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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

> Figuring out how to align future superhuman AI systems to be safe has never been more important

They love using the word “safe” and I’m pretty sure it’s 99% PR, because reading their other “papers” on Safety & Alignment seems to not really identify or define safety bounds at all. You’d think this has something to do with ethics but we all know there are no longer any ethically concerned leaders at their workplace. So I can only surmise that “safety” is a softer word being used to misdirect people on their non-ethically aligned intentions.

You can make the argument that safety is too early in development of these LLM systems to understand but then why throw around the word in the first place?

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It's not really about ethics. It is about control. Making sure the GI you're dishing out tasks to doesn't do something you really don't want it to do.

This is a problem today and it'll be a bigger problem tomorrow with more competent models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07590

Is a safe LLM not an ethical LLM? Control within what boundaries? All three of these words seem to be used interchangeably when people discuss returned information from models. Which is exactly my point it’s poorly defined yet championed as a center piece. Meanwhile you have other companies spitting out acronyms consisting of vague terminology.

A safe language model is one that won't get you sued/on the news. Ethics has nothing to do with it.

Right so it would be a model that won’t get you sued because the news finds it ethical?

>Is a safe LLM not an ethical LLM?

What is an ethical LLM ?

Humans are in general not aligned, not to each other, not to the survival of their species, not to all the other life on earth, and often not even to themselves individually.

There are no universal set of "ethics" so this is about aligning to open ai's own rules, or in other words, control.

If i say to my GPT bot, "go trade stocks for me. don't do anything illegal", can i guarantee that ? No you can't regardless of how "ethical" you make your model to be.

The guarantee that you will have nothing to worry about is the crux of alignment.

> There are no universal set of "ethics" so this is about aligning to open ai's own rules, or in other words, control.

Are ethics not a set of rules relative to the governing body applying those rules?

Right as there are no universal ideas of a safe LLM, controlled LLM, or ethical LLM. Safe would imply some level of control about the ethical output of the model.

Yet the words are still poorly defined as they are interchangeable:

If i say to my GPT bot, "go trade stocks for me. don't do anything illegal", can i guarantee that ? No you can't regardless of how “safe”/“controlled”/“ethical” you make your model to be.

You’re spinning the words to create a distinct difference but it doesn’t hold up because they’re each a relative mechanism for each other as they are all poorly defined in the field but chosen to mask the poor definition. You’re just playing by the PR game rules.

I genuinely don't understand what you're looking for here. Obviously the process definition is poorly defined. If it weren't, we would be able to algin ourselves. We're talking about what the hoped outcome is. Nobody knows what it means to control an intelligence. That's what the research is about.

We're deliberately trying to create something with the capability to also create. It's not ridiculous to be concerned about what we might end up with.

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