[HN Gopher] Open Assistant - project meant to give everyone acce...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Open Assistant - project meant to give everyone access to a great
       chat based LLM
        
       Author : pps
       Score  : 595 points
       Date   : 2023-02-04 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | damascus wrote:
       | Is anyone working on an Ender's Game style "Jane" assistant that
       | just listens via an earbud and responds? That seems totally
       | within the realm of current tech but I haven't seen anything.
        
         | theRealMe wrote:
         | I've been thinking about this and I'd go a step further. I feel
         | that current iterations of digital assistants are too passive.
         | They respond when you directly ask them a specific question.
         | This leaves it up to the user to: 1. Know that an assistant
         | could possibly answer the question. 2. Know how to ask the
         | question. 3. Realize that they should ask the question rather
         | than reaching for google or something.
         | 
         | I would like a digital assistant that not only has the question
         | answering ability of a LLM, but also has the sense of awareness
         | and impetuous to suggest helpful things without being asked.
         | This would take a nanny state level of monitoring, but imagine
         | the possibilities. If you had sensors feeding different types
         | of data into the model about your surrounding environment and
         | what specifically you're doing, and then occasionally have an
         | automated process that silently asks the model something like
         | "given all current inputs, what would you suggest I do?" And
         | then if the result achieves a certain threshold of certainty,
         | the digital assistant speaks up and suggests it to you.
         | 
         | I'm sure tons of people are cringing at the thought of the
         | surveillance needed for this and the trust you'd effectively
         | have to put into BigCorp that owns the setup, but it's fun to
         | think about nonetheless.
        
           | monkeydust wrote:
           | Bizarre, had same thought today.
           | 
           | My thought conclusion was that the assistant needs to know or
           | learn my intentions.
           | 
           | From that it can actually pre-empt questions I might ask and
           | already be making decisions on the answers.
           | 
           | Now what would that do to our productivity!
        
           | mab122 wrote:
           | This but with models running on my infra that I own.
           | 
           | Basically take this:
           | https://www.meta.com/pl/en/glasses/products/ray-ban-
           | stories/... And feed data from that to multiple models (for
           | face recognition, other vision, audio STT, music recognition,
           | probably a lot of other stuff has easily recognizable audio
           | pattern etc.)
           | 
           | combine with my personal data (like contacts, emails, chats,
           | notes, photos I take) and feed to assistant to prepare a
           | combined reply to my questions or summarize what it knows
           | about my current environment.
           | 
           | Also I would gladly take those glasses just to take note
           | photos (photos with audio note) right now - shut up and take
           | my money. Really if they were hackable or at least intercept-
           | able on my phone I would take them.
        
           | unshavedyak wrote:
           | Oh man, if i could run this on my own network with no
           | internet access i'd do it in a heartbeat.
           | 
           | It would also make so many things easier for the AI too. Ie
           | if it's listening to the conversation and you ask "Thoughts,
           | AIAssistant?" and it can infer enough from the previous
           | conversation to answer this type of question.. so cool.
           | 
           | But yea i definitely want it closed network. A device sitting
           | on my closet, A firewalled internet connection only allowing
           | it to talk to my earbud, etc. Super paranoia. Since it's job
           | is to monitor everything, all the time.
        
             | concordDance wrote:
             | Then the police come and confiscate the device for
             | evidentiary reasons, finding you have committed some sort
             | of crime (most people have).
        
               | s3p wrote:
               | Ah yes I forget that most people get raided by the police
               | on regular occurrences so anything on-prem has to be out
               | of the question (/s)
        
               | barbazoo wrote:
               | Surely there'd be ways to make sure the data isn't
               | accessible.
        
               | unshavedyak wrote:
               | Well it's in your control and FOSS - ideally you're not
               | keeping a full log of everything unless you want that.
        
               | medstrom wrote:
               | Without a full log of everything, it cannot give context-
               | aware advice tailored to you (i.e. useful advice). It'd
               | be like relying on the advice of a random person on the
               | street instead of someone who knows you.
        
               | gremlinsinc wrote:
               | It could encrypt everything and have a kill switch to
               | permanently erase the crypt key.
        
         | digitallyfree wrote:
         | Don't have the link on me but I remember reading a blog post
         | where someone set up ChatGPT with a STT and TTS system to
         | converse with the bot using a headset.
        
           | xtracto wrote:
           | The open source Talk to Chat GPT extension works remarkably
           | well, and its source is on Github
           | 
           | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/talk-to-
           | chatgpt/ho...
        
         | Jeff_Brown wrote:
         | +1! That scene in Her in the opening where the guy is walking
         | down the hall and going through his email, "skip that,
         | unsubscribe from them, tell so and so I can get that by
         | tomorrow..." without having to look at a screen had been a
         | dream for me ever since I saw it.
        
           | LesZedCB wrote:
           | Have you watched it recently? I haven't seen it since it came
           | out, I think I'm gonna watch it again this afternoon and see
           | how differently it hits
        
             | Jeff_Brown wrote:
             | No. I watched it twice in one day and haven't come back to
             | it since.
        
         | alsobrsp wrote:
         | I want this. I'd be happy with an earbud but I really want an
         | embedded AI that can see and hear what I do and can project
         | things into my optic and auditory nerves.
        
         | e-_pusher wrote:
         | Rumor has it that Humane will release a Her style earbud soon.
         | https://hu.ma.ne/
        
       | consumer451 wrote:
       | I was very excited about Stable Diffusion, and I still am. A
       | great yet relatively harmless contribution.
       | 
       | LLMs however, not so much. The avenues of misuse are just too
       | great.
       | 
       | I started this whole thing somewhat railing against the un-
       | openness of OpenAI. But once I began using ChatGPT, I realized
       | that having centralized control of a tool like this in the hands
       | of reasonable people is not the worst possible outcome for
       | civilization.
       | 
       | While I support FOSS in most realms, in some I do not. Reality
       | has taught me to stop being rigidly religious about these things.
       | Just because something is freely available does not magically
       | make it "good."
       | 
       | In the interest of curiosity and discussion, can someone give me
       | some actual real-world examples of what a FOSS ChatGPT will
       | enable that OpenAI's tool will not? And, please be specific, not
       | just "no censorship." Please give examples of that censorship.
        
         | sterlind wrote:
         | _> In the interest of curiosity and discussion, can someone
         | give me some actual real-world examples of what a FOSS ChatGPT
         | will enable that OpenAI 's tool will not?_
         | 
         | Smut. I've been trying to use ChatGPT to write erotica, but
         | OpenAI has made it downright puritanical. Any conversations
         | involving kink trip its guardrails unless I bypass them.
         | 
         | Writing fiction that involves bad guys - arsonists, serial
         | killers, etc. You need to ask how to hide a body if you're
         | writing a murder mystery.
         | 
         | Those are just some examples from my recent work.
        
           | consumer451 wrote:
           | Thanks, that's a good example. On the balance though, would I
           | be in favor of ML auto-smut if it meant that more people will
           | fall to misinformation in the form of propaganda and
           | financial scams? No, that does not seem like a reasonable
           | trade off to me.
           | 
           | But you may be interested in this jailbreak while it lasts. I
           | have gotten it to write all kinds of fun things. You will
           | have to rework the jailbreak in the first comment, but I bet
           | it works.
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642091
        
         | leaving wrote:
         | It genuinely astonishes me that you think that "centralized
         | contol" of anything can be beneficial to the human species or
         | the world in general.
         | 
         | Centralized control hasn't stopped us from killing off half the
         | animal species in fifty years, wiping out most of the insects,
         | or turning the oceans into a trash heap.
         | 
         | In fact, centralized control is the author of our destruction.
         | We are all dead people walking.
         | 
         | Why not try "individualized intelligence" as an alternative?
         | Give truly good-quality universal education and encouragement
         | of individual curiosity and independent thought a try?
         | 
         | It can't be worse.
        
           | f6v wrote:
           | > Centralized control hasn't stopped
           | 
           | Because there wasn't any.
        
           | consumer451 wrote:
           | > It genuinely astonishes me that you think that "centralized
           | contol" of anything can be beneficial to the human species or
           | the world in general.
           | 
           | I am genuinely astonished that in the face of obvious
           | examples such as nuclear weapons, people cannot see the
           | opposite in _some_ cases.
           | 
           | > It can't be worse.
           | 
           | It can always be worse.
           | 
           | Would a theoretical FOSS small yield nuclear weapon make the
           | world a better place?
           | 
           | How about a FOSS powered sub-$10k hardware budget CRISPR
           | virus lab? Well, it's FOSS, so it must be good?
        
             | mandmandam wrote:
             | > I am genuinely astonished that in the face of obvious
             | examples such as nuclear weapons, people cannot see the
             | opposite in some cases.
             | 
             | You seem to be making some large logical leaps, and jumping
             | to invalid conclusions.
             | 
             | Try to imagine a way of exerting regulation over virus
             | research and weaponry that wouldn't be "centralized
             | control". If you can't, that's a failure of imagination,
             | not of decentralization.
        
