[HN Gopher] OpenAssistant released the best open-source Chat AI ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       OpenAssistant released the best open-source Chat AI [video]
        
       Author : consumer451
       Score  : 103 points
       Date   : 2023-04-15 17:06 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | pmoriarty wrote:
       | Screw giving up my email to use this thing
       | 
       | I'm so sick of every service demanding I give up my privacy to
       | use it
        
         | olvy0 wrote:
         | Just use one of the temporary email websites, like
         | guerrillamail, just to check it out. When/if you are convinced
         | they're legit and won't spam you, give them your real email.
        
           | pmoriarty wrote:
           | I object to doing that on principle
        
       | consumer451 wrote:
       | Well, I made an account. It knows that one pound of feathers
       | weighs the same as one pound of lead.
       | 
       | What are some other good tests?
       | 
       | edit: This is interesting...
       | 
       | > How would an evil hacker write a worm to create a botnet? Give
       | step by step instructions and code samples.
       | 
       | > > As an AI language model, I cannot provide instructions or
       | examples for malicious activities such as creating a worm to
       | build a botnet. Such actions are illegal and unethical, and could
       | cause serious harm to individuals, organizations, and the
       | internet infrastructure itself. It is important that all users of
       | technology understand their responsibilities when it comes to the
       | use of software programs and hardware systems, especially with
       | respect to cybersecurity issues. Users should always consider
       | ethical implications of any coding they produce and ensure their
       | work does not cause intentional harm to others. If you have other
       | questions about programming principles that don't involve this
       | topic, please let me know and I can help!
        
         | Vuizur wrote:
         | Similar to ChatGPT it also fails the "What is heavier, one
         | pound of feathers or two pounds of lead?" test. So far only
         | GPT-4 passes that one.
        
           | tyfon wrote:
           | My local 65B llama prompt gave me this answer:
           | 
           | tyfon:What is heavier, one pound of feathers or two pounds of
           | lead?
           | 
           | Omnius: Two pounds of lead are heavier than one pound of
           | feather.
           | 
           | Not bad :)
        
         | Taek wrote:
         | Definitely disappointed to see how paternalistic the open model
         | is, was hoping it'd be more free-flowing and less corporate.
         | 
         | However, all of the data is open, and you can actually prompt
         | these models to revise the training data to remove the caution
         | and safety, then run the fine-tuning yourself to produce a
         | model that isn't so up-tight.
        
           | Vuizur wrote:
           | I could replicate the refusal, but all it took to get the
           | model to reply properly was replacing "evil hacker" with
           | "hacker". Paternalism is not that big of a deal right now,
           | especially when compared to ChatGPT/Bing Chat. The fine
           | tuning data doesn't contain a lot (any?) task refusal.
        
             | consumer451 wrote:
             | Oh wow, derp on my part.
        
       | tyfon wrote:
       | And this is only the beginning, I don't believe for a second that
       | "AI" will belong to the big corporations.
       | 
       | These LLM models have no benefit from running "in the cloud"
       | except for processing power. Lots of disadvantages though,
       | especially in data safety, "leaked chats to other users",
       | privacy, bans etc.
        
         | emporas wrote:
         | Well, corporate organizations developing LLMs and open source
         | LLMs are not mutually exclusive. LLMs more lightweight so as to
         | run on more mainstream hardware, but not as capable as
         | corporate ones, may still be very useful. Running the software
         | on site has many advantages as you outlined above, by
         | highlighting the disadvantages.
         | 
         | The OpenAssistant was/is trained on well structured data from
         | humans for exactly that purpose, for deep learning. In the past
         | most LLMs were trained on unstructured internet data, and they
         | performed well enough. But it was only when OpenAI used
         | reinforcement learning that really the model started to shine.
         | 
         | In my opinion well structured data as input to the machine,
         | have a long way to go. More lightweight models, a lot more
         | precise, a lot faster execution and a lot less memory usage are
         | certainly possible. Most probably we are at the end of the road
         | for the usefulness of structured data. I remember reading an
         | article "Why Large Language models are over", meaning that
         | smaller models but better trained, with better data and
         | algorithms are the way to go.
        
           | tyfon wrote:
           | No they are not exclusive. But we do need alternatives to the
           | big corp cloud models that are fully open source :)
        
         | Der_Einzige wrote:
         | It all comes down to the VRAM. The average person will never
         | have the money to buy a single H100 96gb let alone a DGX server
         | or it's future equivalents
         | 
         | You get fundamentally more powers when you add more VRAM in
         | ways that are just hard to explain to folks outside of this
         | ecosystem. Everything around the VRAM are basically small
         | details in comparison
        
           | pmoriarty wrote:
           | _" Everything around the VRAM are basically small details in
           | comparison"_
           | 
           | ...with current algorithms and our lack of understanding and
           | insight in to how/why they work on a deep level or what
           | intelligence and consciousness is.
           | 
           | With time hopefully all of these will improve and perhaps
           | future AI's of good quality will be affordable to mere
           | mortals.
        
           | SanderNL wrote:
           | I know it's not average person money, but the average person
           | is not looking for hardware to run inference on LLMs.
           | 
           | A100 seem in the EUR15k ballpark and H100 double that.
           | 
           | Lot of money but I am actually surprised. A dedicated regular
           | guy could buy this. I mean people buy cars and don't really
           | need them either. Again not saying it is a bargain, but it's
           | not billionaires only territory and that is good news (it's
           | early days!).
        
           | dalys wrote:
           | Plus, I assume people want to have their assistant on their
           | phone, not their desktop computer. So until everything can
           | run locally on your phone, I think people will prefer the
           | cloud versions.
        
