out of curiosity, do you use ad blocking software?
        
       | syrusakbary wrote:
       | Here's the website they just launched, in case it's useful for
       | anyone:
       | 
       | https://open-assistant.io/
        
       | machinelearning wrote:
       | If you're trying to use this and don't get the sign up email,
       | check your spam folder. Gmail seems to auto-categorize the email
       | as spam
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | And... Where is the data?
       | 
       | EDIT: trying it now with model "OA_SFT_Llama_30B_6". It is FAR
       | worse than ChatGPT.
        
       | KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
       | What is the token limit? The 2k limit on llama is *very limiting
       | on the number of things it can do.
        
       | pps wrote:
       | Video about the release:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddG2fM9i4Kk
        
       | TOMDM wrote:
       | This is the same Pythia and Llama based models right?
       | 
       | If so, they certainly aren't ChatGPT level in their quality.
       | Impressive, potentially useful, but not ChatGPT.
       | 
       | Still an incredible effort, the RLHF data here might eventually
       | make an Open Source ChatGPT possible, but these models are not
       | that.
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-15 23:00 UTC)