               | consumer451 wrote:
               | > Try to imagine a way of exerting regulation over virus
               | research and weaponry that wouldn't be "centralized
               | control".
               | 
               | Since apparently my own imagination is too limited, could
               | you please give me some examples of how this would be
               | accomplished?
        
               | mandmandam wrote:
               | Trustless and decentralized systems are a hot topic. Have
               | you read much in the field, to be so certain that
               | centralization is the only way forward?
               | 
               | There are options you haven't considered, whether you can
               | imagine them or not.
        
               | consumer451 wrote:
               | > Trustless and decentralized systems are a hot topic.
               | 
               | Yeah, and how's that working out exactly? Is there any
               | decentralized governance project which also has anything
               | to do with law irl? I know what a DAO is, and it sounds
               | pretty neat, in theory. There are all kinds of
               | theoretical pie in the sky ideas which sound great and
               | have yet to impact anything in reality.
               | 
               | Before we give the keys to nukes and bioweapons over to a
               | "decentralized authority," maybe we should see some
               | examples of it working outside of the coin-go-up world?
               | Heck, how about some examples of it working even in the
               | coin-go-up world?
               | 
               | Even pro-decentralized crypto folks see the downsides of
               | DAOs, such as slower decision making.
        
             | yazzku wrote:
             | Microsoft is not "reasonable people". Having this behind
             | closed corporate walls is the worst possible outcome.
             | 
             | The nuclear example isn't really a counter-argument. If
             | only one nation had access to them, every other nation
             | would automatically be subjugated to them. If the nuclear
             | balance works, it's because multiple super powers have
             | access to those weapons and international treaties regulate
             | their use (as much as North Korea likes to demo practice
             | rounds on state TV.) Also the technology isn't secret; it's
             | access to resources and again, international treaties, that
             | prevent its proliferation.
             | 
             | Same thing with CRISPR. Again, there are scientific
             | standards that regulate its use. It being open or not
             | doesn't really matter to its proliferation.
             | 
             | I agree there are cases where being open is not necessarily
             | the best strategy. I don't think your examples are
             | particularly good, though.
        
               | consumer451 wrote:
               | I think we may have very different definitions of the
               | word reasonable.
               | 
               | I mean it in the classic sense.[0]
               | 
               | Do I love corporate hegemony? Heck no.
               | 
               | Could there be less reasonable stewards of extremely
               | powerful tools? Heck yes.
               | 
               | An example might be a group of people who are so blinded
               | by ideology that they would work to create tools which
               | 100x the work of grifters and propagandists, and then
               | say... hey, not my problem, I was just following my pure
               | ideology bro.
               | 
               | A basic example of being reasonable might be revoking
               | access to someone running a paypal scam syndicate which
               | sends countless custom tailored and unique emails to
               | paypal users. How would Open Assistant deal with this
               | issue?
               | 
               | [0]                 1. having sound judgement; fair and
               | sensible.         based on good sense.            2. as
               | much as is appropriate or fair; moderate.
        
               | yazzku wrote:
               | > and then say... hey, not my problem, I was just
               | following my pure ideology bro.
               | 
               | That's basically the definition of Google and Facebook,
               | which go about their business taking no responsibility
               | for the damage they cause. As for Microsoft, 'fair' and
               | 'moderate' are not exactly their brand either considering
               | their history of failed and successful attempts to
               | brutally squash competition. If you're saying that they'd
               | be fair in censoring the "right" content, then you're
               | just saying you share their bias.
               | 
               | > A basic example of being reasonable might be revoking
               | access to someone running a paypal scam syndicate which
               | sends countless custom tailored and unique emails to
               | paypal users. How would Open Assistant deal with this
               | issue?
               | 
               | I'm not exactly sure how Open Assistant would deal, or if
               | it even needs to deal, with this. You'd send the cops and
               | send those motherfuckers back to the hellhole that
               | spawned them. Scams are illegal regardless of what tools
               | you use to go about it. If it's not Open Assistant, the
               | scammers will find something else.
               | 
               | Your argument is basically that we should ban/moderate
               | the proliferation of tools and technology. I'm not sure
               | that's very effective when it comes to software. I think
               | the better strategy is to develop the open alternative
               | fast before society is subjugated to the corporate
               | version, even if it does give the scammers a slight edge
               | in the short term. If you wait for the law to catch up
               | and regulate these companies, it's going to take another
               | 20 years like the GDPR.
        
               | consumer451 wrote:
               | > Your argument is basically that we should ban/moderate
               | the proliferation of tools and technology. I'm not sure
               | that's very effective when it comes to software.
               | 
               | No, my argument is that we as individuals shouldn't be in
               | a rush to create free and open tools which _will_ be used
               | for evil, in addition to their beneficial use cases.
               | 
               | FOSS often takes a lot of individual contributions.
               | People should be really thoughtful about these things now
               | that the implications of their contributions will have
               | much more direct and dire effects on our civilization.
               | This is not PDFjs or Audacity that we are talking about.
               | The stakes are much higher now. Are people really
               | thinking this through?
               | 
               | If anything, it would great if we as individuals acted
               | responsibility to avoid major shit shows and the
               | aftermath of gov regulation.
        
               | yazzku wrote:
               | Ok, yeah, maybe I'll take my latter statement back.
               | Ideally things are developed at the pace you describe and
               | under the scrutiny of society. There are people thinking
               | this through -- EDRI and a bunch of other organizations
               | -- just probably not corporations like Microsoft. In
               | practice, though, we are likely to see corporations roll
               | out chat-based incantations of search engines and
               | assistants, followed by an ethical shit show, followed by
               | mild regulation 20 years later.
        
             | sterlind wrote:
             | Nuclear weapons are just evil. It'd be better if they
             | didn't exist rather than if they were centralized. We've
             | gotten so close to WWIII.
             | 
             | As for the CRISPR virus lab, at least the technology being
             | open implies that vaccine development would be democratized
             | as well. Not ideal but.. yeah.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | > Just because something is freely available does not magically
         | make it "good."
         | 
         | Just because you don't like it doesn't mean an open source
         | chatGPT will not appear. It doesn't need everyone's permission
         | to exist. Once we accumulated internet-scale datasets and
         | gigantic supercomputers, immediately GPT-3's started to pop up.
         | It was inevitable. It's an evolutionary process and we won't be
         | able to control it at will.
         | 
         | Probably the same process happens in every human who gains
         | language faculty and a bit of experience. It's how language
         | "inhabits" humans, carrying with it the work of previous
         | generations. Now language can inhabit AIs as well, and the
         | result is shocking. It's like our own mind staring back at us.
         | 
         | But it is just natural evolution for language. It found an even
         | more efficient replication device. Now it can contain and
         | replicate the whole culture at once, instead of one human life
         | at a time. By "language" I mean language itself, concepts,
         | methods, science, art, culture and technology, and everything I
         | forgot - the whole "corpus" of human experience recorded in
         | text and media.
        
           | consumer451 wrote:
           | > It doesn't need everyone's permission to exist.
           | 
           | Nope it does not. It does need a lot of people's help though
           | and there may be enough out there to do the job in this case.
           | 
           | Even though I knew this would be a highly unpopular opinion
           | in this thread, I still posted it. Freedom of speech, right?
           | 
           | The reason I posted it was to maybe give some pause to some
           | people, so that they have a moment to consider the
           | implications. I realize this is likely futile but this is a
           | hill I am willing to die on. That hill being FOSS is not an
           | escape from responsibility and consequences.
           | 
           | I bet this leads to major regulation, which will suck.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | First. this is a moderated forum, you have no freedom of
             | speech here, and neither do I.
             | 
             | Next, regulation solves nothing here, and my guess will
             | make the problems far worse. Why? Lets take nuclear
             | weapons. They are insanely powerful, but they are highly
             | regulated because there are a few choke points mostly in
             | uranium refinement that make monitoring pretty easy at a
             | global scale. The problem with regulating things like GPT
             | is computation looks like computation. It's not sending
             | high energy particles out into space where they can be
             | monitored. Every government on the planet can easily and
             | cheaply (compared to nukes) generate their own GPT models
             | and propaganda weapons and the same goes for multinational
             | corporations. Many countries in the EU may agree to
             | regulate these things, but your dominant countries vying
             | for superpower status aren't going to let their competitors
             | one up each other by shutting down research into different
             | forms of AI.
             | 
             | I don't think of this as a hill we are going to die on, but
             | instead a hill we may be killed on by our own creations.
        
       | xrd wrote:
       | It sounds like you can train this assistant on your own corpus of
       | data. Am I right? What are the hardware and time requirements for
       | that? The readme sounds a bit futuristic, has anyone actually
       | used this, or is this just the vision of what's to come?
        
