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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27106 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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This seems... weird, as an explanation, and given my expectations for the NYT may reflect more what one party has fed to the reporter than the real facts on the ground.

The Toner paper in question is here, and there's wayback machine version dating back to Oct 24th. The closest bit I can get to the description from the NYT piece is the section where :

While the system card itself has been well received among researchers interested in understanding GPT-4’s risk profile, it appears to have been less successful as a broader signal of OpenAI’s commitment to safety. The reason for this unintended outcome is that the company took other actions that overshadowed the import of the system card: most notably, the blockbuster release of ChatGPT four months earlier. Intended as a relatively inconspicuous “research preview,” the original ChatGPT was built using a less advanced LLM called GPT-3.5, which was already in widespread use by other OpenAI customers. GPT-3.5’s prior circulation is presumably why OpenAI did not feel the need to perform or publish such detailed safety testing in this instance. Nonetheless, one major effect of ChatGPT’s release was to spark a sense of urgency inside major tech companies.149 To avoid falling behind OpenAI amid the wave of customer enthusiasm about chatbots, competitors sought to accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes, with Google creating a fast-track “green lane” to allow products to be released more quickly.

This result seems strikingly similar to the race-to-the-bottom dynamics that OpenAI and others have stated that they wish to avoid. OpenAI has also drawn criticism for many other safety and ethics issues related to the launches of ChatGPT and GPT-4, including regarding copyright issues, labor conditions for data annotators, and the susceptibility of their products to “jailbreaks” that allow users to bypass safety controls. This muddled overall picture provides an example of how the messages sent by deliberate signals can be overshadowed by actions that were not designed to reveal intent.

A different approach to signaling in the private sector comes from Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s primary competitors. Anthropic’s desire to be perceived as a company that values safety shines through across its communications, beginning from its tagline: “an AI safety and research company.” A careful look at the company’s decision-making reveals that this commitment goes beyond words. A March 2023 strategy document published on Anthropic’s website revealed that the release of Anthropic’s chatbot Claude, a competitor to ChatGPT, had been deliberately delayed in order to avoid “advanc[ing] the rate of AI capabilities progress.” The decision to begin sharing Claude with users in early 2023 was made “now that the gap between it and the public state of the art is smaller,” according to the document—a clear reference to the release of ChatGPT several weeks before Claude entered beta testing. In other words, Anthropic had deliberately decided not to productize its technology in order to avoid stoking the flames of AI hype. Once a similar product (ChatGPT) was released by another company, this reason not to release Claude was obviated, so Anthropic began offering beta access to test users before officially releasing Claude as a product in March.

Anthropic’s decision represents an alternate strategy for reducing “race-to-the-bottom” dynamics on AI safety. Where the GPT-4 system card acted as a costly signal of OpenAI’s emphasis on building safe systems, Anthropic’s decision to keep their product off the market was instead a costly signal of restraint. By delaying the release of Claude until another company put out a similarly capable product, Anthropic was showing its willingness to avoid exactly the kind of frantic corner-cutting that the release of ChatGPT appeared to spur. Anthropic achieved this goal by leveraging installment costs, or fixed costs that cannot be offset over time. In the framework of this study, Anthropic enhanced the credibility of its commitments to AI safety by holding its model back from early release and absorbing potential future revenue losses. The motivation in this case was not to recoup those losses by gaining a wider market share, but rather to promote industry norms and contribute to shared expectations around responsible AI development and deployment. Yet where OpenAI’s attempt at signaling may have been drowned out by other, even more conspicuous actions taken by the company, Anthropic’s signal may have simply failed to cut through the noise. By burying the explanation of Claude’s delayed release in the middle of a long, detailed document posted to the company’s website, Anthropic appears to have ensured that this signal of its intentions around AI safety has gone largely unnoticed. Taken together, these two case studies therefore provide further evidence that signaling around AI may be even more complex than signaling in previous eras

Yes, this is weird writing, in the sense that it's (a little) odd for someone to praise their market competitor so heavily, and it's also a trivial thing to get that bent out of shape about either way, but we're talking about a bunch of self-considered weird auteurs; it'd be less believable to not have some tyranny of trivial disagreements involved.

Is that what people think about when talking about Claude?

it's also a trivial thing to get that bent out of shape about either way

I'm going to disagree. A member of your board praising your competitor for not releasing a product and criticizing you for releasing a very popular product that is now the face of the industry. The CEO should advocate for her removal from the board at that point.

I get her focus is safety and his is releasing products, so there's an obvious tension here. But her public criticism is a knife in the back. There's a difference between being vocally self-critical and undermining your peers. I hope she has the foresight to realize that block of text would cause internal division including possibly the "release products" faction retaliating.

That you disagreed highlights how Sam's position isn't so implausible that it must be dishonest on his part.

But those who are claiming it was a pretext for Sam's power play have a point imo. The paper wasn't widely read or reported on, even in AI safety nobody had heard about it until this incident. Why would Sam care then? If it was a NYT op ed sure.

A member of your board praising your competitor

Yes, this would be very unusual and blameworthy when "board" means "board of directors of a traditional C Corp." But OpenAI is a nonprofit and this was a nonprofit board. It was set up that way purposefully to allow the directors to slow OpenAI down if they felt it necessary for their mission. I'm glad that Sam prevailed, and I want them to accelerate at least for the time being, but the common assumption that "the board" was supposed to act to further OpenAI's commercial interests (as opposed to its mission) is wrong.

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