I could see it being good if it helps you estimate crimes committed by citizens. If you know where the gaps in your knowledge/data are, you can attempt to account for them. And that’s better than nothing.
I think misleading information is obviously bad, incomplete information is not necessarily misleading though.
On the other hand, it might be better to remove incomplete information if it is actively being used to mislead people.
You're not modeling this adversarially and that's your fundamental error here. If you look at your "knowledge supplier" as an entity actively trying to deceive you and give you an incorrect world model you'll realize i'm right and you're living in a fantasy theory world
I'm not the original commenter, but I do think this is true, so I'll bite.
Datacenters process data, but they do it in a particular location, and therefore are subject to local and national laws.
It would be folly for a government to decide that some other country's laws and enforcement standards should be applied in absentia. Whether you love the singularity or hate it, you should whole-heartedly be advocating to have whatever datacenter your country will use be built on shore.
In fact, you should also be whole-heartedly advocating for local frontier models / or at least locally managed open weights models for the same reason. But the datacenter is easy. Just build them. Your fellow citizens will use them. Why send all their data to some other country that might be a strategic adversary?
I think that’s fine, but 1) that mentality leaves you extremely vulnerable to being disrupted by LLMs and 2) IMO, if you are solving the same problems every day it means you are not making progress on solving the root causes of those problems. What you are describing is toil, not knowledge work
Correct. It depends. For example, it might depend on what the collaboration is likely to result in. Perhaps it would be more likely to be moral there were some boundaries in place, like "no mass domestic surveillance" or "no fully autonomous weapons".
Because the US government currently believes it is legal to blow up civilian drug traffickers and wage war without congressional approval. So at some point, yes, collaboration is immoral.
The US military has deployed fully autonomous weapons since at least 1979, and potential adversaries are now doing the same. For better or worse that ship has sailed.
Look, a dumb bomb is a fully autonomous weapon once it's launched. Let's be real: an LLM making decisions on who to target and when and where to launch munitions represents a meaningful change in our concept of autonomous weapons.
So we are wrong to express any opposition or desire to maybe raise the bar here? Aren’t we supposed to be “the good guys”? Or should we just accept a role as the menace of the world, wildly throwing its weight around whenever we have an unscrupulous president?
Those questions are moot. There are situations where it's simply impossible to have a human in the loop because reaction time is too slow or the environment is too dangerous or communication links are unreliable. Russia is deploying fully autonomous weapons to attack Ukraine today and they will be selling those weapons (or licensing the technology) to their allies. There is no option to stop. And let's please not have any nonsense suggestions that we can somehow convince Russia / China / Iran / North Korea to sign a binding, enforceable treaty banning such weapons: that's never going to happen.
There's always an option to stop. We can choose civility over barbarity, stop trying to kill people over 1000+ year old dick waving contests, and stop threatening each other with doomsday weapons because your grandpa shot my grandpa. Just because our leaders are too stupid and cowardly doesn't mean there's no option.
Not sure you're aware, but the joke may be on you. It's apparently Putin who's convinced Trump and the Mullahs (not the band) to choose civility over babarity by allowing a superyacht of one of his cronies to pass through the Hormuz.[0]
Russian trolling at its finest, truly. This timeline keeps raising the bar on the absurdity quotient.
I wasn't aware that the US was throwing away its moral compass for the just cause of frustrating Putin's expansionism. The new story seems to be Putin gets to do what he wants, and so do we.
If you think there's something wrong with giving our warfighters the most effective weapons to carry out their assigned missions with minimum casualties then your moral compass is completely broken. Personally I favor a less interventionist foreign policy but that has to be addressed through the political process. Not by unaccountable individual defense contractor employees making arbitrary policy decisions.
You should know that every single veteran I know ruthlessly mocks Hegseth for trying to use this term non-comedically. It’s a synonym for someone who takes their service way too seriously/makes it their whole identity. It’s almost exclusively used to mock people.
We aren’t Russian and Putin is not our leader. We can choose how we behave and operate. This is like saying we should use chemical weapons if someone else deploys one. You’re speaking as if it’s all so binary. “Do what they do or you lose.”
It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences. Chemical weapons have seen minimal use after WWI largely because they're not very militarily effective. Autonomous kinetic weapons actually work. Right now Ukrainians are building autonomous weapons to defend themselves against Russian autonomous weapons. For Ukrainians it is binary: do what they do or you lose. Would you prefer that they lose? And don't presume to tell us that the Russians can be persuaded to stop by non-violent means, that would be completely delusional.
>It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences.
This is a deeply flawed argument that has an obvious application back at you, but either way if you’re going to stoop to personal attacks I think we’re done here.
Who said otherwise? Clearly it’s about facilitating specific acts by the government. Why are y’all acting like it was so wildly broad? No one said “working with the government is inherently immoral.”
No. Their comment was:
“Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.”
But, “…doing this kind of work with the federal government.” is added context that was not there and is based on your own interpretation.
The language of the parent comment charges that simply working at a company that is engaging in this makes one complicit in an immoral act, and the complicity itself is immoral. I disagree with all of that.
Yes. Working at a company explicitly profiting off of doing clearly immoral acts is wrong. It doesn’t mean working for a company contracted with the federal government is always wrong.
In a logical or mathematical sense, sure, but when it's the US government and a huge surveillance-tech company it's pretty necessarily immoral (at least in an American context where harming liberty is immoral - other cultures disagree).
Like the guy in an old clip saying "What is my crime? Enjoying a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?" while being arrested for trying to pay with a stolen credit card. The succulence of the meal has nothing to do with it, and that it's your own government has nothing to do with it. It's just a sad way to try to distract from what's actually wrong with helping build tools for mass surveillance and autonomous murder.
I don't think that was intentional, but invading countries while trying to distract them with negotiations, randomly assassinating leaders and hoping everything just turns out well, threatening to "destroy civilizations", targeting bridges and more, all while aiding and abetting Israel which is intentionally destroying pharmaceutical, educational, and other such civilian institutions is all 100% intentional.
In some ways worse than bombing the school was the effort to implicitly deny it. The school was near a military facility, and itself was a military facility in the past. US intelligence screwed up. They should have simply acknowledged what happened and why. Their response just reeked of cowardice and malice at the highest level.
You'll have to live with it somewhere else. Neither HN's administrators nor readership will tolerate that kind of behavior. If you intend to participate on Hacker News over the long term, please take up the suggestion by the other poster to review the guidelines and adhere to them.
Of course it doesn't! I acknowledge that I have no first amendment right to speak in this forum, none at all. I merely observe that the people who run the forum are themselves champions of free speech, within limits of course.
That’s insane. There should be a big team of people at AMD whose whole job is just to dogfood their stuff for training like this. Speaking of which, Amazon is in the same boat, I’m constantly surprised that Amazon is not treating improving Inferentia/Trainium software as an uber-priority. (I work at Amazon)
> “Are we afraid of our competitors? No, we’re completely unafraid of our competitors,” said Taylor. “For the most part, because—in the case of Nvidia—they don’t appear to care that much about VR. And in the case of the dollars spent on R&D, they seem to be very happy doing stuff in the car industry, and long may that continue—good luck to them.
Where's the scope for an L7 promo in "Fixed a bunch of tiny issues that were making it hard to use Tranium/Inferentia with PyTorch"?
Amazon's compensation strategy, in which you primarily get a raise years in the future for tricking your management chain into promoting you is definitely bearing its rotten fruit.
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