[HN Gopher] On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
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       On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
        
       Author : satorii
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2021-08-23 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | version_five wrote:
       | I'd suggest using the original article title. [Edit, it's been
       | updated]
       | 
       | Still have to read the article. It's great to see people
       | exploring this. From the first "language models are unsupervised
       | multitask learners" type papers, i wish there had been more
       | emphasis that the various behaviors these models have are
       | essentially a side effect of learning some kind of self
       | supervision task. A model has been trained to e.g. predict the
       | next word given previous words, and we're happy to discover that
       | it can be repurposed as a chatbot. And then people find the
       | chatbot has some undesirable behaviors, and talk about fairness
       | and governance and all that. When the basic point is the model
       | was never really trained to do any of that, its just a word
       | predictor. Why did you ever think it would be OK to just let it
       | run wild on some other task?
       | 
       | All that to say, a big problem in AI/ML is models getting used
       | for things they have no business being used for, and them people
       | being at best underwhelmed, or harmed or offended by the results.
       | The first step should be asking why is this model suitable for
       | making the prediction I'm asking it to, and I think closer
       | scrutiny on what these "foundation models" actually do is a good
       | direction.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | (Title changed now. Submitted title was "What is this new AI
         | term, foundation models".)
        
           | phreeza wrote:
           | To answer the question the original poster apparently had,
           | here are the first two sentences of the abstract:
           | 
           | > AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models
           | (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at
           | scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks.
           | We call these models foundation models to underscore their
           | critically central yet incomplete character.
        
       | AlanYx wrote:
       | I'm curious about the format/formatting of this paper. There are
       | a few visual roadmaps to the various sections and subsections
       | throughout the paper, complete with drawings/iconography (clip
       | art?). I haven't seen anything like this before in an academic
       | paper. Is it something that's becoming popular in certain
       | research communities?
        
         | satorii wrote:
         | Interesting findings! Not sure about whether it is within
         | certain research communities or a broader trend.
         | 
         | But Clip cloud be a good plug-in for nowadays writings/design
         | then, something like Clip empowered unsplash.
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-23 23:02 UTC)