On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 1:04 PM Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
FYI, there's an open letter requesting a 6-month pause on AI development, [ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ ] with reasonable arguments (in my opinion) and signed by several big names too.
First, I want to point out that a "pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4" doesn't involve halting research on how to prevent existing models from hallucinating, how to cause them to summarize and cite reliable sources verifiably and neutrally, how to allow them to be easily and inexpensively edited for updates and corrections, or benchmarking the performance competing approaches to using them for editing tasks, as I've proposed the Foundation should do.
Secondly, I doubt such a pause on training larger models will do anything to address any of the largest risks of LLMs, including any of the risks which have been articulated as a threat to the projects, as far as I know. Existing models a couple generations behind the bleeding edge are more than good enough to, for example, run an organic-appearing campaign to bias Wikipedia articles in pernicious ways for pay, or even as a dedicated individual's personal project with a budget no larger than that of many common hobbies.
I suggest that the nominally non-free restrictions on use of the BLOOM RAIL license are a superior approach to addressing the immediate risks compared to a mere six month moratorium on larger models, especially if those restrictions were codified into law. The following is from https://openfuture.pubpub.org/pub/notes-on-open-ai
"The authors of the RAIL license acknowledge that the license does not meet the Open Source Initiative definition of open code licenses (and it does not meet the Open Definition either). In related news, the newly launched Can’t Be Evil licenses also challenged established open licensing models, while seeking to uphold the spirit of open sharing.... Traditionally, debates over what constitutes an open license were related to normative debates about ensuring user freedoms. Authors of the RAIL license rightly point out that these need to be balanced today with care for responsible uses."
-LW
-LW