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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Side note: Yandex search is awesome, and I really hope they stay alive forever. It's the only functional image search nowadays, after our Google overlords neutered their own product out of fear over lawyers/regulation and a disdain for power users.

You can't even search for images "before:date" in Google anymore.

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Yandex Image Search is today is what Google Image Search should have been.

End of the day I’ll use what actually gets the job done.

Same goes for OpenAI and Google AI. If you don’t actually ever release and let others use your stuff and end paralyzed in fear at what your models may do then someone else is gonna release the same tech, and at this rate it seems like that’ll be Chinese or Russian companies who don’t share your sensibilities at all, and their models will be the ones that end up productized.

OpenAI should just rebrand since nothing they do is actually open.

You know 100 years ago you could just buy uranium openly? Leo Szílard hustled up 200 kilograms, pleted, in the 30's.

What does it have to do with OpenAI branding?

Their "moral" reasoning behind not publishing models is simply laughtable because they do sell API access to them to anyone who can pay. And "bad guys" generally have money.

They can (and do) revoke API access from bad guys. They can't do that to downloaded models. Look, I don't like what OpenAI does, but "API access, but no model download" makes sense if you are worried about misuses.

Bad actors still can get access to such models. It even makes them more dangerous than it would if everyone had access to them.

Here's an alternative: progressively release better and better models (like 3B params, 10B, 50B, 100B) and let people figure out the best way to fight against bad actors using them.

> It even makes them more dangerous than it would if everyone had access to them.

This is the sort of argument that proves guns would be less dangerous if everyone had access to them.

"An armed society is a polite society" - Robert Heinlein

He was an author of fiction. They usually write a lot of stuff that is on some deeper level "true", even though it is on the surface fictional... And a lot of stuff that isn't.

Or sometimes both, because it's only part of the truth. Maybe the complete version should be: "An armed society is a 'polite' society, but with very frequent killings and not-infrequent massacres." I think I prefer living in a less "polite" society.

"It even makes them more dangerous..." needs to be demonstrated, not asserted.

Every company out there says it will "revoke API access for misuse", but do they have transparency reports? Who do they even consider bad guys and what do they consider as misuse?

I would be totally on their side if their reasoning was that they dont publish models to compete with FAANG more efficiently and get more income for their research, but this moral reasoning just sounds completely fake because bad actors do have funding to train their own models.

OpenAI published "Lessons Learned on Language Model Safety and Misuse" in March. https://openai.com/blog/language-model-safety-and-misuse/ It also promised "forthcoming publication".

Examples of "real cases of misuse encountered in the wild" include "spam promotions for dubious medical products and roleplaying of racist fantasies".

Yes, some bad actors can train their own models, but OpenAI can't do much about that either way. It is doubtful whether spam promoters of dubious medical products can, at least for a while.

It would be better for misuse to be criminalized and taken care of by national governments, rather than leave it to for-profit companies to decide what is or isn't "misuse".

Personally, I think using AI to manufacture advertisements on demand is misuse... but will Google agree with me?

National governments are often the criminals themselves, or their partner.

>if you are worried about misuses

why is morality into this? is this the same discussion of car manufacturers not selling cars to certain people because they are worried about misuse?

Automotive companies, in fact, have product liability. It's about liability, not morality.

when you release a project into the wild under a permissive license, aren't you essentially washing yourself from any "liability" ?

> MIT " IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."

don't commercial licenses have same/similar wording so what liability are you talking about?

So they do that because they're doing it for free. Otherwise they couldn't be generous with their work--those licenses are about permitting the generous intent.

We all know the real reason.

They used to be a non-profit with a mission, now they are a for-profit with the only mission of money.

Maybe they should rename to SafeAI, if their concern is controlling access.

Good point. The issue is not the policy per se, it's the fact that their name is not accurate.

I mean, the policy is kind of shit too, given that they used to have the mission of being open.

But yes, the name is not what it should be, given their current ideas.

IMO the main reason these companies don't release their models is not ethical concerns but money:

- NVIDIA sells GPUs and interconnect needed for training large models. Releasing a pretrained LM would hurt sales, while only publishing a teaser paper boosts them.

- Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offer ML-as-a-service and TPU/GPU hardware as a part of their cloud computing platforms. Russian and Chinese companies also have their clouds, but they have low global market share and aren't cost-efficient, so nobody would use them to train large LMs anyway.

- OpenAI are selling their models as an API with a huge markup over inference costs; they are also largely sponsored by the aforementioned companies, further aligning their interests with them.

Companies that release large models are simply those who have nothing to lose by doing so. Unfortunately, you need a lot of idle hardware to train them, and companies that have it tend to also launch a public cloud with it, so there is a perpetual conflict of interests here.

The “ethical concerns” thing is just a progressive-sounding excuse for why they’re not going to give their models away for free. I guarantee you those models are going to be integrated into various Google products in some form or another.

This reminded me of a shitpost comparing Google and Yandex.

https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/78144754/#78145600

I regularly use it for a sample of what Google and Bing are intentionally omitting.

I agree with this. When I am still addicted to porn, Yandex Image is the only one that seems to find relevant and useful links.

FWIW, https://same.energy/ seems to work fine for me

A 500 days old product in beta? I hope they do well.

Extended betas used to be Google's thing.

> Google overlords neutered their own product out of fear over lawyers/regulation

What kind of lawyers/regulation do you have in mind? If anything, I'd find the opposite: lawyers and copyright holders should be grateful for such a tool that - when it was still working - allowed you to trace websites using your images illegally.

Now they all use Yandex for this purpose, with relatively good results.

Maybe the view image link removal in 2018.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-removes-v...

IIRC it was mostly from groups like Getty images. They and other image licensing companies didn't want google showing their images in search results. They claimed it was copyright infringement and given the absolute state of IP law in the US they could have made Google's life very difficult.

We're talking about reverse search, right? (Because "normal" image search still kind of works, it's reverse search that is completely broken.) In this case, you already have the copyrighted image, and if you find out that the same image is on Getty Images, then all the better as you can check it license. Also, it's better for GI as it gives them more exposure, and the kind of companies who use GI are very unlikely to pirate images.

Couldn't compliance with a robots.txt file have prevented all of this?

You misunderstood parent post. It's about Google not being sued for discrimination.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-goog...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-19/google-qu...

https://theconversation.com/googles-algorithms-discriminate-...

Oh I see. What I'm looking for is the reason why they broke the reverse image search. It was working well many years ago but some time after that they switched it to some strange image classifier (I upload an image of an apple to find exactly the same image to track its license of origin, and it says "possibly an image of an apple" - oh thank you Google I didn't know that.)

Do they at least tell you the type of Apple it is?

Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)

https://tineye.com/

> Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)

Tineye is definitely better than Google with crops, etc. Google reverse image search seems to have more data, but it seems much less able to recognize even basic modifications to the input.

> You misunderstood parent post. It's about Google not being sued for discrimination.

Who's suing them and on what grounds? If they made changes, it's probably for PR reasons, not legal ones.

Also not all of these seem "fixed" e.g.:

> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-goog...

Article from 2016, but results look very similar today: https://www.google.com/search?q=unprofessional+hair&source=l...

They used to have in their AI ethics department some of the most anti-AI progressives. They picked on everything - biased training data, discriminatory usage, consuming too much energy to train, models are just stochastic parrots, etc. while forgetting to mention any effort to mitigate the problems (of course these are real concerns and being under intense research) Now these critics are fired, but Google must have learned to fear them.

If they let everyone use the latest models, critics could uncover ugly biases in 10 minutes. Then Google would have to do damage control. These models are very suggestible. You can induce them to make fools of themselves.

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