OpenAI speedrun to the Google playbook of abandoning founding principles. Impressive that they could get this big this fast and just go full mask off so abruptly. Google made it about 17 years before it removed "Don't be Evil".
I really do think this will be the company (or at lease technology) to unseat Google. Ironic that Google unseated Microsoft and now it looks like they will take their throne back.
Being a warmonger is the new cool. No appeasement and whatever. Sama is just being down with the kids.
Finding applications for defense = warmongering?
"Defense" doesn't mean much. Department of Defense regularly conducts offensive wars.
For most of its history from 1789 to 1943 it was war department.
It is just rebranded not changed in the last 70 years
Common misconception. The Department of Defense governs all branches of the military. The Department of War only governed the Army while the Department of the Navy was a separate Cabinet-level department.
It also included the Air Force . It was not just the army . Navy was separate but everything else was under war department
The Air Force was not a separate branch before the Department of Defense was formed; it was part of the Army. And the Marine Corps was (and is) governed by the Department of the Navy (which is currently a sub-department of Defense).
Everything was part of the army back then , that is the point.
Department of war was the “army” yes , but army is not what we think of army today, it literally included the entire air force - which wasn’t small auxiliary unit : both wars used tens of thousands of fighter planes .
Department of war was a department for war not just a name for what we know as army today .
…except the Navy and Marine Corps, which was the original point. A large part of the Second World War was fought by the naval services, despite those services being outside the Department of War. During the war, overall coordination of the military was not carried out by the War Department but rather via the Joint Chiefs of Staff and through ad hoc high level coordination between Army and Naval command. In particular, command in the Pacific theater was split between General Douglas MacArthur Admiral Chester Nimitz (with the ground operations under Nimitz being primarily carried out by Marines). The difficulties caused by this approach were the primary motivation for the reorganization of the American military into a unified Department of Defense.
I am well aware that the Army Air Forces were a very large part of the Army during the Second World War. However, the Navy and Marines also had tens of thousands of airplanes, none of which were under the control of the War Department or the Army Air Forces. It’s a little misleading to claim the War Department controlled the “entire air force” when they only controlled the Army Air Forces and not naval aviation.
The War Department controlled the Army and the Army Air Forces, which were part of the Army at the time, so it’s just as correct and a lot quicker to say that the War Department was only in charge of the Army. It wasn’t in charge of the Navy and Marines, and it wasn’t even in charge of fighting wars because we needed the Navy and Marines to help fight wars and they were under a different department. Which, again, was the reason for forming the Department of Defense in the first place.
When the Air Force became an independent service during the postwar military reorganizations, they actually tried (and failed) to take over naval aviation; to this day the United States Navy has a larger air force than most countries.
"Defense"? Really? But, no, not really, no. I tried to be funny and relate to the zeitgeist.
Another example is the Occulus guy, that pivoted into levering something VR I guess to make stuff to kill other people since Zuckerberg crushed him.
Depends on your religion and point of view. For Christians, absolutely.
what do you plan on doing when China and/or Russia and/or Iran come knocking on your door?
So far, it’s always been the other way round though.
You mean thats the USA that indirectly attacks China, Russia, Iran?
Pretty much but not the US directly its the US hiring Mercs in the form of Ukrainian proxies recently and in the near past it was Isis and co in the middle east to attack Iran and China's belt and road plans.
Not being in the house?
If the elites can't play nicely with each other it is not my problem. I don't trust them.
We had a whole mindset that basically rolled out the red carpet for dictators disguised as peace ment with apps. Including praise for turning oneself into an anti democratic psyOPs zombie. A correction of this nonsense was overdue. And in the moment of weakness, it was also revealed how alone the West really was with its values. The idealists are out there in the trenches, getting shot in the street, because peaceful cowards are willing to sacrifice everything and everyone for indefensible nimbyism.
