[HN Gopher] Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, bu...
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       Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has
       limitations
        
       Author : metadat
       Score  : 54 points
       Date   : 2023-01-10 21:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
        
       | lukeplato wrote:
       | Disclaimer: I haven't finished reading the paper [0]
       | 
       | Based on the ability to get around ChatGPT's self-censoring
       | functionality, it's unlikely the model itself was being retrained
       | to avoid certain outputs but there was some other model used to
       | identify inappropriate prompts. The approach from Anthropic
       | instead seems to change the model's latent space to prefer
       | outputs aligned with its constitution.
       | 
       | It's likely that OpenAI will incorporate this approach of using
       | human oversight to train a constitutional supervised model to
       | then train the chat model with 'RL from AI Feedback' (RLAIF).
       | OpenAI's current RLHF approach seems related to improving quality
       | of outputs while this is more related to its self-censorship
       | (which didn't work well). I suppose this might be why they
       | haven't released the constitution since it might be serving as
       | some kind of moat (or the principles may be differentiable?).
       | It's still not clear to me how a constitution can impact
       | hallucinations.
       | 
       | [0] https://www.anthropic.com/constitutional.pdf
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | atdrummond wrote:
       | Am I the only one who cannot see the embedded tweets? Further,
       | they don't even link to them elsewhere - you have to accept their
       | cookies to view them. Extremely anti-user.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | airstrike wrote:
       | In a strange twist of events... their massive Series B round was
       | led by SBF
       | 
       | "The [$580M] Series B follows the company raising $124 million in
       | a Series A round in 2021. The Series B round was led by Sam
       | Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX. The round also included participation
       | from Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn,
       | and the Center for Emerging Risk Research (CERR)."
       | 
       | https://www.anthropic.com/news/announcement
        
         | mouse_ wrote:
         | When someone pays you with stolen funds, aren't you (morally,
         | if not legally) obliged to pay it back to the victims?
        
           | bsaul wrote:
           | good question, but id say doing so means the end of whole
           | industries (luxury comes to mind)
        
           | JumpCrisscross wrote:
           | > _aren 't you (morally, if not legally) obliged to pay it
           | back to the victims?_
           | 
           | OpenAI would be positively thrilled to give SBF back his
           | money and cancel his shares. I'm not sure his creditors would
           | similarly salivate at that deal. (EDIT: Nvm.)
        
             | axiom92 wrote:
             | The parent is talking about Anthropic
             | (https://www.anthropic.com/), not OpenAI.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > When someone pays you with stolen funds, aren't you
           | (morally, if not legally) obliged to pay it back to the
           | victims?
           | 
           | Legally, its complicated, and the reason for that is because
           | it is viewed as both _morally_ complicated (as well
           | simplistic approaches being viewed as creating undesired
           | social incentives.)
        
             | hahaxdxd123 wrote:
             | Can you delve into the complexities? To me, if clawback
             | were not available, it seems to create the perverse
             | incentive to start a ponzi scheme and then put the money in
             | a shielded "investment" in my friends' overvalued startup.
        
           | troad wrote:
           | If it was a bona fide investment and you are without notice
           | of any wrongdoing - no, I'd say you're not. Presumably your
           | nefarious investor holds some kind of ownership interest that
           | can be sold by their trustees/liquidators to raise funds. If
           | you are able to do so, it seems like a nice thing to try to
           | help source money to help the people caught out, including by
           | assisting in realising any ownership stake, but that's a
           | choice, not an obligation.
           | 
           | Edit: to avoid ambiguity, this response is written re
           | morality, not legality.
        
             | mshake2 wrote:
             | I think the answer should be yes so that those taking
             | investment should feel pressure to ensure that the money
             | from investors is legitimate. Otherwise, it's going to be
             | "whoops, we didn't know ;)" every time.
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | There seems to be a false dichotomy here between either
               | "always treat the recipient as guilty" and "just let them
               | claim ignorance without questioning it".
        
             | jibe wrote:
             | _I'd say you're not_
             | 
             | If the investment was made with stolen funds they can be
             | clawed back.
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | claudiulodro wrote:
       | Why do these companies keep naming these systems after real human
       | names?! I thought I'd be pretty safe, but apparently no name is
       | safe from being Alexa'd.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | dmm wrote:
         | Pretty good! This sounds like something a real person would
         | say.
        
