Safety in the context of LLMs means “avoiding bad media coverage or reputation damage for the parent company”

It has only a tangential relationship with end user safety.

If some of these companies are successful the way they imagine, most of their end users will be unemployed. When they talk about safety, it’s the companies safety they’re referring to.

It's also marketing. "Dangerous technology" implies "powerful". Hence the whole ridiculous "alignment" circus.

I also don't get it. I mean if the training data is publicly available, why isn't that marked as dangerous? If the training data contains enough information to roleplay a killer or a hooker or build a bomb, why is the model censored?

It feels hard to include enough context in the system prompt. Facebook’s content policy is huge and very complex. You’d need lots of examples, which lends itself well to SFT. A few sentences is not enough, either for a human or a language model.

I feel the same sort of ick with the puritanical/safety thing, but also I feel that ick when kids are taken advantage of:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...

The models for kids might need to be different if the current ones are too interested in romantic love.

If you don’t believe that you can be harmed verbally, then I understand your position. You might be able to empathise if the scenario was an LLM being used to control physical robotic systems that you are standing next to.

Some people can be harmed verbally, I’d argue everyone if the entity conversing with you knows you well, and so i don’t think the concept of safety itself is an infantilisation.

It seems what we have here is a debate over the efficacy of having access to disable safeguards that you deem infantilising and that get in the way of an objective, versus the burden of always having to train a model to avoid being abusive for example, or checking if someone is standing next to the sledgehammer they’re about to swing at 200rpm