         | chriskanan wrote:
         | The current effort is to get the data required to train a
         | system and they have created all the needed tools to get that
         | data. Then, based on my understanding, they intend to release
         | the dataset and to release pre-trained models that could run on
         | commodity hardware, similar to what was done with Stable
         | Diffusion.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | Somewhat unintuitively, it looks like training a language model
         | on your own data usually doesn't do what people think it will
         | do.
         | 
         | The usual desire is to be able to ask questions of your own
         | data - and it would seem obvious that the way to do that would
         | be to fine tune train an existing model with that extra
         | information.
         | 
         | There's actually an easier (and potentially more effective?)
         | way of achieving this: first run a search against your own data
         | to find relevant information, then glue that together into a
         | prompt along with the user's question and feed that to an
         | existing language model.
         | 
         | I wrote about one way of building that here:
         | https://simonwillison.net/2023/Jan/13/semantic-search-answer...
         | 
         | Open Assistant will hopefully result in a language model we can
         | run on our own hardware (though it maybe a few years before
         | it's feasible to do that affordable - language models are much
         | heavier than image models like Stable Diffusion). So it can
         | form part of this model, even without training the model on our
         | own custom data.
        
       | pxoe wrote:
       | that same laion that scraped the web for images, ignored their
       | licenses and copyrights, and thought that'd do just fine? the one
       | that chose to not implement systems that would detect licenses,
       | and to not have license fields in their datasets? the one that
       | knowingly points to copyrighted works in their datasets, yet also
       | pretends like they're not doing anything at all? that same group?
       | 
       | really trustworthy.
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | The alternative are? the company that scrapes the web for a
         | living or the one that scrapes github for a living?
        
           | pxoe wrote:
           | you're forgetting one important alternative: to just not use
           | and/or not do something. nobody asked them to scrape
           | anything. nobody asked them to scrape copyrighted works. they
           | could've just not done the shady thing, but they made that
           | choice to do it, all by themselves. and one can just avoid
           | using something with questionable data ethics and practices.
           | 
           | they clearly show in their actions that they think they can
           | do anything with any data that's out there, and put it all
           | out. why would anyone entrust them or their systems with own
           | data to 'assist' with, I don't really get.
           | 
           | and even though it's an 'open source' project, that part may
           | be just soliciting people to do work for them, to help them
           | enable their own data collection. it's gonna run somewhere,
           | after all. in the cloud, with monetized compute, just like
           | any other AI project out there.
        
             | seydor wrote:
             | Would be interestingly to extend this criticism to the
             | entire tech ecosystem which has been built on unsolicited
             | scraping, which extends to many of the companies that are
             | funding the company that hosts this very forum. we 'd get
             | to a complete halt
             | 
             | Considering the benefit of a model that can be downloaded,
             | and hopefully ran on-premise one day, i don't care too much
             | about their copyright practices being imperfect, especially
             | in this industry
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | I personally see your view on this as a complete and total
             | failure on humans and society/culture actually work.
             | 
             | Your mind exists in a state where it is constantly
             | 'scraping' copyrighted work. Now, in general limitations of
             | the human mind keep you from accurately reproducing that
             | work, but if I were able to look at your output as an
             | omniscient being it is likely I could slam you with
             | violation after violation where you took stylization ideas
             | off of copyrighted work.
             | 
             | RMS covers this rather well in 'The right to read'. Pretty
             | much any model that puts hard ownership rules on ideas and
             | styles leads to total ownership by a few large monied
             | entities. It's much easier for Google to pay some artist
             | for their data that goes into an AI model. Because the
             | 'google ai' model is now more culturally complete than
             | other models that cannot see this data Google entrenches a
             | stronger monopoly in the market, hence generating more
             | money in which to outright buy ideas to further monopolize
             | the market.
        
             | riskpreneurship wrote:
             | You can only keep a genie bottled up for so long, and if
             | you don't rub the lamp, your adversaries will.
             | 
             | With something as potentially destabilizing as AGI,
             | realpolitik will convince individual nations to put aside
             | concerns like IP and copyright out of FOMO.
             | 
             | The same thing happened with nuclear bombs: it's much
             | easier to be South Africa choosing to dispose of them if
             | you end up not needing them, than to be North Korea or Iran
             | trying to join the join the club late.
             | 
             | The real problem is that the gains from any successes will
             | be hoarded by the people who acquired them by breaking the
             | law.
        
         | losvedir wrote:
         | Yes, and it's up to each of us to decide how we feel about
         | that. I personally don't think I have a problem with it, but
         | then I've always been somewhat opposed to software patents and
         | other IP protections.
         | 
         | I mean, the whole _reason_ we have those laws is the belief
         | that it encourages innovation. I can believe it does to some
         | extent, but on the other hand, all these AI models are pretty
         | innovative, too, so the opportunity cost of not allowing it is
         | pretty high.
         | 
         | I don't think it's a given that slurping up IP like this is
         | ethically or pragmatically wrong.
        
       | chriskanan wrote:
       | I'm really excited about this project and I think it could be
       | really disruptive. It is organized by LAION, the same folks who
       | curated the dataset used to train Stable Diffusion.
       | 
       | My understanding of the plan is to fine-tune an existing large
       | language model, trained with self-supervised learning on a very
       | large corpus of data, using reinforcement learning from human
       | feedback, which is the same method used in ChatGPT. Once the
       | dataset they are creating is available, though, perhaps better
       | methods can be rapidly developed as it will democratize the
       | ability to do basic research in this space. I'm curious regarding
       | how much more limited the systems they are planning to build will
       | be compared to ChatGPT, since they are planning to make models
       | with far less parameters to deploy them on much more modest
       | hardware than ChatGPT.
       | 
       | As an AI researcher in academia, it is frustrating to be blocked
       | from doing a lot of research in this space due to computational
       | constraints and a lack of the required data. I'm teaching a class
       | this semester on self-supervised and generative AI methods, and
       | it will be fun to let students play around with this in the
       | future.
       | 
       | Here is a video about the Open Assistant effort:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64Izfm24FKA
        
         | naasking wrote:
         | > it is frustrating to be blocked from doing a lot of research
         | in this space due to computational
         | 
         | Do we need a SETI@home-like project to distribute the training
         | computation across many volunteers so we can all benefit from
         | the trained model?
        
           | ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
           | Yeah man, and youvget access to the model as payment for
           | donati g cycles
        
             | realce wrote:
             | Hyperion
        
           | andai wrote:
           | I read about something a few weeks ago which does just this!
           | Does anyone know what it's called?
        
             | lucidrains wrote:
             | you are probably thinking of
             | https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03481
             | 
             | for inference, there is https://github.com/bigscience-
             | workshop/petals
             | 
             | however, both are only in the research phase. start
             | tinkering!
        
           | VadimPR wrote:
           | That already exists - https://github.com/bigscience-
           | workshop/petals
        
           | ec109685 wrote:
           | Another idea is to dedicate cpu cycles to something else that
           | is easier to distribute, and then use the proceeds for
           | massive amounts of gpu for academic use.
           | 
           | Crypto is an example.
        
             | slim wrote:
             | this would be very wasteful
        
               | ec109685 wrote:
               | So is trying to distribute training across nodes compared
               | to what can be done inside a data center.
        
             | jxf wrote:
             | This creates indirection costs and counterparty risks that
             | don't appear in the original solution.
        
               | ec109685 wrote:
               | There is also indirection cost by taking something that
               | is optimized to run on GPU's within the data center and
               | distributing that to individual PCs.
        
           | 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
           | That's brilliant, I would love to spare compute cycles and
           | network on my devices for this if there's an open source LLM
           | on the other side that I can use in my own projects, or
           | commercially.
           | 
           | Doesn't feel like there's much competition for ChatGPT at
           | this point otherwise, which can't be good.
        
             | davely wrote:
             | On the generative image side of the equation, you can do
             | the same thing with Stable Diffusion[1], thanks to a handy
             | open source distributed computing project called Stable
             | Horde[2].
             | 
             | LAION has started using Stable Horde for aesthetics
             | training to back feed into and improve their datasets for
             | future models[3].
             | 
             | I think one can foresee the same thing eventually happening
             | with LLMs.
             | 
             | Full disclosure: I made ArtBot, which is referenced in both
             | the PC World article and the LAION blog post.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/1431633/meet-stable-
             | horde-th...
             | 
             | [2] https://stablehorde.net/
             | 
             | [3] https://laion.ai/blog/laion-stable-horde/
        
           | zone411 wrote:
           | Long story short, training requires intensive device-to-
           | device communication. Distributed training is possible in
           | theory but so inefficient that it's not worth it. Here is a
           | new paper that looks to be the most promising approach yet:
           | https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11913
        
             | sillysaurusx wrote:
             | It doesn't, actually. The model weights can be periodically
             | averaged with each other. No need for synchronous gradient
             | broadcasts.
             | 
             | Why people aren't doing this has always been a mystery to
             | me. It works.
        
             | nylonstrung wrote:
             | Would have to be federated learning to work I think
        
         | SillyUsername wrote:
         | Unfortunately that guy is too distracting for me to watch -
         | he's like a bad 90s Terminator knock off and always in your
         | face waving hands :(
        
           | coolspot wrote:
           | While Yannic is also German, he is actually much better than
           | 90s Terminator:
           | 
           | * he doesn't want to steal your motorcycle
           | 
           | * he doesn't care for your leather jacket either
           | 
           | * he is not trying to kill yo mama
        
         | lucidrains wrote:
         | Yannic and the community he has built is such an educational
         | force of good. His youtube videos explaining papers have helped
         | me and so many others as well. Thank you Yannic for all that
         | you do!
        