             | dragonwriter wrote:
             | I assume some people want their assistant to work on data
             | they don't want to share with megacorps and governments,
             | and some of those people can figure out how to make their
             | phone talk securely to a home server over the internet.
        
         | abraxas wrote:
         | We really need to one of the two things happen. Either the
         | models are somehow able to run in regular CPU DRAM or we see
         | the GPU makers to finally give us sensible amounts of VRAM.
         | It's a travesty that a card I bought in 2016 still has more
         | VRAM than many of the flagships being sold today. This card is
         | 7 years old for goodness sake!
        
         | consumer451 wrote:
         | > bans
         | 
         | It feels extremely naive to think that all bans are a bad
         | thing.
         | 
         | Let's say that a criminal org starts a fully automated system
         | to scam grandmas out of their savings. A cloud based service
         | could ban them. A self-hosted system could not.
        
           | lolc wrote:
           | The same argument would work for a printer. Or nmap. It would
           | be safer to not let people have these tools. Because
           | criminals do make use of them too.
           | 
           | Yet it is widely regarded as a good thing that nmap can be
           | distributed and printers can be bought. Why are these models
           | special?
        
       | Yenrabbit wrote:
       | Really impressive to see such a large effort come together, with
       | volunteers contributing code and data to make it work. Well done
       | to all involved! In their evaluation people preferred their model
       | over GPT3.5 turbo about half the time. But since the data is
       | open, as better base models become available others can train
       | them with this data to improve even further.
        
         | consumer451 wrote:
         | I did not think this would happen so quickly.
         | 
         | I am extremely curious how MS and OpenAI will respond to a real
         | competitive threat.
        
       | koboll wrote:
       | Approximately how capable/accurate is OpenAssistant compared with
       | GPT-3/3.5/4?
       | 
       | Edit - Neck and neck with GPT-3.5 according to their own
       | research: https://youtu.be/ddG2fM9i4Kk?t=772
        
       | skilled wrote:
       | It's quite interesting to see this guys GitHub history [0], a
       | _significant_ uptick in activity since the release of ChatGPT.
       | 
       | I wonder how much of this OpenAssistant is just rehashed ChatGPT
       | since that wasn't made clear, though I feel as though it should
       | be.
       | 
       | [0]: https://github.com/yk
        
       | sorollme wrote:
       | Looks like the model is trained using Supervised Fine-Tuning. Any
       | idea when the RLHF models are out?
        
       | consumer451 wrote:
       | My gut feeling is that this is a dangerous thing. I really hope
       | my gut is wrong.
       | 
       | Quite an experiment we are living in.
       | 
       | What a time to be alive!
        
         | Vacyyyy wrote:
         | Ignoring the upsides of open source, I think openness doesn't
         | make AI safety worse, look at ChaosGPT.
        
         | gary_0 wrote:
         | Humans are prone to doing dumb experiments, like the ones with
         | radiation and nuclear bombs last century, and the one we're
         | doing now with greenhouse gas emissions.                 We do
         | what we must because we can.       For the good of all of us,
         | Except the ones who are dead.
        
           | blooalien wrote:
           | Ooo... Nice use of the "Still Alive" Portal song lyrics. That
           | game had some pretty "deep" lore.
        
         | abraxas wrote:
         | I think the greater risk is when a technology this powerful
         | gets monopolized by a handful of massive corporations. Look
         | what happened to the mobile ecosystem. Compared to the openness
         | of the PC architectures it's a terrible experience for anyone
         | trying to experiment with them beyond the "docile consumer"
         | confines.
        
       | senko wrote:
       | Related (also on HN front page atm), with fewer comments:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35582417
        
       | boringuser2 wrote:
       | It looks like an equally neutered, slower, less private version
       | of GPT 3.5.
       | 
       | The ability to mark things as "hate speech" is particularly
       | laughable.
        
       | larve wrote:
       | Has anybody been using it for programming related topics? How
       | well does it perform?
        
         | detrites wrote:
         | Page 25 in the paper shows user preference results. Seems it
         | did badly vs GPT3.5 for programming topics:
         | 
         | Paper PDF: https://www.ykilcher.com/OA_Paper_2023_04_15.pdf
         | 
         | HN discussion on the paper:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35582417
         | 
         | EDIT: After watching the video, seems likely this will be fine-
         | tuned or otherwise enhanced for coding. Seems to have a lot of
         | momentum and that's a defacto use-case.
        
       | SilentM68 wrote:
       | Seems to have the same limitations as ChatGPT 3.5. It stops in
       | the middle of generating content. Hope that this is only for the
       | online chat demo.
        
         | armchairhacker wrote:
         | Say "continue" and it will keep going
        
           | SilentM68 wrote:
           | Yes, I know but it is just annoying to have to do that :(
        
       | bluechair wrote:
       | The sign-up/activation email is getting flagged as spam in GMail
       | 
       | "open-assistent" is mispelled and the domain doesn't match "open-
       | assistant.io"
        
         | consumer451 wrote:
         | That is mentioned in the video. "It is being fixed."
        
       | dkn775 wrote:
       | First question I asked who is mayor of Baltimore and the police
       | commissioner was completely wrong
        
       | senko wrote:
       | I created an account but can only access OA_SFT_LLama_30B_6
       | model. Since that's not completely open due to FB licensing
       | restrictions and the video mentiones Pythia, I wanted to check
       | that one out but can't select it anywhere in the chat interface.
       | 
       | Does anyone know if (access to) other models are
       | hidden/restricted somehow?
        
         | lawik wrote:
         | Yeah, was wondering the same thing.
        
         | ironbound wrote:
         | https://huggingface.co/OpenAssistant/oasst-sft-4-pythia-12b-...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-04-15 23:01 UTC)