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The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea

26 pointsby 59m agotechnologyreview.com
12 comments
25m agoHN ↗

Title

Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype

25m agoHN ↗

One of the authors is one of the stochastic parrot authors.

21m agoHN ↗

Both authors. Stochastic Parrots was Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell - the linked article is by Emily M. Bender and Timnit Gebru.

23m agoHN ↗

Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.

If someone discovered how to summon demons to aid them in robbing banks the main issue wouldn't be "but who has the responsibility for the crime, the human or the demon", it would be "OMG DEMONS".

Seriously, I don't get what sort of world these people are living in.

19m agoHN ↗

If I run a port scanner / vulnerability fuzzer pointed at your network that churns for days and eventually cracks something and breaks your system, would you be upset with me, or my bash loops?

What if you tried to sue me for damages and my defense was, "Your honor, this was a highly advanced AI gone rogue, I couldn't possibly be held negligent, no one could have foreseen this - I accidentally summoned dark magiks from the silicon itself!"

Note the point I'm making: I am not claiming LLMs are equivalent to a for loop, I'm saying that you can't evade moral and legal responsibility through technical obscurantism.

A bomb wired to a sufficiently-complex RNG is still a bomb.

13m agoHN ↗

But they're not obfuscating things just to evade responsibility.

Do you think that OpenAI hacked HuggingFace on purpose and set up the whole LLM training environment thing just to try to evade responsibility? That it was really just a complicated way of hacking HuggingFace on purpose?

Yes, they made a mistake and a system they were responsible for hacked HuggingFace, but the nature of the mistake still matters, and their intent still matters.

A bomb wired to a sufficiently-complex RNG is still a bomb.

Right, but an EV that explodes because of a fault in the charging circuit is not a bomb, it's an accident. Just because something exploded for complex reasons doesn't make it an obfuscated bomb.

4m agoHN ↗

Despite continuously waving their hands and shrieking about how this thing will literally wipe out all of humanity they couldn't be bothered to airgap it from the internet when testing.

So yes, I think it was equivalent to testing their new rocket by launching it over a population center. oops, we didn't intend for it to crash on that school, but we also didn't follow the most basic safety protocols

18m agoHN ↗

Thank you for the laugh, but I bet on the internet (and especially here) you surely would find people debating exactly that.

11m agoHN ↗

That's not what the LLM hacking accidents have been like at all though. To improve the analogy, it would be like summoning a totally passive demon, giving it weapons and placing it next to a bank, place a small fence around it, and then command it to perform a totally safe "exercise" that is exactly like robbing a real bank.

LLMs do not have agency, they are just producing tokens based on a prompt that a person entered, and some of these tokens can trigger the tools that a person gave them access to.

23m agoHN ↗

Yeah so tired of this. Stealing all our IP and it can't even write a line of code. I am quite special, it won't change my life, I am irreplaceable. These AIbros are lunatics. Last time I checked it couldn't even count the Rs!!! Time to go back to my important asd special work as a human with SOVL

4m agoHN ↗

Feels like the blockchain bubble all over again, just with more impressive demo reels. Still waiting for my LLM to write perfect code.