Read the article, that's not what this is about. Title is clickbait, they fired contractors for using AI to label data when the whole point of labeling data is to distill human knowledge into weights, not distill weights into weights.
You're replying to a joke, and yes, that's all it's about. For all the tales of rapid self-improvement, all labs are real careful not to taint their precious training sets with anything that comes out of their systems. Website reputation modeling, fingerprints in generated text, firing contractors that rely on AI.
I've been told on HN about a year ago that the era of scraping is over and that it's all AI-training-AI now. My web server logs and stories like that disagree.
Bubble bursting behavior in action - AI company that pushes everyone to use AI, replace everything and everyone with AI, fires people for using AI to make the AI.
Earlier this year it was so dissonant to see so many companies explaining how they are going to replace their engineers with AI from both OpenAI and Anthropic, while both companies were instead (and are still) hiring all the human talent they could
Typically, for AI training, you need human feedback. If AI were enough, then OpenAI would do it themselves. Though we all know how bad AI slop is, running it in a loop can lead to unreadable sentences.
They hired contractors on the condition that they provide human feedback without AI; those people broke the rules, so their contracts ended prematurely.
Not sure why this is news uncovered by an investigative journalist.
“Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply … A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous … However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug, they freak out … If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”. At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.”
What is it, exactly, that makes AI-generated text so poisonous to AIs but totally harmless to humans? What is mode/model collapse, and why can it only happen to AIs with too much AI text in their training data and not to, say, human students with too much AI text in their textbooks? The people who know the most about this phenomenon seem much more careful about contamination than they are encouraging us to be.
I don't think anyone is saying it's poisonous here? The people were hired to do a job and they didn't do it. Feels like you're being disingenuous, if there's one thing i know about AI employees, it's that they use LLMs, like, all the time.
Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.
(I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)
Nope, not having trouble following it, but the metaphor leaves out an important link between AI output and the AI itself. The question is, did the AI gain anything from this training? And the answer is, it did not, since the training used it's own answer with no other input. There's nothing in the water metaphor that draws this line.
Maybe a better metaphor is something involving drinking your own piss, but I don't feel the need to flesh that one out
It's not a clickbait title? Click bait has a very different meaning. The click bait title would be something like, "Open AI mysteriously fired these workers, find out why"
This title says why. The article then goes on to explain why that's a problem. Pretty straightforward.
Is your objection to the word “train” in headline? Otherwise, you’re just restating the headline while calling it clickbait (which, btw, it’s not, perhaps you meant to say it is misleading, which is a different thing.)
labeling is more specific than training, and changes the implied situation.
Its the same difference between "I was arrested for having liquid in my car while driving" and "I was arrested for holding an open bottle of whiskey while driving"
Why exactly it is clickbaity? It makes perfect sense to me, I understand title as: people told not use AI fired for using AI - without any need for additional context.
Mechanical Turk was shut down for exactly same reason, it was always a race to the bottom and using LLMs was cheaper than even third world gig workers. Verifying if task were done by humans is probably harder than doing them in the first place.
I don’t know if I’d call if clickbate but it does have a Fox News “pretending to be incredulous at something perfectly sensible because you think your readers are sufficiently ignorant to go along with your feigned incredulity” vibe.
So OpenAI is not a believer in recursive self-improvement after all?
I think people want the service they are paying for.
Read the article, that's not what this is about. Title is clickbait, they fired contractors for using AI to label data when the whole point of labeling data is to distill human knowledge into weights, not distill weights into weights.
You're replying to a joke, and yes, that's all it's about. For all the tales of rapid self-improvement, all labs are real careful not to taint their precious training sets with anything that comes out of their systems. Website reputation modeling, fingerprints in generated text, firing contractors that rely on AI.
I've been told on HN about a year ago that the era of scraping is over and that it's all AI-training-AI now. My web server logs and stories like that disagree.
That is exactly what "training AI" needs: labeled data.
What is the other way to interpret the title in your mind?
They’re a believer, but they won’t be paying third parties for that once it becomes feasible
Bubble bursting behavior in action - AI company that pushes everyone to use AI, replace everything and everyone with AI, fires people for using AI to make the AI.
The more you think about it, the worse it gets.
Earlier this year it was so dissonant to see so many companies explaining how they are going to replace their engineers with AI from both OpenAI and Anthropic, while both companies were instead (and are still) hiring all the human talent they could
Fires people for using AI to label data. That is something that has always been clear from the start is something that needs to be done by humans.
Makes sense, they are buying distillation of human brains not their own weights.
Typically, for AI training, you need human feedback. If AI were enough, then OpenAI would do it themselves. Though we all know how bad AI slop is, running it in a loop can lead to unreadable sentences.
They hired contractors on the condition that they provide human feedback without AI; those people broke the rules, so their contracts ended prematurely.
Not sure why this is news uncovered by an investigative journalist.
How is it a failure of journalistic understanding? They seem to say pretty much the same as you
“Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply … A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous … However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug, they freak out … If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”. At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.”
What is it, exactly, that makes AI-generated text so poisonous to AIs but totally harmless to humans? What is mode/model collapse, and why can it only happen to AIs with too much AI text in their training data and not to, say, human students with too much AI text in their textbooks? The people who know the most about this phenomenon seem much more careful about contamination than they are encouraging us to be.
I don't think anyone is saying it's poisonous here? The people were hired to do a job and they didn't do it. Feels like you're being disingenuous, if there's one thing i know about AI employees, it's that they use LLMs, like, all the time.
Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.
(I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)
Nope, not having trouble following it, but the metaphor leaves out an important link between AI output and the AI itself. The question is, did the AI gain anything from this training? And the answer is, it did not, since the training used it's own answer with no other input. There's nothing in the water metaphor that draws this line.
Maybe a better metaphor is something involving drinking your own piss, but I don't feel the need to flesh that one out
Clickbait title, they fired contractors for using AI to label data, which defeats the purpose of labeling data in this case.
It's not a clickbait title? Click bait has a very different meaning. The click bait title would be something like, "Open AI mysteriously fired these workers, find out why"
This title says why. The article then goes on to explain why that's a problem. Pretty straightforward.
Is your objection to the word “train” in headline? Otherwise, you’re just restating the headline while calling it clickbait (which, btw, it’s not, perhaps you meant to say it is misleading, which is a different thing.)
labeling is more specific than training, and changes the implied situation.
Its the same difference between "I was arrested for having liquid in my car while driving" and "I was arrested for holding an open bottle of whiskey while driving"
Why exactly it is clickbaity? It makes perfect sense to me, I understand title as: people told not use AI fired for using AI - without any need for additional context. Mechanical Turk was shut down for exactly same reason, it was always a race to the bottom and using LLMs was cheaper than even third world gig workers. Verifying if task were done by humans is probably harder than doing them in the first place.
I don’t know if I’d call if clickbate but it does have a Fox News “pretending to be incredulous at something perfectly sensible because you think your readers are sufficiently ignorant to go along with your feigned incredulity” vibe.
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