I'm probably gonna get downvoted for this, but I find allowing the technology to be used for all kinds of different things more "open" than arbitrary restrictions. Yes, even "military and warfare" are pretty arbitrary terms because defensive systems or certain questionnaire research, for instance, could be considered "military and warfare".
Like our PhD project for example, we're doing machine learning on special forces selection in the Netherlands (for details, see [1]). The aim is basically just to reduce costs for the military and disappointment for the recruits. Furthermore, we hope to learn more about how very capable individuals can be detected early. This is a topic that is useful for many more situations than just the military.
[1]: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/s6j3r
Fair enough, but that's not who funded your research (according to your own disclosure, the military paid for it).
If this topic is so useful for "more situations" , why didn't those "many more situations" fund it? Will you be conducting research into how this topic will have non-military usages, or is that just something you tell yourself to sleep better at night while the military pays for more research that "is useful for many more situations than just the military"?
Most modern technology is derived from military research.
Do you feel bad every time you use a microwave? It was originally a military radar. Without military funding, it would not exist in its modern form. Nor would basically all radio communication technologies, satellites, spaceflight. You get the idea.
yeah, I feel terrible about it. We as a species apparently cant punch a dent in a pack of butter unless it is for greed or murder. We chose to be like that. Seriously, wtf???
I would prefer it if we developed competitive qualities. Trying to stop doesn't make sense, we have to outgrow it.
Isn't that how the Internet was invented?
How difficult would it be to repurpose the kinds of models you are working on to, instead, say, perform early detection and selection of problem people for internment/liquidation?
I have talked a lot with military people and actually have much confidence in their morals. Yes they will make many mistakes but in general there are lots of checks and balances and they‘re not evil people. Also note that they are ran by the government which makes them very risk averse.
In general, all technology can be reused. Maybe someday killer robots walk around with a Rust codebase. Should Rust not have been developed?
The new "Gifted And Talented Education" GATE for the modern era.**
We were evaluated for GATE in like 4th grade? Using such AI human behavioral heuristics against the minor population in 3.2.1.... Contract.
So they can be sidelined before they have a chance to disrupt anything.
Especially those individuals having any unique abilities in excess of what AI could substitute for.
GattAIca here we come, baby!
Your research will be assimilated by the Killbot Evolution Research Program. Your country thanks you.
For your service, here is a limited edition digital flag pin emoji:
Following which, you will need to learn how to defend against all the internal threats to any such system. ^_^
It's only arbitrary if you make it arbitrary. A strict ban on "military and warfare," may prevent some relatively innocuous projects from reaching fruition, but I find that to be an insignificantly small & significantly worthwhile cost to pay considering the flip side.
I understand the idealism, but the realistic alternative is that the US government abstains while other governments use the technology freely. Not sure how that's a better scenario, in a practical sense.
It's probably why OpenAI decided to remove the restriction.
It's kind of wild that you can't get it to do anything PG-13 for "safety" but it's going to be used in military technology. I have no value judgement on the decision, but it seems incongruent with their mission.
Also, for a company that proved it has no governance, I'm surprised they didn't quietly do it anyway and wait until it was discovered.
I'm going to keep this vague to keep some anonymity, but where I work our product is used by a group that falls under one branches of at least one military and we have a team that is working on a new feature that uses ChatGPT under the hood, but the feature is completely innocuous.
The best comparison I can give would be if we were talking about health care and our product was used to schedule nurses shifts or book operating rooms.
I actually think OpenAI is on an accelerated path because it knows it's days are numbered.
If the tech were truly superior, we would see Apple, Google and Meta rushing to license their tech. Yet they're not, instead, they're all building their own version. There's no secret sauce left to building an LLM. It's all public knowledge. And while ChatGPT has an edge right now, it's not a substantial one.
ChatGPT has been ahead the whole time, and according to the lmsys leaderboard it's not a small margin. Nobody else has yet beaten what openAI released in march last year.
Google tried to beat it with Gemini Ultra, but as well as being unreleased, the stats in the paper don't lend much confidence it will beat gpt-4-0314
It doesn’t matter how good the technology is. It matters how well they can productize it.
