Comment by echelon
10 hours ago
> GPT2 was considered too dangerous to release
This is how ridiculous this industry is. Regulation-seeking panic over nothing. Drama in search of a moat.
Everything is "too dangerous". GPT2 is going to invent a time machine and break crypto and genetically engineer super rabies.
They sell knives, guns, combustible materials, and multi-ton heavy machinery in stores. That's what's actually dangerous.
That's what's actually dangerous.
It's a different sort of danger. Knives, guns, etc are locally dangerous. The threat from AI is globally dangerous. Despite being a much lower risk of it happening, the blast radius is massively bigger, which means the overall danger is greater.
Also, maybe both things some be considered. Many countries manage the sale of knives, guns, etc. You don't need to accept that risk just because AI exists, or vice versa.
I agree that this should be something that researchers reflect on. GPT-2 is one of the primary models to research on nowadays, and many recent developments have come from studying it as a test bench.
Imagine if CRISPR was considered "too dangerous" to publish because of the potential ethical ramifications, and that only a special few should be aware. It is utter self-righteousness, and it is shameful behaviour. The world cannot adjust itself to what it cannot see, so you risk greater catastrophe by keeping it secret.
The open dissemination of knowledge at every increment is the only way for society to truly deal with what is to come.
My impression at the time was they were perhaps overly cautious but this was a bunch of researchers who wanted to self-regulate. Anthropic didn’t exist, deepmind was also much less product-focused and relatively cautious. Chinese models weren’t really a factor either.
Government regulation was really not in the picture either in 2020 or 2021 tbh. The government was still trying to beat a pandemic. Some of the Biden admin eventually wanted to but it wasn’t very serious.
why are chinese models a consideration at all?
Parent post is saying there was no community of peer models, just some people figuring it out as they went and with lots of slack to go slow if they wanted
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What are your thoughts on the HuggingFace incident?
"Drama in search of a moat" is hard to beat.
Optimal next token generation disguised as something more.
Well, no. Without controls, a language model can drive sensitive individuals to violence or suicide. The idea of releasing a frontier model without RL is frightening based on what we have learned.
> The idea of releasing a frontier model without RL is frightening
In case you were not aware, strong base models (no post training at all) have been available for quite some time now. Including ones that eclipse “scary” frontier models from even a year ago.
So…
Words out of a magic box on a computer can’t make you kill yourself. Perhaps the people that would use that as encouragement are already mentally ill enough that it really doesn’t matter what the trigger is?
On a more callus but fully serious note, evolution starts out physical, that the species that don’t eat and breed as well, die. What happens when you remove that? When life is so safe that you basically wont stave, get eaten, catch a disease, don’t really need to compete all that hard for scarce resources, etc? Do you think evolution just stops? Or perhaps does a social or mental evolution become the predominant differentiator for successful reproduction over time?