       | samwillis wrote:
       | > Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that,
       | taken together, formed a sort of "constitution" (hence the name
       | "constitutional AI"). The principles haven't been made public,
       | but Anthropic says they're grounded in the concepts of
       | beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence
       | (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom
       | of choice).
       | 
       | This is giving me very strong Asimov's "three laws of robotics"
       | vibes:
       | 
       | First Law
       | 
       | A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow
       | a human being to come to harm.
       | 
       | Second Law
       | 
       | A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except
       | where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
       | 
       | Third Law
       | 
       | A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection
       | does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
        
         | wwwtyro wrote:
         | > or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
         | 
         | This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to
         | work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the
         | future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.
        
           | ChrisClark wrote:
           | Yeah, his stories were about those gaping holes and how
           | things go horribly wrong because of them.
        
           | burkaman wrote:
           | That's sort of the point of his stories. The laws do not
           | work, and there is no set of laws that could work perfectly.
           | Any set of rules as simple as this applied to something as
           | complex as humanity will always have a mountain of loopholes.
        
           | thedorkknight wrote:
           | If I recall correctly, the whole point was that aligned goals
           | are super hard to do, and that this is what leads to the
           | robots creating a secret robot illuminati that takes over
           | world leadership without anyone realizing they're voting for
           | robots, and then working to protect humans.
        
         | de_keyboard wrote:
         | > First Law
         | 
         | > A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction,
         | allow a human being to come to harm.
         | 
         | Hmmm I wonder about trolley problems
        
           | kadoban wrote:
           | You may already know, but _most_ of Asimov's stories with the
           | three laws are heavily based on problems with said laws, and
           | clever loopholes of various sorts.
           | 
           | So it's always hilarious when people use them
           | unironically/uncritically in other contexts.
        
         | powersnail wrote:
         | What the three laws of robotics didn't predict, is how much our
         | current AI is pure heuristics, and so it doesn't quite have the
         | ability to strictly follow rules, or even interpret rules in an
         | unambiguous manner.
         | 
         | Hard-coded behaviors cannot express the abstract ideas in those
         | laws, while the ML part cannot be relied upon to accurately
         | behave.
        
         | KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
         | Maybe the ML model would start a market maker and exchange in
         | the Bahamas too.
        
       | wwwtyro wrote:
       | Is there any reason to believe that the first open source chat
       | GPT clone won't consume most mindshare, a la stable diffusion?
        
         | ShamelessC wrote:
         | Deployment is the significant barrier with these models. They
         | have far more parameters than stable diffusion/DALLE2.
        
         | turmeric_root wrote:
         | on top of the hardware requirements ($10s of thousands of GPUs
         | are needed for something a language model as big as gpt-3)
         | there's also a lot of work involved in RLHF models like
         | chatgpt. you need to pay people to write and review
         | thousands/tens of thousands of responses for training. see
         | 'methods' here: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
        
         | antimatter15 wrote:
         | There are already open source LLMs with comparable parameter
         | counts (Facebook's OPT-175B, BLOOM), but you'll need ~10x A100
         | GPUs to run them (which would cost ~$100K+).
         | 
         | I suspect a big part of why stable diffusion managed to consume
         | so much mindshare is that it can run on ordinary consumer
         | hardware. On that point, I would be excited about an open-
         | source RETRO (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.04426.pdf) model with
         | comparable performance to GPT-3 that could run on consumer
         | hardware with an NVMe SSD.
        
           | lagrange77 wrote:
           | GPT-J-6B is said to be also of comparable performance in
           | certain areas to GPT-3 and can be run (inference) on a
           | RTX3090.
           | 
           | https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B
        
           | rafaelero wrote:
           | They aren't as good as davinci-003, though. There is no open
           | source model competitive with GPT-3.5 yet.
        
         | adamsmith143 wrote:
         | It all ends up on HuggingFace anyway so that's where the smart
         | money is heading.
        
         | mouse_ wrote:
         | My theory is that OpenAI is preying on venture capital, and
         | they don't care who wins long term. As long as they're first to
         | get the freshest ideas on the biggest computers, they can
         | secure a large sum of money.
        
           | eddsh1994 wrote:
           | And do what with it?
        
           | speed_spread wrote:
           | Sounds like SNL's "First Change Bank" skit:
           | 
           | - You give us a dollar, we'll give you four quarters!
           | 
           | - People ask us how we make money. The answer is simple:
           | _volume_.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-10 23:00 UTC)