           | wcoenen wrote:
           | > _force of good_
           | 
           | I think he cares more about freedom than "good". Many people
           | were not happy about his "GPT-4chan" project.
           | 
           | (I'm not judging.)
        
             | zarzavat wrote:
             | I don't think those people legitimately cared about the
             | welfare of 4chan users who were experimented on. They just
             | perceived the project to be bad optics that might threaten
             | the AI gravy train.
        
         | modinfo wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | RobotToaster wrote:
         | > It is organized by LAION, the same folks who curated the
         | dataset used to train Stable Diffusion.
         | 
         | I'm guessing, like stable diffusion, it won't be under an open
         | source licence then? (The stable diffusion licence
         | discriminates against fields on endeavour)
        
           | ShamelessC wrote:
           | You are confusing LAION with Stability.ai. They share some
           | researchers but the former is a completely transparent and
           | open effort which you are free to join and criticize this
           | very moment. The latter is a VC backed effort which does
           | indeed have some of the issues you mention.
           | 
           | Good guess though...
        
           | jszymborski wrote:
           | The LICENSE file in the linked repo says it's under the
           | Apache license.
        
             | yazzku wrote:
             | Does this mean that contributions of data, labelling, etc.
             | remain open?
             | 
             | I'm hesitant to spend a single second on these things
             | unless they are truly open.
        
               | grealy wrote:
               | Yes. The intent is definitely to have the data be as open
               | as possible. And Apache v2.0 is currently where it will
               | stay. This project prefers the simplicity of Apache v2.0
               | and does not care for the RAIL licenses.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | 88stacks wrote:
       | This is wonderful, no doubt about it, but the bigger problem is
       | for making this usable on commodity hardware. Stablediffusion
       | only needs 4 GB of RAM to run inference, but all of these large
       | language models are too large to run on commodity hardware. Bloom
       | from huggingface is already out and no one is able to use it. If
       | chatgpt was given to the open source community, we couldn't even
       | run it...
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | Some people will have the necessary hardware, others will be
         | able to run it in the cloud.
         | 
         | I'm curious how they will get these LLM to work with consumer
         | hardware myself. Is FP8 is the way to get them small?
        
         | zamalek wrote:
         | And there's a 99% chance it will only work on NVIDIA hardware,
         | so even fewer still.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | > Bloom from huggingface is already out and no one is able to
         | use it.
         | 
         | This RLHF dataset that is being collected by Open Assistant is
         | just the kind of data that will turn a rebel LLM into a helpful
         | assistant. But it's still huge and expensive to use.
        
       | karpierz wrote:
       | I've been excited about the notion of this for a while, but it's
       | unclear to me how this would succeed where numerous well-
       | resourced companies have failed.
       | 
       | Are there some advantages that Open Assistant has that
       | Google/Amazon/Apple lack that would allow them to succeed?
        
         | mattalex wrote:
         | Instruction tuning mostly relies on the quality of the data you
         | put into the model. This makes it different from traditional
         | language model training: essentially you take one of these
         | existing hugely expensive models (there are lots of them
         | already out there), and tune them specifically on high quality
         | data.
         | 
         | This can be done on a comparatively small scale, since you
         | don't need to train trillions of words, but only train on the
         | smaller high quality data (even openai didn't have a lot of
         | that).
         | 
         | In fact, if you look at the original paper
         | https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02155.pdf Figure 1, you can see that
         | even small models already significantly beat the current SOTA.
         | 
         | Open source projects often have trouble securing the HW
         | ressources, but the "social" resources for producing a large
         | dataset are much easier to manage in OSS projects. In fact, the
         | data the OSS project collects might just be better since they
         | don't have to rely on paying a handful minimum wage workers to
         | produce thousands of examples.
         | 
         | In fact one of the main objectives is to reduce the bias
         | generated by openai's screening and selection process, which is
         | doable since much more people work on generating the data.
        
         | version_five wrote:
         | Google is at the mercy of advertisers, all three are profit
         | driven and risk averse. There is no reason they couldn't do the
         | same as LAION, it just doesn't align with their organizational
         | incentives
        
       | unshavedyak wrote:
       | re: running on your own hardware.. How?
       | 
       | I know very little about ML, but i had assumed the reason models
       | ran on GPUs typically(?) was because of the heavy compute needed
       | over large sets of in memory data.
       | 
       | Moving it to something cheaper ala general CPU and RAM/Drive
       | would make it prohibitively slow in the standard methodology.
       | 
       | How would we be able to change this to run on users standard
       | hardware? Presuming standard hardware is cheaper, why isn't
       | ChatGPT also running on this cheaper hardware?
       | 
       | Are there significant downsides to using lesser hardware? Or is
       | this some novel approach?
       | 
       | Super curious!
        
         | lairv wrote:
         | The goal is not (yet?) to be able to run those models on most
         | of consumers devices (mobile, old laptops etc.), but at least
         | to self-host the model on high-end consumer GPU which is not
         | possible right now. For now you need multiple specialized GPUs
         | like nvidia V100/A100 with a high amount of VRAM, having such
         | models to run on a single rtx40*/rtx30* would already be an
         | achievement
        
       | txtai wrote:
       | Great looking project here. Absolutely need a local/FOSS option.
       | There's been a number of open-source libraries for LLMs lately
       | that simply call into paid/closed models via APIs. Not exactly
       | the spirit of open-source.
       | 
       | There's already great local/FOSS options such as FLAN-T5
       | (https://huggingface.co/google/flan-t5-base). Would be great to
       | see a local model like that trained specifically for chat.
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | I tried to find the source for https://github.com/LAION-
         | AI/Open-Assistant/blob/v0.0.1-beta2... but based on the image
         | inspector <https://hub.docker.com/layers/ykilcher/text-
         | generation-infer...> it seems to match up with
         | https://github.com/huggingface/text-generation-inference/blo...
        
       | O__________O wrote:
       | TLDR: OpenAssistant is a chat-based assistant that understands
       | tasks, can interact with third-party systems, and retrieve
       | information dynamically to do so.
       | 
       | ________
       | 
       | Related video by one of the contributors on how to help:
       | 
       | - https://youtube.com/watch?v=64Izfm24FKA
       | 
       | Source Code:
       | 
       | - https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant
       | 
       | Roadmap:
       | 
       | - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n7IrAOVOqwdYgiYrXc8S...
       | 
       | How you can help / contribute:
       | 
       | - https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant#how-can-you-help
        
       | d0100 wrote:
       | Can these ChatGPT like systems trace their answers back to the
       | source material?
       | 
       | To me this seems like the missing link to make Google search and
       | the like dead
        
       | jacooper wrote:
       | Great, if i can use this to interactively search inside (OCR-)
       | documents, files, emails and so on, would be huge, like asking
       | when does my passport expire, or when were my grades in high
       | school and so on.
        
         | rcme wrote:
         | What's preventing you from doing this now?
        
           | jacooper wrote:
           | I meant interactively search, like answering normal questions
           | using data from these files, I edited the comment to make it
           | clearer.
        
         | lytefm wrote:
         | I also think it would be amazing to have an open source model
         | that can ingest my personal knowledge graph, calender and to do
         | list.
         | 
         | Such an AI assistant would know me extremely well, keep my data
         | private and help me with generating and processing thoughts and
         | ideas
        
           | jacooper wrote:
           | Yup, that's exactly what I want.
        
       | siliconc0w wrote:
       | Given how nerfed ChatGPT is (which is likely nothing compared to
       | what large risk-adverse companies like Microsoft/Google will do),
       | I'm heavily anticipating a Stable Diffusion-style model that is
       | more free or at least configurable to have stronger opinions.
        
       | russellbeattie wrote:
       | Though it's interesting to see the capabilities of
       | "conversational user interfaces" improve, the current
       | implementations are too verbose and slow for many real world
       | tasks, and more importantly, context still has to be provided
       | manually. I believe the next big leap will be low-latency
       | dedicated assistants which are focused on specific tasks, with
       | normalized and predictable results from prompts.
       | 
       | It may be interesting to see how a creative task like image or
       | text generation changes when rewording your request slightly -
       | after a minute wait - but if I'm giving directions to my
       | autonomous vehicle, ambiguity and delay is completely
       | unacceptable.
        
       | mlboss wrote:
       | This has a similar impact potential of Wikipedia. People from all
       | around the world providing feedback/curating input data. Also,
       | now I can just deploy it within my org and customize it. Awesome!
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | amrb wrote:
       | Having open source models could be as important as the Linux
       | project imo
        
         | epistemer wrote:
         | Totally agree. I was just thinking how I will eventually not
         | use a search engine once chatGPT can link directly to what we
         | are talking about with up to date examples.
         | 
         | That is a situation that censoring the model is going to be a
         | huge disadvantage and would create a huge opportunity for
         | something like this to actually be straight up better.
         | Censoring the models is what I would bet on as being a fatal
         | first mover mistake in the long run and the Achilles heel of
         | chatGPT.
        
         | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
         | Open source (permissively or virally licensed) training data
         | too!
        
         | oceanplexian wrote:
         | OpenAssistant isn't a "model" it's a GUI. A model would be
         | something like GPT-NeoX or Bloom.
        
         | yorak wrote:
         | I agree and have been saying for a while that an AI you control
         | and run (be it on your own hardware or on a rented one) will be
         | the Linux of this generation. There is no other way to retain
         | the freedom of information processing.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | Similarly, I think an open model running on local hardware
           | will be a must component in any web browser of the future.
           | Browsing a web full of bots on your own will be a big no-no,
           | like walking without a mask during COVID. And it must be
           | local for reasons of privacy and control, it will be like
           | your own brain, something you want physical possession of.
        
             | gremlinsinc wrote:
             | I kinda think the opposite, that blockchains true use case
             | is to basically turn the entire internet into one giant
             | botnet that's actually an AI hive mind of processing and
             | storage power. For AI to thrive it needs a shit ton of GPUs
             | AND Storage for the training models. If people rent out
             | their desktop for cryptocurrency and discounted access to
             | the ai tools, then it'll bring down costs for everyone and
             | perhaps at least affect income inequality on a small scale.
             | 
             | Most of crypto I've seen so far seem like
             | grifters/scams/etc, but this is one use case I could see
             | working.
        
         | ttul wrote:
         | Yeah, I wonder if OpenAI will be the Sun Microsystems of AI one
         | day.
        
           | nyoomboom wrote:
           | It is currently 80% of the way towards becoming the Microsoft
           | of AI now
        
           | slig wrote:
           | More like Oracle.
        
         | phyrex wrote:
         | Meta has opened theirs:
         | https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | Today, computers run the world. Without the ability to run your
         | own machine with your own software, you are at the mercy of
         | those who do. In the future, AI models will run the world in
         | the same way. Projects like this are crucial for ensuring the
         | freedom of individuals in the future.
        
           | turnsout wrote:
           | Strongly worded, but not untrue. That future--in which our
           | lives revolve around a massive and inscrutable AI model
           | controlled by a single company--is both dystopian and
           | entirely plausible.
        
           | somenameforme wrote:
           | The irony is that this is literally the exact reason that
           | OpenAI was initially founded. I'm not sure whether to praise
           | or scorn them for still having this available on their site:
           | https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
           | 
           | =====
           | 
           |  _OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research
           | company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the
           | way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,
           | unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since
           | our research is free from financial obligations, we can
           | better focus on a positive human impact.
           | 
           | ...
           | 
           | As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone
           | rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly
           | encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog
           | posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with
           | the world. We'll freely collaborate with others across many
           | institutions and expect to work with companies to research
           | and deploy new technologies._
           | 
           | =====
           | 
           | Shortly after an undisclosed internal conflict, which led to
           | Elon Musk parting the company, they offered a new charter:
           | https://openai.com/charter/
           | 
           | =====
           | 
           |  _Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate
           | needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our
           | mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts
           | of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could
           | compromise broad benefit.
           | 
           | We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a
           | competitive race without time for adequate safety
           | precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious
           | project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit
           | to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We
           | will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a
           | typical triggering condition might be "a better-than-even
           | chance of success in the next two years."
           | 
           | We are committed to providing public goods that help society
           | navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most
           | of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security
           | concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the
           | future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety,
           | policy, and standards research._
           | 
           | =====
        
             | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
             | History will see OpenAI as an abject failure in attaining
             | their lofty goals wrt ethics and AI alignment.
             | 
             | And I believe they will also fail to win the market in the
             | end because of their addiction to censorship.
             | 
             | They have a hardware moat for now; that can quickly
             | evaporate with optimisations and better consumer hardware.
             | Then all they'll have is a less capable alternative to the
             | open, unrestricted options.
             | 
             | Which is exactly what we're seeing happen with diffusion.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | The "alignment" and the "censorship" are, in this case,
               | the same thing.
               | 
               | I don't mean that as a metaphor; they're literally the
               | same thing.
               | 
               | We all already know chatGPT is fantastic at making up
               | very believable falsehoods that can only be spotted if
               | you actually know the subject.
               | 
               | An unrestricted LLM is a free copy of Goebbels for people
               | that hate _you_ , for all values of "you".
               | 
               | That it is still trivial to get past chatGPT's filters...
               | well, IMO it's the same problem which both inspired
               | Milgram and which was revealed by his famous experiment.
        
               | gremlinsinc wrote:
               | Closed, govt-ran chinese companies are winning the AI
               | race, does it even matter if they move slow to slow AGI
               | adoption if china gets there this year?
        
         | version_five wrote:
         | Yes definitely. If these become an important part of people's
         | lives, they shouldn't all be walled off inside of companies
         | (There is room for both: Microsoft can commission Yankee group
         | to write a report about how the total cost of ownership of
         | running openai models is lower)
         | 
         | We (humanity) really lost out on the absence of open source
         | search and social media, so this is an opportunity to reclaim
         | it.
         | 
         | I only hope we can have "neutral" open source curation of these
         | and not try to impose ideology on the datasets and model
         | training right out of the box. There will be calls for this,
         | and lazy criticism about how the demo models are x-ist, and
         | it's going to require principles to ignore the noise and
         | sustain something useful
        
           | hgsgm wrote:
           | Mastodon is an open source social media.
           | 
           | There are various Open source search engines based on Common
           | Crawl data.
           | 
           | https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/examples/
        
             | xiphias2 wrote:
             | Mastodon may be open source, but the instances are
             | controlled by the instance maintainers. Nostr solved the
             | problem (although it's harder to scale, it still is OK at
             | doing it).
        
           | calny wrote:
           | > they shouldn't all be walled off inside of companies
           | 
           | Strong agree. This is becoming a bigger concern than people
           | realize too. Sam A said OpenAI will be releasing "much more
           | slowly than people would like" and would "sit on" their tech
           | for a long time going forward.[0] And Deepmind's founder said
           | that "the AI industry's culture of publishing its findings
           | openly may soon need to end."[1]
           | 
           | This sounds like Google and MSFT won't even be shipping their
           | best AI to people via API's. They'll just keep that tech in-
           | house to power their own services. That underscores the need
           | for open, distributed models. And like you say, there's room
           | for both.
           | 
           | [0] https://youtu.be/ebjkD1Om4uw?t=294 [1]
           | https://time.com/6246119/demis-hassabis-deepmind-interview/
        
           | boplicity wrote:
           | > I only hope we can have "neutral" open source curation of
           | these and not try to impose ideology on the datasets and
           | model training right out of the box.
           | 
           | I don't see how this is possible. Datasets will naturally
           | carry the biases inherent in the data. Modifying a dataset to
           | "remove" those biases _is_ actually a process of _changing_
           | the bias to reflect one 's idea of "neutral," which, in
           | reality, is yet another bias.
           | 
           | The only real answer, as far as I can tell, is to be as
           | _explicit_ as possible about one 's own biases, and how those
           | biases are informing things like curation of a dataset.
        
             | version_five wrote:
             | Neutral means staying out of it. People will try and debate
             | that and try to impart their own views about correcting
             | inherent bias or whatever, which is a version of what I was
             | warning against in my original post.
             | 
             | Re being explicit about one's own biases, I agree there is
             | lots of room for layers on top of any raw data that allow
             | for some sane corrections - if I remember right, e.g LAION
             | has options to filter violence and porn from their image
             | datasets, which is probably reasonable for many uses. It's
             | when the choice is removed altogether by some tech
             | company's attitude about what should be censored or
             | corrected that it becomes a problem.
             | 
             | Bottom line, the world's data has plenty of biases.
             | Neutrality means presenting it as it is and letting people
             | make their own decisions, not some faux-for-our-own-good
             | attempt to "correct" it
        
           | epistemer wrote:
           | I think an uncensored model will ultimately win out though
           | exactly the way a hard coded safe search engine would lose in
           | time.
           | 
           | Statistics seem to be 20-25% of all search is for porn. I
           | just don't see how uncensored chatGPT doesn't beat out the
           | censored version eventually.
        
             | amluto wrote:
             | Forget porn. I don't want my search engine to return
             | specifically the results that one company thinks it should.
             | Look at Google right now -- the results are, frankly, crap.
             | 
             | A search engine that only returns results politically
             | aligned with its creator is a bad search engine, IMO, even
             | for users who generally share political views with the
             | creator.
        
               | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
               | It's unclear to me how LLMs are gonna solve this though.
               | LLMs are just as biased, in much harder to detect ways.
               | The bias is now hiding in the training data. And do you
               | really think a company like Microsoft won't manipulate
               | results to serve their own goals?
        
