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Comment by sph

6 hours ago

What do low income people have to do with it, when AI companies and research is borne out of Silicon Valley culture of rich, liberal Californians?

I'm still waiting for models based on the curt and abrasive stereotype of Eastern European programmers, as contrast to the sickeningly cheerful AIs we have today that couldn't sound more West Coast if they tried.

7 comments

sph

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fourside  6 hours ago

Low income and liberal is usually code for certain “undesirables” that conservatives tend to dislike. Better watch what LLM your kids use or they might end up speaking Spanish and listening to rap ;).

  • xiphias2  2 hours ago

    It's not about liking / disliking, but conservatives tend to prefer staying together even if it's a bad relatioship, and liberals prefer splitting by default if there are serious problems.

    The syncopath style is clearly categorized as more liberal (do what you feel is good).

  • dinkumthinkum  5 hours ago

    Eh, or grow up hating American and thinking they need to fly to Cuba to explain to the people are great communism is for them. Who knows.

tbrownaw  6 hours ago

> What do low income people have to do with it, when AI companies and research is borne out of Silicon Valley culture of rich, liberal Californians?

RLHF is "ask a human to score lots of LLM answers". So the claim is that the AI companies are hiring cheap (~poor) people from convenient locations (CA, since that's where the rest of the company is).

  • astrange  4 hours ago

    "Poor" in California means earning $80k/year, so they probably are not doing that. Africa / Indonesia / Philippines are better places to find English speaking RLHF workers.

  • sublinear  4 hours ago

    Yes, this precisely it. There isn't going to be hard evidence to prove it though. Survey data that underpins some empirical studies have similar transparency issues too. This is far from a new problem.

    If you adjust your mindset slightly when searching online, it's not hard to find communities of people looking for quick side work and this was huge during the covid lockdown era. There were people helping train LLMs for all kinds of purposes from education to customer service. Those startups quickly cashed out a few years ago and sold to the big players we have now.

    I don't get why this is hard for people to believe (or remember)?