Gemini ultra is nowhere close to GPT-4 for anything I tried.
What if you took away 3/4 of the training data though? If NYT et al wins their case, training data won’t be free anymore.
Content owners will decide on the price and even who to license to.
Content owners will be asking exorbitant amounts for licensing fees and will likely strike exclusive deals with LLM owners.
Maybe Microsoft actually bought GitHub for the content?
You seem to be very very conveniently ignoring the fact that Microsoft spent 10 billion to basically gain exclusive use of OpenAI's tech... exactly what you're saying Apple, Google, and Meta should be doing.
Microsoft funded the R&D, their return on investment was not guaranteed. It's apples to oranges.
Microsoft invested $10B after GPT4 came out… their initial investment of $1B might have been for R&D, but their $10B investment was for tech that they knew about.
Isn't Microsoft's $10B investment likely more of a "pay as you go" rented integration of GPT4 into Bing and a few other places rather than a $10B wire transfer into OpenAI's bank account?
Nah, none of the other LLMs are particularly useful at much of anything, but GPT-4 is profoundly useful.
I've seen a lot of things come from gtp4, none of them "profound."
Could you share something that you se and think "profound"?
I said profoundly "useful".
GPT-4 helps me write reams of code every day at my job.
Apple is apparently throwing largish sums of money to license all its training data, so it may be that OpenAI ends up exploding because of the “move fats and break things” so common in SV.
With enough training anyone can be a belly dancer.
I also think that profit for LLM-based businesses without massive data troves is now solidly capped.
Content owners are moving quickly to monetize their hordes of data. The days of free training data are over. If you don’t own it already, you probably can’t afford it.
I think the interesting side effect is that LLMs will end up as bifurcated as the internet. Each only being trained on some subset of content based on which subset the LLM builder chooses or is able to license for training.
LLM agents will all be hamstrung and biased in various ways based on fragmented training sets.
There will be no singularity.
There will be many LLM agents that learned to think based on the information their creators could afford or chose to provide it.
These agents will have biased, inaccurate and incomplete world views, yet will be very confident they know everything. How very human!
If inference costs keep going down, I expect pirate LLMs trained on pirated and much more complete text libraries will proliferate.
synthetic datasets ftw! they might have had a library when nobody was looking, but everything created after GPT-3 is analyzed by everyone and everything before GPT is extracted by getting GPT and other LLM's to talk
oh noes not the terms of service!
I cannot figure out why they documented such a thing, it's too amateurish - just do the standard operating procedure and let the military industrial complex friends and allies of america use the service and keep it under the rug
I normally have a very dim view of OpenAI/Altman but in this case I wonder if is something akin to a warrant canary, except for 5th generation warfare?
Altman does seem to have a bit of Chomsky in him, so it's not impossible.
SOP matches 126 meanings and MIC matches 123 on acronymfinder.
For the ignorant (me), what do you mean? I'm guessing SOP is "standard operating procedure" given the military context of this thread, but MIC? No clue.
It's really helpful to just spell out the words, at least the first time.
military-industrial complex
sorry, standard operating procedure and military industrial complex.
The topic sometimes puts one into acronym mode :)
(re: acronymfinder - funny enough, though 90% of AI is shit this bit falls into the 10% where it's pretty good at explaining acronyms, i use it often enough with MBA types, the depths of its hidden context are the untapped goldmines)
I think you figured out at least one important factor in this - I forgot about warrant canaries until your comment... So thanks for resurrecting that.
What we should then ask, is for a OpenAI PUBLIC SECTOR Contract Details Dashboard" <-- Meaning, they should be required to show all the "open" AI they have being built on their systems if they want us to have faith in Safe Responsible Humane Alignments?
--
@dylan604:
The Smart hockey-stick :-)
But yeah - and the worse part is not just Corporate competitors, but bad actors, rogue states, triads, ALL the Mafia's/scammers/phishers/ransomers/coin snatchers...