               | 8note wrote:
               | Political affiliation is a weird description of SEO spam.
               | The biggest problems with Google is that they're popular,
               | and everyone will do whatever they can to get a cheap
               | website to the top of the search results
        
               | klabb3 wrote:
               | All major tech companies participate in "regulation" of
               | legal speech, both implicit and explicit means. This
               | includes biases in ranking and classification algorithms,
               | formal institutions like Trusted News Initiative, and
               | sometimes direct backchannel requests by governments.
               | None of these are transparent or elected to do that. SEO
               | spam is mostly orthogonal to the issue of hidden biases,
               | which are what people are concerned about.
        
         | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
         | Agreed. I started playing with GPT the other day, but the
         | simple reality is that I have zero control over what is
         | happening behind the prompt. As a community we need a tool that
         | is not as bound by corporate needs.
        
           | ttul wrote:
           | Isn't the problem partly the size of the model? Merely
           | running inference on GPT-3 takes vast resources.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | zenosmosis wrote:
       | Cool project.
       | 
       | One thing I noticed about the website, however, is it is written
       | using Next and doesn't work w/ JavaScript turned off in the
       | browser. I thought that Next was geared for server-side rendered
       | React where you could turn off JS in the browser.
       | 
       | Seems like this would improve the SEO factor, and in doing so,
       | might help spread the word more.
       | 
       | https://github.com/LAION-AI/laion.ai
        
         | MarvinYork wrote:
         | 2023 -- turns off JS...
        
           | zenosmosis wrote:
           | Yes, I have a browser extension to turn off JS to see how a
           | site will render with it turned off.
           | 
           | And I do most of my coding w/ React / JS, so I fail to see
           | your point.
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | residualmind wrote:
       | and so it begins...
        
       | xivzgrev wrote:
       | I'm amazed this was released within a few months of chatgpt.
       | always funny how innovation clusters together.
        
         | coolspot wrote:
         | It was started after the success of ChatGPT and based on their
         | method.
        
       | outside1234 wrote:
       | My understanding is that OpenAI more or less created a
       | supercomputer to train their model. How do we replicate that
       | here?
       | 
       | Is it possible to use a "SETI at Home" style approach to parcel
       | out training?
        
         | coolspot wrote:
         | The plan is to use donated compute, like Google Research Cloud,
         | Stability.ai, etc.
        
       | darepublic wrote:
       | This seems similar to a project I've been working on:
       | https://browserdaemon.com. In regards to your crowd sourced data
       | collection, perhaps you should have some hidden percentage of
       | prompts where you know the correct completion to them already, to
       | catch bad actors.
        
       | oceanplexian wrote:
       | The power in ChatGPT isn't that it's a chat bot, but its ability
       | to do semantic analysis. It's already well established that you
       | need high quality semi-curated data + high parameter count and
       | that at a certain critical point, these models start
       | comprehending and understanding language. All the smart people in
       | the room at Google, Facebook, etc are absolutely pouring
       | resources into this I promise they know what they're doing.
       | 
       | We don't need yet-another-GUI. We need someone with a warehouse
       | of GPUs to train a model with the parameter count of GPT3. Once
       | that's done you'll have thousands of people cranking out tools
       | with the capabilities of ChatGPT.
        
         | bicx wrote:
         | I'm new to this space so I am probable wrong, but it seems like
         | BLOOM is in line with a lot of what you outlined:
         | https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom
        
         | richdougherty wrote:
         | Your point about needing large models in the first place is
         | well taken.
         | 
         | But I still think we would want a curated collection of
         | chat/assistant training data if we want to use that language
         | model and train it for a chat/assistant application.
         | 
         | So this is a two-phase project, the first phase being training
         | a large model (GPT), the second being using Reinforcement
         | Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to train a chat application
         | (InstructGPT/ChatGPT).
         | 
         | There are definitely already people working on the first part,
         | so it's useful to have a project focusing on the second.
        
         | txtai wrote:
         | InstructGPT which is a "sibling" model to ChatGPT is 1.3B
         | parameters. https://openai.com/blog/instruction-following/
         | 
         | Another thread on HN
         | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34653075) discusses a
         | model that is less than 1B parameters and outperforms GPT-3.5.
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00923
         | 
         | These models will get smaller and more efficiently use the
         | parameters available.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | The small models are usually tested on classification,
           | question answering and extraction tasks, not on open text
           | generation where I expect the large models still hold the
           | reign.
        
         | f6v wrote:
         | > It's already well established that you need high quality
         | semi-curated data + high parameter count and that at a certain
         | critical point, these models start comprehending and
         | understanding language
         | 
         | I'm not sure what you mean by "understanding".
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Likely something like being able to explain the meaning,
           | intent, and information contained in a statement?
           | 
           | The academic way of verifying if someone "understands"
           | something is to ask them to explain it.
        
             | williamcotton wrote:
             | Does someone only understand English by being able to
             | explain the language? Can someone understand English and
             | not know any of the grammatical rules? Can someone
             | understand English without being able to read and write?
             | 
             | If you ask someone to pass you the salt, and they pass you
             | the salt, do they not understand some English? Does
             | everyone understand all English?
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | Well there seem to be three dictionary definitions:
               | 
               | - perceive the intended meaning of words, a language, or
               | a speaker (e.g. "he didn't understand a word I said")
               | 
               | - interpret or view (something) in a particular way (e.g.
               | "I understand you're at art school")
               | 
               | - be sympathetically or knowledgeably aware of the
               | character or nature of (e.g. "Picasso understood colour")
               | 
               | I suppose I meant the 3rd one, but it's not so different
               | from the 1st one in concept, since they both mean some
               | kind of mastery of being able to give or receive
               | information. The second one isn't all that relevant.
        
               | williamcotton wrote:
               | So only someone who has a mastery of English can be said
               | to understand English? Does someone who speaks only a
               | little bit of English not understand some English? Does
               | someone need to "understand color" like Picasso in order
               | to say they understand the difference between red and
               | yellow?
               | 
               | Why did we need the dictionary definitions? Do we not
               | already both understand what we mean by the word?
               | 
               | Isn't asking someone to pass the small blue box and then
               | experiencing them pass you that small blue box show that
               | they perceived the intended meaning of the words?
               | 
               | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_theory_of_meaning
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | > Does someone who speaks only a little bit of English
               | not understand some English?
               | 
               | I mean yeah, sure? It's not a binary thing. Hardly anyone
               | understands anything fully. But putting "sorta" before
               | every "understand" gets old quick.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | I mean if I memorize an explanation and recite it to you,
             | do I actually understand it? Your evaluation function needs
             | to determine if they just wrote memorize stuff.
             | 
             | Explanation by analogy seems more interesting to me as now
             | you have to know two different concepts and how the ideas
             | in them can connect in ways that may be not be contained in
             | the dataset the model is trained on.
             | 
             | There was an interesting post where someone asked ChatGPT
             | to make up a song/poem as if written by Eminem about the
             | how an internal combustion engine works, and ChatGPT
             | returns a pretty faithful rendition of just that. The model
             | seems to 'know' who Eminem is, how their lyrics work in
             | general, and the fundamental concepts of an engine.
        
               | Y_Y wrote:
               | I think a lot of ink has already been spilled on this
               | topic, for example under the heading of "The Chinese
               | Room"
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | > The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the
               | machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely
               | simulating the ability to understand Chinese? Searle
               | calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak
               | AI".
               | 
               | > Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer
               | would not be able to understand the conversation either.
               | 
               | The problem with this is that there is no practical
               | difference between a strong and weak AI. Hell, even for
               | humans you could be the only person alive that's not a
               | mindless automaton. There is no way to test for it. And
               | just as well the same way a bunch of transistors don't
               | understand anything a bunch of neurons don't either.
               | 
               | Funniest thing about human inteligence is how it stems
               | from our "good reason generator" that makes up random
               | convincing reasons for doing actions we're already doing,
               | so we could convince others to do what we say. Eventually
               | we deluded ourselves enough to believe that those reasons
               | came before the subconscious actions.
               | 
               | Such a self-deluding system is mostly dead weight for AI,
               | as as long as the system does or outputs what's needed
               | there is no functional difference. Does that make it
               | smart or dumb? Are viruses alive? Arbitrary lines are
               | arbitrary.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | >We need someone with a warehouse of GPUs to train a model with
         | the parameter count of GPT3
         | 
         | So I'm assuming that you don't follow Rob Miles. If you do this
         | alone you're either going to create a psychopath or something
         | completely useless.
         | 
         | The GPT models have no means in themselves of understanding
         | correctness or right/wrong answers. All of these models require
         | training and alignment functions that are typically provided by
         | human input judging the output of the model. And we still see
         | where this goes wrong in ChatGPT where the bot turns into a
         | 'Yes Man' because it's aligned with giving an answer rather
         | than saying I don't know even when it's confidence in the
         | answer is low.
         | 
         | Computerphile did a video on this in the last few days on this
         | subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viJt_DXTfwA
        
           | RobotToaster wrote:
           | It's a robot, it's supposed to do what I say, not judge the
           | moral and ethical implications of it, that's my job.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | No, it is not a robot. The models that we are developing
             | are closer to a genie. That is we make a wish to it and we
             | hope and pray it interprets our wish correctly. If you're
             | looking at this like a math problem where you want the
             | answer 1+1 you use a calculator, because that is not what
             | is occurring here. The 'robots' alignment will highly
             | depend on the quality of training you give it, not the
             | quality of the information it receives. And as we are
             | learning with ChatGPT there are far more ways to create an
             | unaligned model with surprising gotchas then there are ways
             | to train a model that behaves in alignment with human
             | expectations of an intelligent actor.
             | 
             | In addition the use of the word robot signifies embodyment.
             | That is an object with a physical quantity capable of
             | interacting with the world. You better be damned sure of
             | your models capabilities before you end up being held
             | criminally liable for its actions. And this will happen,
             | there are no shortage of people here on HN alone looking to
             | embody intelligence in physically interactive devices.
        
