On Twitter someone asked you if you would provide any risk assessment reflection, and you replied that the risk would be similar to the release of a new model of pen or pencil.
That reply, while cute, isn’t accurate. A new pencil does not mean new capabilities for humanity, while the whole point of your release is that it does afford new capabilities and therefore new risks.
The woman, a professor working on the societal impacts of AI, asked a straightforward question in apparent good faith [1]. Your reply did not seem to me to be in good faith.
Can you explain the apparent disconnect? I’m less concerned as to whether or not you would release an assessment and more concerned at the dismissive attitude, especially towards a female professor studying societal impacts of AI, a fellow researcher.
I believe my answer is accurate. I don't know on what basis you claim otherwise. This is my work, and I'm well placed to make the assessment. My response is based on reading a great many papers and doing many experiments over the last few years, and I am confident of it.
By way of background: I studied the philosophy of ethics at university, I co-authored a book chapter on AI/ML ethics, my wife and I quit our jobs and worked for free for years entirely focused on trying to help society adapt to and benefit from AI, I wrote the actual article we're commenting on, and the article is about LLM fine-tuning -- a field I to some extent created by developing the ULMFiT algorithm.
The person in question is, IIRC, at Governance AI, a group whose work I spent months studying in depth -- work which I believe is more likely to cause harm to society than to benefit it, as I explained here:
I think the power concentration problem, the successor species problem, and the harmful content problem are not particularly aligned in how they would be solved. Am I correct in guessing you believe the power concentration problem is important and the others are much less so?
Implicit in every reply you've given is the assumption that OP is treating the criticism from this researcher differently because she's a woman. Do you have any basis on which you're making this assumption? OP explained that they have substantive issues with the organization of which this researcher is a member.
> I can see why it would appear that I’m saying that, but that was not my intention.
You are talking out of both sides of your mouth. In another comment on this same thread, you say this:
> [...]women in the field are more readily dismissed, and I think they shouldn’t be. It’s a moment to check our internalized biases and make sure we’re operating in good faith.
In your original comment you explicitly accuse the OP of operating in bad faith, presumably as a result of "internalized biases" as described above. How does this not add up to an assumption that OP treated the researcher differently because she's a woman? It is exactly what you are implying.
I think it's easier to dismiss risk with this project as it allows democratised access to AI models and furthers research in the field. The ability to generate low-quality content has been available since long before LLM technology, additionally these 70B param models are just barely fitting into $10,000 worth of hardware (not accounting for M-series chips).
The scaling issue with potential runaway AI can be excluded.
The potential for virus writing / security exploitation perhaps but such risks are already present with existing models so this point too can be excluded.
I'm not sure there's any inherent risk here compared to what's easily available with a considerably reduced amount of resource requirements.
The write up here seems concerned with allowing independent and democratised research which is a greater benefit than concentrated efforts.
"I'm an expert and the other person isn't as knowledgeable as me" doesn't make your point very well. And mentioning that you worked for free for years seems irrelevant.
> especially towards a female professor studying societal impacts of AI
> especially towards a professor studying societal impacts of AI
I can't help but feel like you're trying to load this question with some expectation that sex/gender should change how people react and respond. It shouldn't, at all, positively or negatively. Everyone is human (for now).
I think you're saying that correcting a bias isn't itself applying bias.
I think the poster to which you're responding is saying there wasn't any visible evidence of bias in the original behaviour.
From one point of view, you're correcting a bias (in this case, one you suspect might exist), and you believe that isn't a bias.
From another point of view, you're introducing a new bias (that definitely exists) to something that was previously (presumably) agnostic and neutral, by saying that a correction should only be applied when the question-asker meets certain criteria.
Both points of view are legitimate.
PERSONALLY I'd rather we not bring the "have you thought about how this might be discriminatory" bits into the converation unless there's at least some vague reason to think that it was, rather than presuming it's always discrimination when the genders and/or sexes and/or races line up a certain way. But that's because I think it's more important to debate the ideas in their pure form than to correct every instance of discrimination, and that's an arbitrary value judgement I made.
I completely get your take on this and don't disagree. IMO it reads as a flippant response to a potentially serious question, and I am going to assume this is unintentional, which does not mean it is unfair to call it out.
Stepping back, this is the kind of discourse that Twitter can sometimes reinforce: short responses that, lacking context, can be interpreted in polarizing ways. After a bit of reading on the participants (because both of them are working in interesting areas), my belief is that the "pencil" response is actually shorthand for a whole set of beliefs that provide a lot of context and nuance to the discussion, but if you don't know that, it sounds like saying "AI is as dangerous as a new brand of chewing gum".
In addition, without defining what risks we're talking about, it's really hard to know the scope the answer is addressing. E.g., societal risk due to AI in general? vs. say, the risks of affecting the quality an existing model with fine-tuning?
So, I am chalking this up to a misunderstanding due to the limitations of the platform as well as the short-hand used in the response. And I could be completely wrong :)
On Twitter someone asked you if you would provide any risk assessment reflection, and you replied that the risk would be similar to the release of a new model of pen or pencil.
That reply, while cute, isn’t accurate. A new pencil does not mean new capabilities for humanity, while the whole point of your release is that it does afford new capabilities and therefore new risks.
The woman, a professor working on the societal impacts of AI, asked a straightforward question in apparent good faith [1]. Your reply did not seem to me to be in good faith.
Can you explain the apparent disconnect? I’m less concerned as to whether or not you would release an assessment and more concerned at the dismissive attitude, especially towards a female professor studying societal impacts of AI, a fellow researcher.
[1] https://x.com/dr_atoosa/status/1765874818283385071