They all benefit at an unprecedented EQUAL rate at this point with the broad spectrum, capability, cost-effectiveness and effectively un-regulated, not-yet-aligned/guard-railed AIs here, in dev, and in near term.
Its got to be an amazing spot if your a top notch cybercrime person in the A-game right now. That, and White-Hat AI-pentesting, and next level security is behind schedule, it seems.
---
Also, I posted this regarding national security status for cloud provider's infra: [0]
In the increasingly interconnected global economy, the reliance on Cloud Services raises questions about the national security implications of data centers. As these critical economic infrastructure sites, often strategically located underground, underwater, or in remote-cold locales, play a pivotal role, considerations arise regarding the role of military forces in safeguarding their security.
While physical security measures and location obscurity provide some protection, the integration of AI into various aspects of daily life and the pervasive influence of cloud-based technologies on devices, as evident in CES GPT-enabled products, further accentuates the importance of these infrastructure sites.
Notably, instances such as the seizure of a college thesis mapping communication lines in the U.S. underscore the sensitivity of disclosing key communications infrastructure.
Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38975443
You ask good questions mate - best of luck, i suspect these topics will get less and less traction more and more rapidly.
(TBH i also forgot about warrant canaries for a good while. I just threw the question out to myself "what if Altman actually doesn't WANT to be a badguy, what might he have done to signal his Borgification?")
just do the standard operating procedure and let the military industrial complex friends and allies of america use the service and keep it under the rug
An AI with the capability to be autonomous in any environment, able to plan and execute plans well enough to defeat human opponents, is exactly what the AI doomer POV is rightly afraid of.
It wasn't removed https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/
The last line of the CoC document:
"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"
This is Google telling ME to not be evil not Google telling itself to not be evil. Big difference. Its sounds more like "if you see something, say something" snitch culture. That's evil.
This document is written where the first person is a Google employee.
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil." https://archive.is/6XL7e
OpenAI speedrun to the Google playbook of abandoning founding principles. Impressive that they could get this big this fast and just go full mask off so abruptly. Google made it about 17 years before it removed "Don't be Evil".
It's inevitable that dangerous real time AI capable of formulating plans are going to be developed for military purposes.
The "OODA Loop" is fundamental to combat. (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) Having a tighter and more potent (in the sense of fast and accurate processing) OODA loop is a fundamental advantage. The economics and game theory of military combat is going to result in units which have potent OODA loops which can overwhelm a human being's OODA loop. Once that happens, competition between different sides will result in an arms race going far above that level of capability.
Once the above happens, it's disturbingly likely that instrumental goals will arise in such entities which are dangerous not only to human beings on the wrong side, but to human beings on any side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
Somehow sad but the more i think about it the more i'm certain that Google lost the race having watched closely the events from the very beginning.
Oof. It is not AGI, so does not count (sarcasm).
That's because Google never went mask off. When Google started, only nerds cared about the Internet. As the Internet became more successful, non-nerds started demanding that the company do for them all the evil things non-nerd society has always done, and Google got blamed for it every single time. Now that the Internet had been thoroughly colonized by those people before OpenAI came along, is it any surprise that they'd demand OpenAI enact the exact same tyranny from day one?
I’m no fan of either firm but the hyperbole is unwarranted. The substance here is plainly a normalisation of contract language to focus on the activity rather than the actor.
Or they just adapt their policies to the real world. It is easier to be theoretical pacifist if basically nothing happens. But last 2 years are a shitshow and the Western world has been forcefully reminded about the fact that military might actually serves some positive purpose, too.
Any artificial limitations OpenAI places upon themselves will absolutely not be used by competitors. Google did not see that back in their day. Timelines are much more compressed now
Right. Because an evil company would abide by their terms/principles. Once they removed that pesky, "don't be evil" barrier it was open-season on being super evil.
They removed it because it's stupid and meaningless.