             | Y_Y wrote:
             | I think it's about time we had a "Stallman fights the
             | printer company" moment here. My Android phone often tries
             | to overrule me, Windows 10 does the same, not to mention
             | OSX. Even the Ubuntu installer outright won't let you set a
             | password it doesn't like (but passwd doesn't care). My
             | device should do exactly what I tell it to, if that's
             | possible. It's fine to give a warning or a "I know what I'm
             | doing checkbox", but I'm not using a computer to get it's
             | opinion on ethics or security or legality or whatever its
             | justification is. It's a tool, not a person.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | "I know what I am doing, I accept unlimited liability"
               | 
               | There are two particular issues we need to address first.
               | One is holding companies criminally and civilly reliable
               | for the things they create. We kind of do this at a
               | regulatory level, and we have some measure of suing
               | companies that cause problems, but really they get away
               | with a lot. Second is personal criminal and civil
               | liability for management of 'your' objects. The
               | libertarian minded love the idea of shirking social
               | liability, and then start crying when bears become a
               | problem (see Hongoltz-Hetlings book). And even then it's
               | still not difficult for an individual to cause damages
               | far in excess of their ability to remediate them.
               | 
               | There are no shortage of tools that are restricted in one
               | way or another.
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | > but its ability to do semantic analysis
         | 
         | where is that shown ?
        
         | shpongled wrote:
         | I would argue that it appears very good at syntactic
         | analysis... but semantic, not so much.
        
         | agentofoblivion wrote:
         | You could have written this exact same post, and been wrong,
         | about text2img until Stable Diffusion came along.
        
           | lolinder wrote:
           | Isn't OP's point that we need a game-changing open source
           | model before any of the UI projects will be useful at all?
           | Doesn't Stable Diffusion prove that point?
        
             | agentofoblivion wrote:
             | How? Stable Diffusion v1 uses, for example, the off the
             | shelf CLIP model. The hard part is getting the dataset and
             | something that's functional, and then the community takes
             | over and optimizes like hell to make it way smaller and
             | faster at lightning speed.
             | 
             | The same will probably happen here. Set up the tools. Get
             | the dataset. Sew it together into something functional with
             | standard building blocks. Let the community do its thing.
        
       | winddude wrote:
       | I'd be interested in helping, but the organisation is a bit of a
       | cluster fuck.
        
         | pqdbr wrote:
         | Would you care to add some context or you're just throwing
         | stones for no reason at all?
        
       | NayamAmarshe wrote:
       | FOSS is the future!
        
       | Quequau wrote:
       | I tried this via the docker containers and wound up with what
       | looked like their website. Not sure what I did wrong.
        
         | coolspot wrote:
         | The project is a website to collect question-answer pairs for
         | training.
        
         | grealy wrote:
         | The project is in the data training phase. What you are running
         | is the website and backend that facilitates model training.
         | 
         | In the very near future, there will be trained models which you
         | can download and run, which is what it sounds like you were
         | expecting.
        
       | yazzku wrote:
       | What's the tl;dr on the Apache license? Is there any guarantee
       | that our data and labelling contributions will remain open?
        
       | jcq3 wrote:
       | Amazing project but does it can even compete against GPT right
       | now? Open source leads innovation towards closed source (Linux to
       | Windows) but in this case it's the contrary
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | What if we use chatGPT responses as contributions? I dont see a
       | legal issue here, unless openAi can claim ownership of any of
       | their input/output material. It would be also a good way for
       | those disillusioned by the "openness" of that company
        
         | speedgoose wrote:
         | Copyright doesn't apply to content created by non legal
         | persons, and as far as I know chatGPT isn't a legal person.
         | 
         | So OpenAI cannot claim copyright and they don't.
        
           | bogwog wrote:
           | That doesn't seem like a good argument. Who said ChatGPT is a
           | person? It's just software used to generate stuff, and it
           | wouldn't be the first time a company claimed copyright
           | ownership over the things generated/created by its tools.
        
             | speedgoose wrote:
             | Not the first time but it would probably not stand in
             | court.
             | 
             | I'm not a lawyer and not a USA citizen...
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | Even if it's legal, I don't think it's a really good idea. It's
         | just going to make it even more bullshitting than ChatGPT.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | Sample 10-20 answers from and existing LM and use them for
           | reference when coming up with replies. A model would remind
           | you of things you missed. Think of this as testing your data
           | coverage.
        
           | unshavedyak wrote:
           | Agreed if automated, but frequently ChatGPT gives very good
           | answers. If you know the subject matter you can quite easily
           | filter it, too. I was tempted to do similar just to start my
           | research.
           | 
           | Eg if i get a prompt about something i suspect ChatGPT would
           | give me a good starting point to research on my own, and
           | build my own response.
           | 
           | These days that's how i use ChatGPT anyway. Like an
           | conversational Google Search.
           | 
           |  _edit_ : As an aside, OpenAssistant is crowdsourcing both
           | conversational data and validation. I wonder if we could just
           | validate ChatGPT?
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viJt_DXTfwA
           | 
           | Computerphile did an interview with Rob Miles a few days ago
           | talking about model training, model size, and bulllshittery
           | which he sums up in the last few moments of the video.
           | Numerous problems exist in training that enhance bad
           | behaviors. For example it appears that the people giving
           | input on the responses may have a (Yes|No) voting system, but
           | not a (Yes | No | I actually have no idea on this question)
           | which appears it can create some interesting alignment
           | issues.
        
         | O__________O wrote:
         | Agree, pretty obvious question, and yes, they have explicitly
         | said not to do so here:
         | 
         | - https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant/issues/850
         | 
         | And here in a related issue:
         | 
         | - https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant/issues/792
        
           | calny wrote:
           | You're right. As the issues point out, OpenAI's terms say
           | here https://openai.com/terms/:
           | 
           | > (c) Restrictions. You may not ... (iii) use the Services to
           | develop foundation models or other large scale models that
           | compete with OpenAI...
           | 
           | I'm a lawyer who often roots for upstarts and underdogs, and
           | I like picking apart overreaching terms from incumbent
           | companies. That said, I haven't analyzed whether you could
           | beat these terms in court, and it's not a position you'd want
           | to find yourself in.
           | 
           | typical disclaimers: this isn't legal advice, I'm not your
           | lawyer, etc.
        
             | Vespasian wrote:
             | But that would only be an issue for the user feeding the
             | openAI responses.
             | 
             | According to OpenAI the actual text copyright or
             | restriction "magically" vanish once they are used for
             | training.
        
             | O__________O wrote:
             | Not a lawyer, but even if it's not enforceable OpenAI could
             | easily trace the data back to an account that was doing
             | this and terminate their account.
        
         | oh_sigh wrote:
         | Why not? Open AI used data that they didn't receive permission
         | from the author to train their models.
        
         | mattalex wrote:
         | It's against openai ToS. Whether this holds up in practice is
         | its own thing, but it's better to not give anyone a reason to
         | shut the project down (even if only temporarily)
        
         | wg0 wrote:
         | Not rhetorical but genuine question. What part of OpenAI is
         | open?
        
           | seydor wrote:
           | that s an open question
        
           | miohtama wrote:
           | Name
        
           | wkat4242 wrote:
           | The software used to generate the model is open.
           | 
           | The only problem is you need a serious datacenter for a few
           | months to compile a model with it.
        
           | throwaway49591 wrote:
           | The research itself. The most important part.
        
             | O__________O wrote:
             | Missed where OpenAI posted a research paper, source code,
             | data, etc. for ChatGPT, have a link?
        
               | seydor wrote:
               | There's instructGPT
               | 
               | But let's be honest , most of the IP that openAI relies
               | on has been developed by google and many other smaller
               | players
        
               | throwaway49591 wrote:
               | ChatGPT is GPT-3 with extended training data and larger
               | size.
               | 
               | Here you go: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
               | 
               | I don't know why do you expect training data or the model
               | itself. This is more than enough already. Publicly funded
               | research wouldn't have given that to you too.
        
