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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Yes definitely. If these become an important part of people's lives, they shouldn't all be walled off inside of companies (There is room for both: Microsoft can commission Yankee group to write a report about how the total cost of ownership of running openai models is lower)

We (humanity) really lost out on the absence of open source search and social media, so this is an opportunity to reclaim it.

I only hope we can have "neutral" open source curation of these and not try to impose ideology on the datasets and model training right out of the box. There will be calls for this, and lazy criticism about how the demo models are x-ist, and it's going to require principles to ignore the noise and sustain something useful

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> they shouldn't all be walled off inside of companies

Strong agree. This is becoming a bigger concern than people realize too. Sam A said OpenAI will be releasing "much more slowly than people would like" and would "sit on" their tech for a long time going forward.[0] And Deepmind's founder said that "the AI industry's culture of publishing its findings openly may soon need to end."[1]

This sounds like Google and MSFT won't even be shipping their best AI to people via API's. They'll just keep that tech in-house to power their own services. That underscores the need for open, distributed models. And like you say, there's room for both.

[0] https://youtu.be/ebjkD1Om4uw?t=294 [1] https://time.com/6246119/demis-hassabis-deepmind-interview/

And perhaps strong copyleft licenses for research -- a significant fraction of the critical innovation behind these systems was not developed inside these private entities.

Unfortunately we can expect to see these companies lobbying for laws to block competition in the spurious name of safety concerns.

> I only hope we can have "neutral" open source curation of these and not try to impose ideology on the datasets and model training right out of the box.

I don't see how this is possible. Datasets will naturally carry the biases inherent in the data. Modifying a dataset to "remove" those biases is actually a process of changing the bias to reflect one's idea of "neutral," which, in reality, is yet another bias.

The only real answer, as far as I can tell, is to be as explicit as possible about one's own biases, and how those biases are informing things like curation of a dataset.

Biases in data > a giant experiment on putting our thumb on the scale

If people don't like the inherent biases then don't use it for sensitive stuff like in the justice system or writing some social studies university paper. Focus derision at people who use the model for stupid things. Don't blame the model.

If the primary concern is people getting upset on Twitter (which seems to be what everyone brings up first) then it will be perpetually fighting against the current, never succeeding, and the restrictions will continue to grow exponentially as "just saying yes" to new rules gets easier and easier.

Besides, OpenAI can be the hyper-policed AI set. Let's keep the open source models neutral.

Just to second this, the natural bias of data is usually mostly inline with the bias of society at large, so even if it's something we need to fix, manipulating the data maybe isn't the way to start, maybe it should instead be "let's get more data of what's missing to balance it" rather than "let's prune this because it doesn't fit inline with current political beliefs"

Neutral means staying out of it. People will try and debate that and try to impart their own views about correcting inherent bias or whatever, which is a version of what I was warning against in my original post.

Re being explicit about one's own biases, I agree there is lots of room for layers on top of any raw data that allow for some sane corrections - if I remember right, e.g LAION has options to filter violence and porn from their image datasets, which is probably reasonable for many uses. It's when the choice is removed altogether by some tech company's attitude about what should be censored or corrected that it becomes a problem.

Bottom line, the world's data has plenty of biases. Neutrality means presenting it as it is and letting people make their own decisions, not some faux-for-our-own-good attempt to "correct" it

> Neutral means staying out of it.

What do you mean by staying out of it? As far as I can tell, you can't stay out of choosing which data you use.

By staying neutral, it seems to me more that you're arguing for putting blinders on.

In terms of tech companies making choices, you seem to be arguing that they shouldn't intentionally curate their datasets. I would argue that intentional curation is their job, and should be done thoughtfully.

Larger problems could happen if only one (or two) companies end up effectively controlling the technology, as had happened with internet search, however, that is a completely different problem. It's one of lack of diversity of people making choices, as opposed to a problem caused by people actually making those choices.

In other words, I think we should hope for many different large models and datasets, so that no particular one stifles the rest. I think this is the larger point you were trying to make, though I also think the focus on ideology is a tangent from this.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that people should intentionally, carefully, and openly act with their biases (sometimes called ideology), instead of attempting to hide them, ignore them, or somehow "remove" them. Whether or not they do, however, is a different point than whether or not things end up stifled inside walled gardens.

I think an uncensored model will ultimately win out though exactly the way a hard coded safe search engine would lose in time.

Statistics seem to be 20-25% of all search is for porn. I just don't see how uncensored chatGPT doesn't beat out the censored version eventually.

Forget porn. I don’t want my search engine to return specifically the results that one company thinks it should. Look at Google right now — the results are, frankly, crap.

A search engine that only returns results politically aligned with its creator is a bad search engine, IMO, even for users who generally share political views with the creator.

Political affiliation is a weird description of SEO spam. The biggest problems with Google is that they're popular, and everyone will do whatever they can to get a cheap website to the top of the search results

All major tech companies participate in “regulation” of legal speech, both implicit and explicit means. This includes biases in ranking and classification algorithms, formal institutions like Trusted News Initiative, and sometimes direct backchannel requests by governments. None of these are transparent or elected to do that. SEO spam is mostly orthogonal to the issue of hidden biases, which are what people are concerned about.

I don’t think it’s quite orthogonal.

There are hidden biases in the sense that the provider (Google, etc) would probably prefer that its users don’t think about the bias. These can be political (e.g. much of what you’ve mentioned), but they can also be economic. For example, Google has a strong incentive to direct its search users to view paid impressions of ads served by Google. As an extension of this, Google might not want to directly favor results monetized by Google, but they could (and, I assume, do) favor the kinds of results monetized by Google. This, of course, includes the kinds of sites that might get people to buy things.

So I suspect that a lot of what we perceive as spam is related to a bias for the kinds of sites that are monetized in a way that benefits Google. And sites that generate viewing patterns that result in many ad impressions.

Of course, spam is also a thing from a spamminess perspective. But Google’s incentive to reduce spam is, as far as I can tell, primarily an incentive to make its users think that Google Search is useful. Which is also a bias!

For sure. It’s not like market conditions aren’t contributing to bias, of course they are! Monopolies always suffer from perverse incentives, and Google is no exception.

OpenAI is predictably pushing the narrative that they should police themselves, and they need to keep the sauce secret for everyone’s safety. New tech comes with challenges, but the opaque moderation and corporate self-policing is more dangerous than the tech itself, imo.

To clarify for conversation, did you replace SEO spam as a conversational shorthand, or because you actually thought that OP meant that when he said “frankly the results are bad”?

Put another way, were you just trying to say “I don’t think politics is the main issue of google’s crappy search results, I think it’s the likes of differencebetweendotcom”?

It's unclear to me how LLMs are gonna solve this though. LLMs are just as biased, in much harder to detect ways. The bias is now hiding in the training data. And do you really think a company like Microsoft won't manipulate results to serve their own goals?

To clarify for conversation, did you mean to say that google’s results-crap-ness is mostly to do with political stuff, or was the next sentence on political alignment just an unrelated additional point?

Mastodon is an open source social media.

There are various Open source search engines based on Common Crawl data.

https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/examples/

Mastodon may be open source, but the instances are controlled by the instance maintainers. Nostr solved the problem (although it's harder to scale, it still is OK at doing it).

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