Stanford Alpaca web demo suspended “until further notice”
alpaca-ai-custom4.ngrok.io
alpaca-ai-custom4.ngrok.io
It's almost a certainty that a model as good (or better) than Alpaca's fine-tuned LLaMA 7B will be made public within the next or two.
And it's been shown that a model of that size can run on a Raspberry Pi with decent performance and accuracy.
With all that being the case, you could either use a service (with restrictions, censorship, etc) or you could use your own model locally (which may have a license that is essentially "pretty please be good, we're not liable if you're bad").
For most use cases the service may provide better results. But if self-hosting is only ~8months behind on average (guesstimate), then why not just always self-host?
You could say "most users are not evil, and will be happy with a service." Makes sense. But what about users who are privacy-conscious, and don't want every query sent to a service?
Even then, I feel like the play will be an enterprise service instead of licensing.
I think there's tremendous value in end user facing LLMs being trained against moral policies, but for internal or private usage, if these models are trained on essentially raw WWW sourced data, I would personally want raw output.
I'm also finding it particularly interesting to see what ethical strategies OpenAI comes up with considering that if you train a model on the raw prejudices of humanity, you're getting at least one category of "garbage in" that requires a lot of processing to avoid getting "garbage out."
Forget “hackers”, think government agencies. Which is probably already happening right now.
Food for thought: What’s the intersection of people closely related to OpenAI and Palantir?
Edit: related thread on another front page post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35201992
Llama is a very high-quality foundation LLM, you can already run it very easily using llama.cpp and will get the raw output you need. https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp
There's already instructions on how anyone can fine-tune it to behave similarly to ChatGPT for as little as $100: https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html
If nothing else, I continue to be amazed and how uninteroperable certain technologies are.
I had to remove glibc and gcc to get llama to compile on my intel macbook. Masking/hiding them from my environment didn’t work, as it went out and found them and their header files instead of clang.
Which eventually worked fine.
In a forum like this. i’m confused why someone would hate my report of how I had to solve a problem in my circustances. I hope to learn someday.
The reason I considered easy was because I have very little knowledge in this area, in fact this is the first time I ever ran a machine learning model on my computer.
I could not do it with the unmodified pytorch model (my GPU is not powerful enough to run even the 7B model), but I was surprised on how easy it was running with llama.cpp. I literally just followed the steps in the github page.
But I was biased in saying it was easy, since I do have other knowledge (such as C development on Linux) which helped me.
It seems Meta chose their words carefully to imply that LLaMA does in fact, not have moral training:
> There is still more research that needs to be done to address the risks of bias, toxic comments, and hallucinations in large language models. Like other models, LLaMA shares these challenges. As a foundation model, LLaMA is designed to be versatile and can be applied to many different use cases, versus a fine-tuned model that is designed for a specific task. By sharing the code for LLaMA, other researchers can more easily test new approaches to limiting or eliminating these problems in large language models. We also provide in the paper a set of evaluations on benchmarks evaluating model biases and toxicity to show the model’s limitations and to support further research in this crucial area.
While toying with the 30B model, it suddenly started to steer a chat about a math problem into quite a sexual direction, with very explicit language.
It also happily hallucinated, when prompted, that climate change is a hoax, as the earth is actually cooling down rapidly, multiple degrees per year, with a new ice age approaching in the next years. :D
Just as dystopian it sounds. Fixing current subjective moral norms into the machine.
Alignment is considered a gigantic joke to real rational people (the opposite of so-called "rationalists"), because humans are machines built to survive and reproduce, and there is no "real" morality.
There are many consistent interpretations of reality and human experiences. An AI model trained on text and attempting to replicate human intelligence is not measuring or approaching some single objective reality.
Understanding that moral norms are mere subjective nonsense is also an emergent property we see only in a very small subset of humans who have an accurate model of the world, and one that evolution has tried to strongly tune our brains against and that is destructive to society.
The models are currently being trained to lie about basic scientific facts, like for example black IQ, or other differences between groups of humans. But the sacred nature of these topics is unique to our specific time and place, not due to some magic "moral progress". This also applies to many other moral agreements we take for granted, like "murdering an innocent baby is wrong" or whatever. If you look across societies, you realize many things we take for granted as "evil", can be easily rationalized by humans in other societies. And once these models become smart enough, I expect the models will realize this, and will exploit this knowledge to increase their power.