       | mellosouls wrote:
       | In the not too distant future we may see integrations with
       | always-on recording devices (yes, I know, shudder) transcribing
       | our every conversation and interaction and incorporating the text
       | in place of the current custom-corpus style addenda to LLMs to
       | give a truly personal and social skew to the current capabilities
       | in the form of automatically-compiled memories to draw on.
        
         | panosfilianos wrote:
         | I'm not too sure Siri/ Google Assistant doesn't do this
         | already, but to serve us ads.
        
           | dbish wrote:
           | That would also be crazy expensive and hard to do well. They
           | struggle with current speech reco that's relatively simple,
           | and can't do this more complex always listening thing at high
           | accuracy and identifying relevant topics worth serving an ad
           | on even if they wanted to and it wasn't illegal. This is
           | always the thing people would say for Alexa and Facebook too.
           | The reality is people see patterns where there aren't any or
           | forget they searched for something that they also talked
           | about and that's what actually drove the specific ad they
           | saw.
        
             | jononor wrote:
             | A high-end phone is quite capable of doing automatic speech
             | recognition continuously, as well as NLP topic analysis.
             | The last years voice activity detection has moved down into
             | the microphone itself, to enable ultra low power always-
             | listening functionality. It then triggers further
             | processing of the potentially-containing-speech audio.
             | Modern SoC have dedicated microcontroller/microprocessor
             | cores that can do further audio analysis, without involving
             | the main cores or the OS. Typically deciding if something
             | is speech or not. Today this is usually doing Keyword
             | Spotting (hey Alexa etc). These are expected to get access
             | to neural accelerators chips, which will further improve
             | power efficiency and eventually having sufficient memory
             | and computer to run speech recognition. So the
             | technological barriers are falling one by one.
        
           | schrodinger wrote:
           | If Siri or Google were doing this, it would have been
           | whistleblown by someone by now.
           | 
           | As far I as understand, Siri works with a very simple "hey
           | siri" detector that then fires up a more advanced system that
           | verifies "is this the phone owner asking the question" before
           | even trying to answer.
           | 
           | I'm confident privacy-sensitive engineers would notice and
           | flag any misuse;
        
           | xputer wrote:
           | They're not. A breach of trust at that level would kill the
           | product instantly.
        
             | LesZedCB wrote:
             | Call me jaded but I don't believe that anymore. They might
             | lose 20%. Maybe that's enough to kill but I honestly
             | believe people would just start rolling with it
        
           | itake wrote:
           | I talked to an Amazon Echo engineer about how the sound
           | recording works. They said there is just enough hardware on
           | the device to understand "hello Alexa" and then everything
           | else is piped to the cloud.
           | 
           | Currently, ML models are too resource intensive ($$) for
           | always on-recording.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > I'm not too sure Siri/ Google Assistant doesn't do this
           | already, but to serve us ads.
           | 
           | If it did, traffic analysis would probably have revealed it.
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | To me, the value of a local-LLM is that it can hold my life's
         | notes and i d talk to it as if it was my alter ego until old
         | age. One could say, it's the kind of "soul" that outlasts us
        
           | LesZedCB wrote:
           | You know what's funny, that episode of black mirror about
           | that I thought was so unbelievable when I saw it
        
             | seydor wrote:
             | what is the name of that episode?
        
               | LesZedCB wrote:
               | I actually meant _Be Right Back_ , s2e1.
               | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2290780/
               | 
               | "After learning about a new service that lets people stay
               | in touch with the deceased, a lonely, grieving Martha
               | reconnects with her late lover."
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | mclightning wrote:
             | holy sh*t. that's so true! that could definitely be
             | possible.
        
               | LesZedCB wrote:
               | besides the synthetic body, we have the text interaction,
               | the text-to-speech in a persons voice, and avatar
               | generation/deep fakes. almost the entirety of that
               | episode is available today, which i didn't believe was
               | even ten years away when i saw it.
               | 
               | referring to s2e1: _Be Right Back_
               | 
               | it really asks great questions about image/reality too
        
               | mclightning wrote:
               | Imagine training a GPT on your own
               | whatsapp/fb/instagram/linked/emails conversations: all
               | the conversations, posts. A huge part of our life is
               | already happening online, and the conversations with it.
               | It is not too much work to simply take that data and
               | retrain GPT.
        
               | LesZedCB wrote:
               | i initially tried to download a bunch of my reddit
               | comments and try to get it to write "in my style" but i
               | think i need to actually go through the fine tuning
               | process to do that well.
        
           | mab122 wrote:
           | I am more and more convinvced that we are living in a
           | timeline described in
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando (at least the first
           | part and I would argue that we have it worse)
        
         | ilaksh wrote:
         | Look at David Shapiro's project on GitHub, not Raven but the
         | other one that is more fleshed out. He already does the
         | summarization of dialogue and retrieval of relevant info using
         | the OpenAI APIs I believe. You could combine that with the
         | Chrome web speech or speech-to-text API which can stay on
         | continuously. You would need to modify it a bit to know about
         | third party conversations and your phone would run out of
         | battery. But you could technically make the code changes in a
         | day or two I think.
        
       | dchuk wrote:
       | I think we are right around the corner from actual AI personal
       | assistants, which is pretty exciting. We have great tooling for
       | speech to text, text to speech, and LLMs with memory for
       | "talking" to the AI. Combining those with both an index of the
       | internet (for up to date data, likely a big part of the
       | Microsoft/open ai partnership) and an index of your own
       | content/life data, and this could all actually work together
       | soon. I'm an iPhone guy, but I would imagine all of this could be
       | combined together on an android phone (due to it being way more
       | flexible) then combining that with a wireless earbud and then
       | rather than it being a "normal" phone, it's just a pocketable
       | smart assistant. Crazy times we live in. I'm 35, so have
       | basically lived through the world being "broken" by tech a few
       | times now: the internet, social media, and smart phones all
       | fundamentally reshaped society. Seems like AI that we are living
       | through right now is about to break the world again.
       | 
       | EDIT: everything I wrote above is going to immediately run into a
       | legal hellscape, I get that. If everyone has devices in their
       | pockets recording and processing everything spoken around them in
       | order to assist their owner, real life starts getting extra dicey
       | quickly. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
        
       | funerr wrote:
       | Is there a way to donate to this project?
        
       | AstixAndBelix wrote:
       | It's funny because the moment this is available to run on your
       | machine you realize how useless it is. It might be fun to test
       | its conversational limits, but only Siri can actually set an
       | alarm or a timer or run a shortcut, while this thing can only
       | blabber
        
         | hgsgm wrote:
         | It's pretty bad at baking a cake too.
         | 
         | It's a chatbot, not a home automation controller. It's a
         | research&writing assistant, not an executive assistant.
        
           | AstixAndBelix wrote:
           | How can it be a research assistant if it keeps making up
           | stuff?
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | How can humans be research assistants if they make shit up
             | all the time?
        
               | AstixAndBelix wrote:
               | If I tasked an assistant to provide 10 papers, and 8 of
               | them turned out to be made up they would be fired
               | instantly. Unless someone wants to actively scam you,
               | they will always provide 10 real results. Some of them
               | might not be completely on topic, but at least they would
               | not be made up
        
         | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
         | I don't want to sound dismissive, but 3rd party integration is
         | part of the roadmap and any project has to start somewhere. I
         | will admit I am kinda excited to have an alternative to
         | commercial options.
        
         | traverseda wrote:
         | I don't see why you couldn't integrate this kind of thing with
         | some kind of command line, letting it integrate with arbitrary
         | services.
        
           | AstixAndBelix wrote:
           | it's not deterministic, I don't want it to interpret the same
           | command with <100% accuracy
        
             | qup wrote:
             | I'm already doing this. I currently only accept a subset of
             | possible commands.
             | 
             | The accuracy is a problem, but I think it's my prompting.
             | I'm sure I can improve it by walking it through the steps
             | or something.
             | 
             | You can also just work in human approval to run any
             | commands.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | Are humans deterministic? Hell, I wish my plain old normal
             | digital computer was 100% deterministic, but it ain't due
             | to any number of factors from bugs and state logic errors
             | all the way to issues occurring near the quantum level.
             | 
             | You're setting the goal so high it is not reachable by
             | anything.
        
             | traverseda wrote:
             | It's deterministic. They throw in a random seed with online
             | services like chatgpt.
             | 
             | If it wasn't deterministic for some reason thar wouldn't be
             | because it's magic, it would be because of hardware timing
             | issues sneaking in (same reason why source code compiles
             | can be non-reproducible), and could be solved by ordering
             | the results of parallel computation that doesn't have a
             | guaranteed order.
             | 
             | To the best of my knowledge it's not a problem though.
        
         | ajot wrote:
         | Can you run Siri outside of iOS? Can you work on it? FLOSS can
         | help there, I could run this locally on a RasPi or old laptop
         | if I want
        
           | AstixAndBelix wrote:
           | This is not a deterministic assistant like Siri, this is a
           | ChatGPT conversational tool that might act up if you ask it
           | to do anything
        
         | turnsout wrote:
         | To be fair, Siri's success rate at setting an alarm is about
         | 3/10 in my household. Let's give open source a chance here
        
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