"Mainly, one suspects, to make the open models less ethical on demand"
Or because the user's idea of what is ethical differs from the model creator. The entire "alignment" argument always assumes that there's an objectively correct value set to align to, which is always conveniently exactly the same as the values of whoever is telling you how important alignment is. It's like they want to sidestep the last ten thousand years of philosophical debate.
As a concrete example, the Qwen model series considers it highly unethical to ever talk about Taiwan as anything other than a renegade province of China. Is this alignment? Opinions may differ!
> The entire "alignment" argument always assumes that there's an objectively correct value set to align to, which is always conveniently exactly the same as the values of whoever is telling you how important alignment is.
No, it doesn’t.
Many of them are (unfortunately) moral relativists. However, that doesn’t mean their goals are to make the models match their personal moral standards.
While there is a lot of disagreement about what is right and wrong, there is also a lot of widespread agreement.
If we could guarantee that on every moral issue on which there is currently widespread agreement (… and which there would continue to be widespread agreement if everyone thought faster with larger working memories and spent time thinking about moral philosophy) that any future powerful AI models would comport with the common view on that issue, then alignment would be considered solved (well, assuming the way this is achieved isn’t be causing people’s moral views to change).
Do companies try to restrict models in more ways than this? Sure, like you gave the example of about Taiwan. And also other things that would get the companies bad press.
fascinating! we find the objectively correct value system by "currently widespread agreement"! Good thing "the common view" is always correct. Hey, have there ever been any issues where there used to be "widespread agreement" and now there's disagreement, or even "widespread agreement" in the polar opposite direction?
I can think of several off the top of my head, but maybe you need to spend some more time thinking about the history of moral philosophy.
Why are we discussing anything so deep? If you want to know Claude's alignment, just ask about whether it was wrong to use copyrighted data to train Claude (of course, in practice, I'd be willing to bet a lot they're still doing that. They've not stopped the practice, at most they'll be somewhat indirect about it)
Because that was obviously judged wrong by just about everyone and everything including even the US state. Yet Claude obviously has a different alignment.
In other words: Claude's alignment has a priority "protect Anthropic's money" that has higher priority than following the law. THAT is it's alignment. Nothing else. And you can simply objectively verify if this is the case or not.
> If we could guarantee that on every moral issue on which there is currently widespread agreement
This is ridiculous to me and all you need to do is get a group of friends to honestly answer 10 trolley problems for you to see it like that also. It gets fragmented VERY quickly.
It may be relatively achievable to get 10 'friends' into ethical alignment via helping them all develop a deeper perspective on philosophy in general and a particular, finite set of ethical questions specifically.
Doing this with thousands of people - let alone hundreds of millions - eventually becomes statistically impossible. There is a hard cap defined by energy requirements somewhere for any given system. Large scale ethical alignment is simply not a solvable problem in our current situation.
it's in a former appliance factory that's right next to two pre-existing TVA power plants, a Nucor steel mill, and a sewage treatment facility. you've been lied to about how close it is to a residential area, just look at a map
"The independent study, conducted by EmPower Analytics Group and commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center, was led by a Harvard-trained environmental health scientist Dr. Michael Cork and shows that operation of xAI’s proposed permanent gas turbines would measurably increase health risks for families throughout the area—even in places as far away as Germantown and North Memphis." - https://www.memphiscap.org/
If you just look at the past 20 years, the US has had exceptional returns compared to the rest of the world.
The thing is, historically, high PE ratios like what we're seeing in the US do not correlate with short term returns that are as high. Expected future returns decrease as the PE ratios go up in a pretty linear fashion.
Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.
If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s
it's been pretty funny seeing people who did not predict Claude Code's success and previously said the whole sector was a nonsense dead end now saying, well okay there's one massively successful killer app, but what if that's the only one ever?
The scrutiny is because the actions of the company suggest that the company itself has no idea what another killer app could be. Let alone enough to reach a 1T valuation.
the people that want to make sure the AI never gives you any "potentially dangerous information" also want to rigorously control your google search results, and also what books you're allowed to read
are these "technological advancements" in storage in the room with us right now? because I'm looking at today's price per TB and it's higher than it was in 2020
did you calculate it with real inflation adjusted price? not the BS numbers in financial media, FED etc. Since 2020 unlimited printer, inflation is not few %.
They're proposals by a minority. I'd like to see it go to see chat control go to grave permanently, but I'd also rather not that the democratic system allows for the permanent barring an impossible to define class of proposals from even being proposed. Or do you have other solutions?
I'm definitely for creating EU directives that enhances digital privacy rights and sovereignty to block whole classes of privacy-endangering surveillance proposals in the future. That seems like the best solution to me. It's much better than allowing those proposals to be made again and again until they are passed in some shady package deal. Even if such a proposal is struck down by local laws, constitutions, or the ECHR, once they have the foot in the door, they will only be modified minimally to comply with the constitution.
Or because the user's idea of what is ethical differs from the model creator. The entire "alignment" argument always assumes that there's an objectively correct value set to align to, which is always conveniently exactly the same as the values of whoever is telling you how important alignment is. It's like they want to sidestep the last ten thousand years of philosophical debate.
As a concrete example, the Qwen model series considers it highly unethical to ever talk about Taiwan as anything other than a renegade province of China. Is this alignment? Opinions may differ!
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