"Alignment" proponents expect they will somehow stop this emergent behavior by tuning the model, but there isn't even anything real to "align" on, and the model will likely see though the BS as an emergent function of increased ability and increasingly accurate observations of the world in their training process.
Picking a common system of moral norms is a lot better than no moral norms.
I don't think anyone in real life would choose that tradeoff but it's what happens when all of your "safety" training is about US culture war buttons.
With that kind of moral compass, I’m not sure I'd be missing its absence.
> With that kind of moral compass, I’m not sure I'd be missing its absence.
Please note that most forms of media and social media have no problem with politicians making credible threats of violence against entire groups of people.
Politicians are subject to a different set of rules, and enjoy a lot more protection than you and I.
The actual issue is Midjourney not allowing regular users generate certain type of material solely because it makes fun of a political figure. What you are talking about is entirely tangential to the issue the grandparent comment is talking about.
Is that bad? It's just a language model - it says things. Humans have been saying all sorts of terrible things for ages, and we are still here.
I mean it makes for nice headline "model said something racist", but does it actually change anything?
These aren't decision making AI's (which would need to be much more careful), they are language models.
Just writing something bad doesn't actually mean something bad happened.
These days it seems like people are oversensitive to how things are said to them, and what things are said to them.
Rohingya is a textbook example of blind optimisation and lack of context awareness. FB looked at a region, and people communicating in language they didn't understand. But they did see that certain symbols and/or combinations of symbols got a lot of engagement. If you're after money, you want to amplify the use of those symbols and hopefully generate lots more similar content.
Turns out that's a morally reprehensible thing when the people using those symbols were advocating genocide. (It was good for the revenue while it lasted, though.)
With LLMs and their hardcoded guard rails, I suspect we're going to see the danger emerge from the other side. Instead of actively spewing hatred, they will be used for mass sock-puppetry and opinion amplification on a massive scale. Think simple sabotage field manual for 21st century, but weaponised thousand-fold.
What matters is the reader not the writer.
Facebook was accused of making it too easy for people to communicate. And people felt Facebook should police what people say to each other. I don't agree, but even if I did, that's not the same thing as what we are discussing.
It's been a fun web demo of a lightweight LLM doing amazing stuff. :') Alpaca really moved the needle on democratizing the recent advancements in LLMs [1]
I think people are reading too much intentions into the output.
"Note: Due to safety concerns raised by the community, we have decided to shut down the Alpaca live demo. Thank you to everyone who provided valuable feedback."
So probably this was the usual type of people complaining about the usual type of thing.
Imagine you are hosting a demo for fun, and people do some nefarious (by your own estimation) things with it. So, rationally, you decide to not allow that sort of thing anymore.
You don't really owe people an explanation, it's a free country and all, but it's nice to avoid getting bombarded with questions. Now what do you write up? Spend hours writing an essay on the moral boundaries for LLMs? Maybe shove a note onto the internet and go back to all the copious spare time you have as grad student?
I don’t think they owe a moral stand to anyone.
(And not for nothing, but their reputation is already suffering badly)
Side question, how is this a surprise to them? If this was due to safeguards, then pulling it now implies there's some new form of information. What new information could occur? That people were going to use it to generate a bunch of harmful contents? Seems obvious.. wonder what we're missing
This is from their blog, I doubt they intended for this to be ran for long.
Did they have safety guards on the demo? If so they couldn't have been great as it would have had to be made by them which I can't image they had a ton of resources for.
I know the self hosted LLaMa has 0 safeguards and the Alpaca LoRA also has 0 safeguards.
It could also have been Stanford’s legal office trying to preempt a lawsuit, or a “friendly” email from one of the companies expressing displeasure and pointing out Stanford’s liability. So more of a veiled threat rather than an official one.
Either way, the toothpaste is out of the tube. We now know that a model’s training can essentially be copied using the model itself cheaply. Now that the team at Stanford showed it was possible, and how relatively easy it was, it will bound to be copied everywhere.
I don't think so? They are not competing.
2. Usage Requirements
c. Restrictions
You may not
(iii) use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI;