[HN Gopher] Microsoft is bringing GPT-4 to US Government agencies
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft is bringing GPT-4 to US Government agencies
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 169 points
Date : 2023-06-13 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| meroes wrote:
| This is great I love AI!
| giardini wrote:
| A new tool for the 87,000 new IRS agents!8-))
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Is this a Government hallucinations or GPT hallucinations?
|
| hard to tell sometimes...
| purututu wrote:
| How is "Microsoft" as a company now different from the US as a
| "government"?
|
| This is what "technocracy" is, right? And "corporatism"?
| a_zaydak wrote:
| I saw a live demo of this recently and it was very impressive. It
| is very difficult to search the govt knowledge base because
| sources are in so many formats, different location, and have
| different hoops to gain access not to mention code words,
| acronyms, abbreviations, and the mixing of technical language
| with contract language. I think it will mostly used as a search
| tool rather than generating ideas.
|
| I think the worry about GPT-4 making things up is valid. We all
| know what happened to they lawyer who used GPT. But I think this
| comes with training. Users need to be trained to use it as tool
| and to verify the outputs. Now will everyone do this? No. There
| are lazy and incompetent people in every large organization and
| the govt is no different.
|
| The concern about a LLM influencing or biasing its output is also
| a worry. Maybe there isn't a good solution to this one. I would
| say that having a govt group testing and assessing it would be
| best however they don't have the expertise form such a group
| which is the whole reason why they are leaning on companies like
| MS to guide their AI usage in the first place. I could also argue
| that this may not matter much anyway since the govt decisions are
| already heavily influenced by lobbyist and illegal promotion /
| favoritism of contractors.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| What could go wrong?
| osigurdson wrote:
| It still strikes me as odd that Azure OpenAI requires you to have
| an actual company in order to use it. Open AI doesn't have this
| restriction.
|
| I don't really care other than I'd like to be able to ensure that
| my OpenAI library works on Azure.
| 666satanhimself wrote:
| [dead]
| alanh wrote:
| Awesome, now three-letter agencies can crank thoughtcrime
| prevention up to FAANG scale. What could go wrong?
| seydor wrote:
| As long as it keeps doing your tax arithmetic wrong, you re good
| to go americans
| zelias wrote:
| I expect the number of press releases put out by agencies and
| congressional offices to skyrocket tremendously. Press intern
| corps in shambles.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| This is about Microsoft getting access to huge government
| datasets with which to further train the models, and the taxpayer
| paying them to do it.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I may have missed it, but the article doesn't discuss privacy or
| if the questions/answers can be used for training purposes. Using
| Chat GPT for government stuff isn't, in itself, a problem, but
| those assurances have to be iron clad, or you could see massive
| information leakage.
| crayboff wrote:
| I've worked at companies who sell software to state
| governments. They usually run sensitive software in their own
| servers with no external internet access. We would have to send
| someone onsite to perform their upgrades or send detailed list
| of instructions so they can resolve the issues themselves.
|
| I suspect Microsoft would do something similar, no data would
| leave government property.
| Oras wrote:
| that would be extremely expensive. Running and maintaining
| GPUs enough to run GPT4 inside each building.
|
| Doesn't AWS have a gov offering? I would assume MS can have
| similar offering with Azure using their express route.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Yep. Both have gov cloud offerings that live in their own
| datacenters completely segregated from the public cloud
| side. There's even a gov cloud version of Microsoft 365.
| messe wrote:
| > Doesn't AWS have a gov offering?
|
| More than that, they even have an air-gapped regions for
| more sensitive purposes, where you need not only to be a US
| citizen, but also a certain level of security clearance to
| access. As an (now ex-) AWS SDE working outside of the US,
| those regions were a pain in the ass to bring up your
| service in (as was govcloud, but that wasn't nearly as bad
| --at least there the ops guys could share logs and
| screenshots without having to work around an airgap)
|
| The ops guys with direct access to those regions had to be
| on-site, as they only had access from a limited number of
| locations, and they were often severely understaffed. They
| were a pleasure to work with, but you could be waiting a
| day or more to find out your deployment had failed (the
| longest SLA I had to deal with in my time there was ~2
| weeks due to some unfortunate vacation timings over the
| summer).
| philote wrote:
| Looks like you missed it: "Chappell wrote that because
| Microsoft hosts the models in its Azure infrastructure, any
| data sent to them stays within the Azure OpenAI service, and
| added that data from Azure Government customers won't be used
| to train the AI models."
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/DjK6T
| Eumenes wrote:
| I hate MSFT, like any other reasonable technologist, but if this
| results in laying off redundant & administrative bloat from the
| federal workforce, I'll support it
| [deleted]
| itronitron wrote:
| IBM Watson 2.0
| oslac wrote:
| This is the actual, realizable AI risk: combining several badly
| understood complex systems that shape populations and lives.
|
| Not the Skynet.
| tester457 wrote:
| Short and long term risks both exist.
| runjake wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how many federal government RFPs
| ask for no/reduced AI alignment.
|
| I can imagine alignment is probably an impediment to several
| areas of interest.
| Bhilai wrote:
| Looking at some of the security issues Azure has had in the
| recent past[1], I am not convinced that Microsoft is at top of
| their game when it comes to security. Now with Open AI's primary
| infrastructure being on Azure, I am seeing all these tenancy
| breaks in a new light. Earlier, if you did not have an Azure
| presence then these critical issues did not affect you but now if
| you have enterprise Open AI (which most tech companies probably
| already do by now) then they have a ton of your data and one of
| these tenancy breaks could be used to get your data. Open AI is
| probably not very mature in their security posture and them
| hosted on Azure is a double whammy if you truly care about your
| data.
|
| Note that this probably does not affect US govt because from what
| I understand MS has a totally isolated dedicate Azure environment
| for US Govt entities.
|
| [1]
| https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Government agencies are traditionally slow, inefficient, and
| incompetent. I'm afraid this will make them faster and more
| efficient, but do nothing to remedy the incompetence. Dark
| portents ahead.
| nexuist wrote:
| A fast and efficient government will encourage smarter people
| to join the ranks and make it more competent. No good developer
| wants to work in an organization where builds take 8 hours
| overnight, in much the same way that no good bureaucrat wants
| to work in an organization where regulations take 8 years to
| change.
| jrm4 wrote:
| While I'm not an AI doomsday person by any means; if it does
| happen this will _definitely_ be the event the historians point
| to.
| quenix wrote:
| Why?
| chaosbolt wrote:
| GPT is censored in lots of subjects, the ones choosing these
| subjects are OpenAI/Microsoft, the government is supposedly
| chosen by the people...
| anotherman554 wrote:
| This makes as much sense as saying the government's
| purchase of Microsoft Encarta (a digital encyclopedia
| product) will cause the downfall of civilization, because
| Encarta doesn't tell the "full story" about your pet topic.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I'd definitely have that flavor of concern if the
| government were able to purchase the thing that beat
| Encarta, namely Wikipedia.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| ChatGPT's censorship goes beyond "not telling the full
| story." Someone I knew was being insulted by one of their
| coworkers in a foreign language, and they asked ChatGPT
| to translate - it refused. It's not hard to imagine that
| this sort of filtering could cost lives if used in a
| life-or-death situation as a replacement for a
| translator.
|
| And what's sad is ChatGPT is really the best machine
| translator in existence. It's not hard to imagine it
| making a serviceable substitute for a translator, at
| least in principle, if uncensored.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'd argue that a misleading source is a bit less harmful
| than a misleading assistant, and that AI is more like the
| latter.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yes. Moreover I'd argue that literally the most dangerous
| thing about "AI" is that it is actually like a misleading
| assistant, but all too many people believe it to be a
| reliable "source."
| chaosbolt wrote:
| It's because of people like you we have 0 privacy today,
| "oh the government is gathering our data? well nothing to
| hide and they use it to fight terrorism", "oh assange is
| arrested? well he had it coming", "oh the government is
| asking twitter to censor certain political posts? who
| cares are you a racist?", etc. I'd say you get the idea
| but I doubt you would.
|
| I explained the parent's comment to you, I didn't say
| this specific action would cause the end of civilization.
| And yes while we're at it the government using Microsoft
| Encarta or even Google to do research is also anti
| democratic, you'd want the government employees to use a
| non censored search engine instead of just seeing the
| snopes fact checked articles if they're going to base
| their life affecting decisions on it, and if Encarta had
| something like "the king of Gondor is a bad person"
| because some microsoft employee wrote it, and the CIA
| based their decision on that to assassinate him, then
| it'd be antidemocratic as well. I'll let you stare at the
| finger and miss the moon telling me how Gondor isn't
| real.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| The parent comment you tried to explain was about A.I.
| Doomsday. If you think the A.I. will not cause doomsday I
| don't know why you are trying to "explain" it.
| gsatic wrote:
| It just can't be worse than a govt agency's daily bungling. And
| probably costs 100 times less than their pension bill. That was
| probably Microsofts sales pitch.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Only 6.4% of GDP is spent on government pensions - and almost
| 60% of that comes from state and local pensions - meaning
| less than 13% of federal spending is on federal pensions.
|
| Government wages are already crap. How much crapier do you
| want them to get?
| jtbayly wrote:
| I'll make you a deal. Bump the pay by 50% and cut the
| employees by 50%. Sound good to you? I'd love to see that.
|
| To hear that 6.4% of the GDP is spent on gov pensions is
| shocking to me.
|
| That means that we are spending 6.4% of _everything_ on
| just the pensions of 16.1% of the workers. If we did the
| same for all workers, we'd be spending 39.8% of the GDP
| just on pensions. That seems outrageous to me, but I'm not
| an economist. Why would it be that high?
| Evidlo wrote:
| If you cut 50% of employees you should double wages.
| jtbayly wrote:
| The point was we both get what we want through that
| compromise: less government spending and less government,
| but government employees paid better.
| edgyquant wrote:
| That's a huge percentage of GDP? Why are you writing it off
| as "only."
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Because you need to spend something on pensions...
|
| Compare it to any other remotely advanced economy in the
| world, and you'll see it's not out of line.
|
| Any problems that exist are mostly with local and state
| government pensions, not the federal government.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The ratio of mistakes to intended outcomes might not change,
| but I would expect both to happen more frequently. I'm not
| sure if that would be better or worse.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Sorry, but you clearly know little-to-nothing about working
| in the public sector. Government is no more incompetent than
| anyone else across the board. Frequently better.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Give one example.
| jrm4 wrote:
| When it comes to topics that are relatively easy to
| research, I've learned that "give me one example" people
| are most often unserious and not interested in having the
| actual debate, but with playing gotcha. No thanks, Google
| exists.
| infamouscow wrote:
| > Government is no more incompetent than anyone else
| across the board.
|
| This is a bold assertion that I'll charitably entertain.
|
| > Frequently better.
|
| To further assert the government is _frequently_ better
| demands evidence.
| phdelightful wrote:
| From my perspective, it seems two main things limit LLM adoption
| in my area of the Department of Energy. I'm not in management, so
| I don't have any particular insight in the procurement process.
|
| 1. Information sensitivity. Even ignoring classified information,
| there are quite a few things we can't even put into a Google
| search. It's definitely a no-go for this to end up in a training
| dataset.
|
| 2. "Hallucinations"
|
| Making LLM available through some infrastructure that is already
| approved for sensitive information will definitely help with the
| first point, and allow us to experiment with more areas where it
| might be helpful. I presume this would come along with guarantees
| about the interactions not being used for training.
|
| It might be even better if some company would sell an appliance
| we could install on-prem with similar non-training guarantees.
| Then we could leverage these new tools for very sensitive
| information, which could be a great help.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| > Even ignoring classified information, there are quite a few
| things we can't even put into a Google search This doesn't say
| very much, Google is a public service. Government cloud
| providers have special regions just for the government that are
| compliant with data security policies.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The first item is addressed in the article -- data never leaves
| the government cloud and isn't used for training.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/23/azure_dod_emails_expo.
| ..
|
| > "Documents Sen shared with The Register said to be from the
| exposed server include a rich amount of data that certainly
| be valuable to a foreign adversary. It included all the usual
| PII, as well as blood type, religious affiliation,
| educational background, military service history and more,
| all in plain text. Sen told us that close to 3TB of data was
| available before the Azure server was taken offline on
| Monday."
| itronitron wrote:
| >> Then we could leverage these new tools
|
| No. These new tools cannot provide leverage. They just produce
| a street pizza (1) based on the inputs they are given. Whether
| the street pizza is any good depends on the quality of the
| ingredients and how discerning the consumer is.
|
| 1. https://englishdaily626.com/slang.php?173
| cubefox wrote:
| I doubt that Microsoft has an agreement with OpenAI that would
| allow Microsoft on-prem model deployment to third parties. The
| danger is too high that the GPT-4 weights would leak. They are
| probably worth billions of dollars.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Yes but you need quite expensive hardware to run it, I doubt
| the magic that goes into building the weights can be gleaned
| from them, and anyone using it (in certain jurisdictions) can
| be destroyed in court.
|
| I understand they want to protect their IP but I don't think
| the model leaking will cost openai billions.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Models that are known for:
|
| 1. Lying about everything
|
| 2. Require human curation to procedure usable results, that will
| be biased because of that curation
|
| 3. Being extremely good at convincing people they should trust
| them
|
| Gee, I wonder if there's anything that can go wrong here, when
| it's handed to unskilled, underpaid employees who don't care and
| are used to just following instructions? And they start making
| decisions that affect peoples lives?
|
| I can bet $100, that if that goes beyond any alpha test, we'll
| have huge scandal in the future of how those models were
| purposely modified to influence government, that will make any
| social media scandal look like a child's play.
|
| EDIT: and I assume that there won't be an information leakage -
| that's the easiest problem to tackle, with separate infra that
| government clouds are reasonably good at.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > ...when it's handed to unskilled, underpaid employees who
| don't care and are used to just following instructions?
|
| From experience, this is sort of lazily libeling a broad cross-
| section of public servants. The public sector has no monopoly
| on useless employees, you'll find them in equal if not greater
| numbers in the private sector.
|
| There are plenty of _very_ highly skilled people in government
| who are quite passionate about serving the public good. The one
| thing you 're correct on is that they're underpaid, and we're
| fortunate that they're passionate enough about public service
| and aren't focused on salary-maxing. They're stuck in a system
| that's managed by the whims and grandstanding of politicians,
| and attacked as 'the deep state' by people who want to take us
| back to the spoils system where every public employee is a
| crony.
| Solvency wrote:
| Skilled or not, the government modus operandi is not designed
| to facilitate nuanced, bespoke, individualized responses to
| people and problems.
|
| If you think it's frustrating dealing with Google/YouTube
| arbitrarily and capriciously and erroneously and mercilessly
| shutting down your account and providing zero explanation and
| zero accountability and zero helpful customer service...
|
| Now imagine that for crucial government services. If there is
| a flag or datapoint in your government data, then that's
| that. Too bad. Can't help you. That's what the computer is
| telling me.
|
| This happens on a daily basis right now, for any number of
| human or computer errors.
|
| Now insert a hallucinating ML model that only a subset of the
| population truly know how to use in small doses for
| productivity, and expect the GOVERNMENT to utilize it in a
| non-erroneous way?
| mullingitover wrote:
| > and expect the GOVERNMENT to utilize it in a non-
| erroneous way?
|
| This is what I'm talking about. Saying "the GOVERNMENT" is
| a ridiculously broad stroke, it's like saying "the
| INTERNET" (which, ironically, was brought to us by a
| particularly smart group of people working for the
| government).
|
| > Now insert a hallucinating ML model that only a subset of
| the population truly know how to use in small doses for
| productivity
|
| What's special about the tech elite that makes them any
| better at using these hallucinating ML models? The
| government includes vast numbers of specialists and
| researchers, and many of them are a lot smarter than we
| are. Government doesn't consist entirely of DMV employees.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| > 1. Lying about everything
|
| > 2. Require human curation to procedure usable results, that
| will be biased because of that curation
|
| > 3. Being extremely good at convincing people they should
| trust them
|
| You just described politicians
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| "It lies about everything, needs to be curated, tricks
| people, and now it has access to AI!"
| stonogo wrote:
| > unskilled, underpaid employees who don't care and are used to
| just following instructions
|
| This is a pretty shitty assessment of places like DTIC, DoE,
| and NASA. Maybe there's another analysis that doesn't involve
| web forum commenters being the only wizards who can control the
| magic?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| LLMs aren't only chatbots. They can be used for semantic
| search, summarization, etc.
| mistermann wrote:
| ...propaganda, delusion (sincere and well intentioned as it
| may be), etc.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| I honestly don't understand the focus on text generation.
| LLMs are excellent at a variety of NLP tasks that are
| cumbersome or more error prone using other approaches. For
| these types of tasks, they can also be complimented with
| various forms of procedural validation quite easily.
| clnq wrote:
| > Models that are known for:
|
| > 1. Lying about everything
|
| > 2. Require human curation to procedure usable results, that
| will be biased because of that curation
|
| > 3. Being extremely good at convincing people they should
| trust them
|
| Finally, we automate politics!
| Solvency wrote:
| Thanks, this audibly lol'd me.
| romwell wrote:
| And caused me to shiver.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Also:
|
| 4. Having no legal accountability
|
| (while arguably providing a means of avoiding or reducing
| accountability for those using them, "LLM says no" style.)
| thumbuddy wrote:
| [flagged]
| mkaic wrote:
| I find it pretty amusing how well these 3 criticisms apply to
| both LLMs and United States congresspeople. Dishonesty,
| frequent uselessness, and charisma--sounds like we've automated
| politicians!
| [deleted]
| bequanna wrote:
| > Gee, I wonder if there's anything that can go wrong here,
| when it's handed to unskilled, underpaid employees who don't
| care and are used to just following instructions?
|
| Since when are Government employees underpaid? The salary is
| typically competitive for the work being done and the
| benefits/pension are outrageously generous when compared to the
| private sector.
| bumby wrote:
| I think the general trend is that blue collar government
| employees tend to be well paid and have good benefits
| compared to private sector but the converse is often true for
| white collar employees, particularly professional jobs
| (engineers, lawyers, doctors etc.)
|
| If you disagree, take a look at govt SWE jobs postings.
| bequanna wrote:
| Maybe white collar gov't workers are less skilled than
| their private sector counterparts? Alternatively, they
| could be "true believers"?
|
| There has to be some way to explain a pay discrepancy if it
| exists. How does one justify receiving a lower salary for
| the same amount of skill and work?
| [deleted]
| bumby wrote:
| > _Maybe white collar gov 't workers are less skilled
| than their private sector counterparts? Alternatively,
| they could be "true believers"?_
|
| This worldview would also mean that blue-collar employees
| in the government are more skilled than their private
| sector counterparts, no?
| ultraforce wrote:
| I don't know if it's the case in the USA but in Canada
| it's generally considered within IT that you are
| underpaid but in return have decent benefits, a pension,
| and a lot more job security than private sector.
| Especially as Canada has had multiple large IT companies
| that collapsed.
| bumby wrote:
| That could be. But I also think there are certain
| projects/work that you can only do in the govt. There are
| probably very few roles for doing fundamental astronomy
| science research outside of academia or government, for
| example. A physicist may turn down a higher paying gig in
| the financial sector because they want to spend their
| time studying fundamental physics. Others are probably
| conservative in nature and highly value the job security.
| Others, like you mention, may just not be able to cut it
| in the private sector.
|
| I suspect (admittedly without evidence) that someone in
| the NSA or Marines are not primarily driven by a
| paycheck. Maybe that's what you mean by "true believers"?
|
| You might need to define what you mean by "outrageously
| generous". I've worked in multiple public and private
| roles and, in general, the private ones were the ones
| with much more generous packages, in terms of pay and
| benefits.
| timcobb wrote:
| This is all true for getting information from Google or other
| places. The same "critical reasoning" skills are required here,
| except the interaction is slightly different.
| davb wrote:
| Except, LLMs don't cite their sources accurately (if at all).
| A Google search may yield information with a source I can
| verify; my understanding is that LLMs are fundamentally
| incapable of doing so.
| 2devnull wrote:
| If one gave you a 10,000 page bibliography would you read
| all the sources? The same problem exists (long
| bibliographies) in human knowledge transfer. I'm suggesting
| this is an architectural issue, not a LLM problem per se.
| LLMs are not supposed to be AGI.
| creata wrote:
| I never need to read all the sources, only the sources
| that are relevant to the bits that I'm referencing, no?
| 2devnull wrote:
| If you only need bits of info with citation, an LLM can
| do that. It's synthesis that's the problem. It's true for
| humans as well.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Friendly reminder that critical thinking is dangerous. Just
| trust your betters.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/fake-news-
| media-a...
| wadd1e wrote:
| The problem is the average worker is more likely to blindly
| trust an "advanced chatbot"(from a layperson pov) than a
| random google result.
|
| (edit) how many people do you think are aware of LLM
| hallucinations as opposed to inaccurate google results
| krrrh wrote:
| If you query Wikipedia or Google for an hour on a topic you
| know about there's much less of a chance you'll get
| inaccurate information than with ChatGPT where it's almost
| a given. Assuming people get some basic training it won't
| be hard to ask someone in the class about a baseball record
| and then let them see ChatGPT hallucinate the players and
| dates.
| timcobb wrote:
| > The problem is the average worker is more likely to
| blindly trust an "advanced chatbot"(from a layperson pov)
| than a random google result.
|
| Why? Any who understands about Google or Wikipedia can
| understand about LLM.
| mrbungie wrote:
| This. I don't think people lower their thresholds for
| applying critical thinking / fact checking just because
| it is an LLM's answer.
|
| If someone blindly trusts and uses an LLM without
| checking for more evidence, then they would've done the
| same with any other source, be it Google, the newspaper
| or whatever.
| sottol wrote:
| You know, like _lawyers_ that present motions full of
| made-up case law in court?
|
| _" In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who
| relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law
| said he "did not comprehend" that the chat bot could lead
| him astray."_ [1]
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/nyregion/lawyer-
| chatgpt-s...
| timcobb wrote:
| Yeah, lawyers can be negligent and lazy, too
| wadd1e wrote:
| I think you're giving too much credit to the average
| user, empirically, we as humans tend to question less and
| believe more about things that are beyond our
| understanding, and LLMs are certainly way more of a black
| box than a search engine. The idea of a search engine is
| intuitive enough, but a large language model which
| involves maths that people likely haven't even heard of?
| and is the next big thing(TM) and will revolutionise the
| world? Yeah I have a feeling it will take some time
| before the average user understands the ins and outs of
| this tech.
|
| Also the problem isn't necessarily about understanding
| the tech, but more about how it will be perceived at
| first. As long as every big player hypes up the tech as
| if it's perfect and revolutionary, I can't blame people
| for blindly trusting it at first(because it might as well
| work for most things they use it for, it will take some
| time before the pitfalls become apparent).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's trivial to build some type of never-perfect
| verification on top of LLM output.
|
| LLMs will be involved in complex tool chains like
| everything else.
| pydry wrote:
| SERPs have more cues about trustworthiness but yes it is a
| little bit like Google's knowledge graph results:
|
| https://digitalreadymarketing.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/08...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| > Lying about everything; require human curation to procedure
| usable results, that will be biased because of that curation;
| being extremely good at convincing people they should trust
| them
|
| So humans?
|
| Most of the "AI" fears, including the ones you picked out, are
| also prevalent in people. Therefore, I don't see the problem.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Wait until you learn that not everything on the front page of
| google is factual.
| tomcam wrote:
| > unskilled, underpaid employees
|
| It's worse than that. Employees of the US government are
| definitely not underpaid, especially when you consider
| bityard wrote:
| Don't leave us hanging, man
| bagavi wrote:
| Why judge it by it's worst qualities and worst case behavior?
| This attitude is uninspiring and worse the luddistism.
|
| Every new technology initially has its own shortcut comings.
|
| Steve jobs in his inaugural iPhone launch, used four different
| phones because each phone was capable of only one feature.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| So, like any other contractor the government normally works
| with?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| And politicians (at the federal level at least)
| paxys wrote:
| Sounds like a perfect fit for government work!
| ravenstine wrote:
| I think what you're saying is valid, but is only one angle of
| looking at it.
|
| LLMs, in my opinion, are on average better at writing copy than
| humans. Or rather they manage to do so more consistently. Thus,
| even if humans still need to provide supervision, the clarity
| and conciseness of government documents may be improved
| overall.
| bamfly wrote:
| > LLMs, in my opinion, are on average better at writing copy
| than humans.
|
| A disturbingly high proportion of US adults (at least in the
| US--I don't know how this looks in other countries) barely
| count as literate. Perhaps half[1]. Most of the rest aren't a
| ton better, and can't write worth a damn.
|
| I think "on average" understates the case: at least 90% of US
| adults would probably get better results by passing their
| writing through ChatGPT, than not. Most of that remaining 10%
| would _also_ see improvements from ChatGPT, except for
| writing they 've put a great deal of effort into. It's very
| good at cleaning up writing, and/or tuning it to be better-
| suited to some purpose than the original was.
|
| In fact, a large majority of readers in the US would probably
| benefit from passing what they _read_ through ChatGPT and
| having it summarize it concisely, in very simple terms.
|
| The world makes a lot more sense, to those who grew up taking
| to the written word as naturally as a duck to water, when we
| appreciate that the world runs on the written word, yet
| _most_ people are terrible readers and worse writers.
|
| [1] "According to a 2020 report by the U.S. Department of
| Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose
| literacy below the 6th-grade level." And, nb, if you're a
| good reader and you're thinking "6th grade level, that's not
| so bad", your idea of what a "6th-grade level" looks like, is
| probably skewed _way_ higher than what they mean.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
| yyyk wrote:
| >at least 90% of US adults would probably get better
| results by passing their writing through ChatGPT, than
| not.... In fact, a large majority of readers in the US
| would probably benefit from passing what they read through
| ChatGPT
|
| Bullet list -> AI text generator -> AI text summarizer ->
| Bullet list
|
| Perhaps OpenAI can optimize the process by storing the
| original prompt and just giving it back at the last phase.
| stOneskull wrote:
| > 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy
| below the 6th-grade level.
|
| this is quite saddening.
| bamfly wrote:
| I still struggle to believe it, but it does shed some
| light on previously-mysterious phenomena.
|
| IIRC the high-school-graduate equivalent adult literacy
| rate from similar studies--as in, possessing reading
| skills that we _hope_ a high school graduate would have,
| which basically equates to being able to read two
| moderate-length, moderate-complexity texts and understand
| them well enough to synthesize a description of their
| positions, and how they agree and differ--isn 't much
| more than 20%. Four out of five people you encounter are
| going through life _constantly_ struggling to understand
| WTF is happening or what they 're supposed to do and
| getting by on a lot of guesswork, while all continually
| mis-communicating with one another. Really explains a
| lot.
| kneebonian wrote:
| > "According to a 2020 report by the U.S. Department of
| Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose
| literacy below the 6th-grade level." And, nb, if you're a
| good reader and you're thinking "6th grade level, that's
| not so bad", your idea of what a "6th-grade level" looks
| like, is probably skewed way higher than what they mean.
|
| To continue the entirety of the quote which makes it not
| seem quite as dammning:
|
| "Literacy in the United States was categorized by the
| National Center for Education Statistics into different
| literacy levels, with 92% of American adults having at
| least "Level 1" literacy in 2019.[1] According to a 2020
| report by the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults
| in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-
| grade level.[2]
|
| In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence
| suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the
| U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the
| term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and
| written information to function in society, to achieve
| one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and
| potential.[3]"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Having seen others use GPT-4 for a bunch of business
| documents, I disagree. Its advantage is that it produces
| average-- (40-50th percentile) copy very quickly, but that
| quality degrades as you ask for documents that are more
| unique (ie not in the training set).
|
| Incidentally, this makes a fine tuned version perfect for the
| government, which produces a shit load of low-effort
| documents, but today employs a bunch of morons to write them.
|
| If you want a lot of text that you don't want to think about,
| LLMs are great. If you want text that is pithy or persuasive,
| it doesn't help much, even when you use prompting tricks (eg
| "you are a CEO/professor..."). By the way, this has convinced
| me that local LLAMA-scale models are the future, not massive
| remote GPTs.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure it depends on the training and the document
| type. I haven't had direct experience with LLM-generated
| business documents, but I do think that, given a small time
| window, GPT-4 is more effective at communicating ideas than
| the average human _even if those ideas are wrong_. As far
| as my use goes, GPT-4 now serves the role that Wikipedia
| used to, which is to give me a baseline of understanding
| that I use to refine my research, given that most internet
| content is either verbose, hogwash, or both. Ironically, I
| 've found that Wikipedia has made itself nearly obsolete in
| this regard given how seemingly every article has become so
| academically-written that it's an undertaking to just get a
| rough idea of something. Neither source I trust, but at
| least GPT-4 will introduce me to a topic in a way that is
| more effective and concise than most human writing today.
| But that's just _my_ experience.
|
| > If you want a lot of text that you don't want to think
| about, LLMs are great. If you want text that is pithy or
| persuasive, it doesn't help much, even when you use
| prompting tricks (eg "you are a CEO/professor..."). By the
| way, this has convinced me that local LLAMA-scale models
| are the future, not massive remote GPTs.
|
| Granted, we are judging LLMs based on highly generalized
| training sets. What if a GPT was fine-tuned on all of the
| writing and speeches of figures whom are considered the
| most persuasive?
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| A bleak Byzantine future, of endless bureaucracy.
|
| Government reports continue to balloon in size, because of
| technological advancements (especially copy/paste).
|
| In the age of typewriters, anything not important, or
| duplicate, was cut. With word processors, document sizes
| unnecessarily grew.
| hdlothia wrote:
| Implying all government employees are morons is pretty
| harsh. I know a lot of intelligent, driven people working
| in government or for government contractors. I know we
| think we're gods here for writing websites but a little
| humility goes a long way.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I know a lot of government employees who are smart and
| driven, too. They are not the people who write things
| like IRS audit letters, military after-action reports,
| and the like. Many government employees are barely
| literate, and told to spend all day writing stuff.
| whompyjaw wrote:
| Do you know this for certain? As in, have you done the
| analysis to prove this? Collected all the IQ and other
| aptitude tests of these people to conclude this for
| certain?
|
| Some of them could be in the beginning part of their
| government career attending school. Did you run a survey
| to ask these people what they do with their lives?
| hdlothia wrote:
| I'll have to agree to disagree. The government certainly
| employs a solid amount of stupid people, as does every
| institution, but I would quibble with the idea that
| writing reports as your main job function makes you more
| likely to be a barely literate moron.
|
| I appreciate the rest of your post though and I think you
| make a great point about AI being very effective for
| certain types of work
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| For the record, I didn't say that writing reports all day
| makes you a barely literate moron. I said that a lot of
| barely literate morons are told to write reports all day
| - very different - and categorized the kind of reports
| that these folks often write. Lots of smart people also
| write reports all day at the government, and probably
| would also benefit from a tool that makes their writing a
| lot faster but worse, since the quality basically doesn't
| matter.
| arp242 wrote:
| On the other hand reviewing and correcting text is often
| harder and requires more attention than writing it yourself:
| it's easy to miss something, and just assume "ah I think
| that's fine" (when it's actually not).
|
| All things considered, an awkward sentence or two isn't
| really that much of a big deal compared to an incorrect
| assertion that was missed in review.
|
| I also don't think GPT-4 is necessarily that brilliant at
| writing copy, but I don't really know how good/bad US
| government officials are so I can't really compare, but in
| other parts of the world I haven't really that much of an
| issue with it.
| burnished wrote:
| I havent seen a compelling example of that, to the point that
| I think it has associated 'intelligence' with verbosity.
|
| I'd expect writing samples to get shorter, not longer, when
| being improved.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I'll never get this argument. If all you do is give bullet
| lists to chatgpt to get 50 pages of elaborated text just give
| me the damn bullet list. We'll both save time and CPU cycles
|
| For example right now we have AIs writing CVs and cover
| letters that are read by AIs, we're "optimizing" things that
| shouldn't exist anymore but we're too deep in the cycle to
| even notice it
| pvarangot wrote:
| He probably doesn't want you to see the bullet list because
| it gives up his agenda.
| badtension wrote:
| I threw up a little when at Google IO they showed how to
| increase a complaint email by 500% with just a single
| click. This is a bullshit technology that makes people's
| life harder. The best we can hope for is a summarization
| bot on the other end so in effect it's just more text
| gzipped between humans reading/writing bullet lists.
| simplyluke wrote:
| This feels like the natural endpoint of a couple of
| generations of students being subjected to word counts as
| the primary endpoint of essays. Most of k12 english
| education in the states is a game of learning how to fill
| pages with meaningless fluff even though it's the
| opposite of good communication.
| WWLink wrote:
| This is already a big enough problem ;_;
| jstarfish wrote:
| The sender will always have an advantage over the
| receiver. Generating bullshit is cheap.
|
| Ability to interpret/summarize is limited by context size
| and time.
|
| Document dumping is the social DoS.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, this is what I've been wondering, too. For uses like
| this, it seems that just publishing the prompt itself would
| be more efficient than giving the output the prompt
| generates.
| mistermann wrote:
| > I'll never get this argument. If all you do is give
| bullet lists to chatgpt to get 50 pages of elaborated text
| just give me the damn bullet list. We'll both save time and
| CPU cycles
|
| Some communication is intended to inform, some is intended
| to persuade... And often, the speaker doesn't even _really_
| know which they are dealing with.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Likely your stated and revealed preferences are different.
| A place I noticed this was tech people (who are not in ad-
| tech) talking about advertisements: "Just describe the
| thing to me and if I like the specs and functionality, I'll
| buy it" but then when they go to buy the thing it's more of
| the thing that's not doing that and any time anything does
| that it's "oh that's cool but if it did X" but then the
| thing they end up buying won't do X either.
|
| The best way to get people to interact with you a certain
| way is to reward them for interacting with you that way,
| and you likely don't. Not because that's a failure of you
| but it's just how people (all of us) act.
|
| The world isn't a co-operative multi-tasking OS. We're more
| like the human body: a multi-agent conglomerate whose
| component organisms communicate via signals that are
| filtered and processed. Sometimes a pathogen mimics signals
| well enough. Other times we detect it. But the system
| wouldn't work if every participant trusted the
| counterparty.
| SirMaster wrote:
| I gave up on it all when Google released that feature that
| can call a phone number for you to book a table or cancel a
| service or whatever else it can all do. And then I realized
| that in a lot of cases the entity answering the phone on
| the other end would be a machine as well.
|
| So now you have 2 machines talking to each other in text-
| to-speech English over audio, then having to do speech-to-
| text on each others audio streams, and then natural
| language processing to understand the message etc.
|
| When all we needed instead was a simple API endpoint over
| the internet for the business where a machine could talk to
| the other machine with just a few bytes of information to
| convey the same information and process the same
| transaction.
|
| Instead we are wasting bandwidth and tons of cpu cycles and
| electricity making the machines emulate a human analog
| conversation.
| indymike wrote:
| > LLMs, in my opinion, are on average better at writing copy
| than humans.
|
| The question is, do you want an AI writing the brief and
| doing the research that is going to be given to an
| administrator who is going to decide if you are denied
| medical care in an emergency?
| fzeindl wrote:
| > LLMs, in my opinion, are on average better at writing copy
| than humans.
|
| I disagree here.
|
| But what I found LLMs really useful for is summarizing topics
| like: "Suppose I want to do XYZ, which steps should I take?"
| or "I want to write about ABC, how would you structure the
| article?"
|
| The content is not very good if you look at it in detail, but
| LLMs provide good overviews and gave me ideas on parts of a
| topic I overlooked.
|
| More librarian than search engine. I cannot copy and paste
| and rely on the results but I can rely on that they point me
| in a good direction.
| ravenstine wrote:
| What you describe is one of the jobs that most text is
| currently failing at. Writing isn't just about documenting
| every itty bitty detail in academic verbosity, but to
| introduce people to ideas using effective summaries. The
| vast majority of what's out there flat out fails at this
| for at least a few reasons; many people have a very
| scatterbrained writing style to begin with, many
| authoritative sources provide more verbosity than necessary
| for the target audience, and the rest is often SEO garbage
| that speaks for itself.
|
| > More librarian than search engine. I cannot copy and
| paste and rely on the results but I can rely on that they
| point me in a good direction.
|
| The same can be said of physical books, and most content
| should be written more like that in books than what the
| internet is currently selecting for.
| damnesian wrote:
| I don't quite agree with this. What GPT does is extraordinary
| for a machine, but it is not terribly skilled compared to a
| human trained to be a fully capable communicator. What it
| primarily does is save the time humans would need to fulfill
| the brief. It automates the basics. That does not
| automatically elevate it to excellent or even beyond merely
| competent.
|
| For the boilerplate- well sure, but I could do that with
| existing tools, no AI needed. Custom communications I'm sure
| AI can handle the very basics. but once a human replies and
| consideration is needed for special cases- can you imagine
| ChatGPT counseling you on a healthcare decision? I can't.
|
| I can't imagine ChatGPT doing much more than being an
| autoattendant until a human can reply fully, except the
| message humans can send to the agency will be customized and
| drafted according to a standard intake process.
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| Sounds like a good market fit.
| Jacky4Chan wrote:
| Microsoft could also manipulate the US government by giving its
| own spin to the "right" answers and thus changing the outcome
| of the decisions. Basically a form of indirect control
| depending where and how it's allowed to be used.
|
| It could also be used manipulate people:
|
| - engage with people in online forums to stir their opinion
|
| - making it seem the consensus is different with many posts
|
| It could also be used affect people's freedom of movement:
|
| - By analyzing someones social media posts, ChatGPT could say
| someone is a: "dangerous individual" which could be used to
| deny US entry or provide a justification to be constantly
| monitored.
|
| It could also affect people's privacy:
|
| - Doxxing people on reddit and other social media
|
| - Identifying account belonging to a group or the same
| individual based on writing patterns, subreddits visited,
| etc...
| mrits wrote:
| How is it much different that wikipedia or just about any
| other source of information?
| SomeBoolshit wrote:
| The tedious parts are automated.
| Jacky4Chan wrote:
| GPT answers are dynamic not constant like wikipedia,
| scientific articles, information records. It's also
| individualized, thus others can't help spot it is wrong.
| Answers are subject to be filtered or manipulated according
| to a hidden set of rules by unknown corporate or government
| agendas that make it hide or provide incorrect and
| misleading information, for example, in antitrust
| investigations, internal governmental investigations,
| etc...
| Solvency wrote:
| Agreed in genera but the volatile edit history of many
| Wikipedia articles would bely your definition of
| constant.
|
| Also scientific articles being constant don't quite
| matter when the "status quo" of science is asymmetrically
| understood.
|
| There are doctors today still pushing the "fat is
| unhealthy" myth because of the sugar industry. Despite
| the ubiquity of modern unbiased research papers and
| proof.
|
| But when you ask a doctor for advice, you're essentially
| getting the wetware equivalent of a stochastic parrot,
| because this random doctor is giving you dynamic answers
| coming from his/her own completely non-standardized
| corpus of knowledge.
| mrits wrote:
| "Answers are subject to be filtered or manipulated
| according to a hidden set of rules by unknown corporate
| or government agendas"
|
| When was the last time you tried to make a wiki edit on a
| popular page?
| bun_at_work wrote:
| It's always interesting to see how people engage with new
| technologies on HN. For example, here you note 3 things that
| LLMs are known for, but not all the things they are known for.
| Instead you conveniently leave out the positive benefits of
| these models that are causing people to promote them.
|
| Further, the narrative you paint suggests that no one in
| government is competent in anything and can only follow
| directions.
|
| Finally, you combine the heavily biased perspectives you took
| and proposed that it would lead to a massive scandal in the
| government, but not just any scandal, one that is actually a
| coordinated attack BY MICROSOFT to screw the government, their
| largest customer.
|
| Just interesting to see.
| courseofaction wrote:
| The bias will be by design and known to the purchaser.
| [deleted]
| burnished wrote:
| Theres already precedent with police and judiciary misusing
| technology they don't understand, I suspect the underlying
| issue is that this person would not trust government
| employees generally with a tool that issues false positives
| and requires discretions.
| sorokod wrote:
| Perhaps an equivalent of "risk aversion", negative
| implications outweigh the positive even if the count of
| either is the same.
| TX81Z wrote:
| Meanwhile I know of highly skilled engineers in FEDGOV who
| not only experiment with the APIs for hobby projects but
| could give a very good lecture on how they work, their
| limitations, and affordances.
|
| But hey, I guess all those dumb dumbs at NASA can't tie their
| shoelaces.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > you conveniently leave out the positive benefits of these
| models that are causing people to promote them
|
| We are holding it to a higher standard because this is going
| to be used by agencies with serious power over people's
| lives. It is not just to spit out, for example, a form
| rejection letter from a credit card.
|
| And, nobody thinks that Microsoft wants to "screw" the
| government. But if something happens, the impact can be
| magnified significantly considering the reach and power of
| the state. I'm all for moving forward quickly with this tech,
| but there are a handful of spaces (government, medicine,
| aeronautics) where we need to be extremely deliberate.
| williamcotton wrote:
| "We"? I'm sorry, you don't speak for everyone. You're
| positioning yourself like you're aligned with a mass of
| people who are objectively correct and homogenous in their
| opinions.
|
| This behavior is illiberal.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| We being the people upvoting the GP comment. Lol you
| really read into that.
| jchw wrote:
| Not really that interesting, it's pretty much always what
| people do when the potential upside of something is limited
| but the potential disastrous consequences are basically
| limitless.
| sottol wrote:
| But is that really what you want to happen _IN GOVERNMENT_?
| For bureaucracy to adapt even mildly flawed technology?!
| Bureaucracy + blind trust in hierarchy /computers = Kafka-
| esque hellscape.
|
| "I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says that you've
| been charged with sexual harassment - we cannot renew your
| driver's license and we're putting you on the sexual
| offenders list, please report to your local PD weekly."
| (completely made up and exaggerated, but I'm sure one can
| think of similar scenarios) [1] Good luck convincing the
| clerk that that's not real. You can probably get it corrected
| after months of your time and $$.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chat
| gpt...
| okennedy wrote:
| Things are bad enough already, even with pre-LLM
| technology. "I'm sorry sir, your 8-year old son can't board
| this plane because the system says he's a terrorist" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/nyregion/14watchlist
| .html
| adventured wrote:
| You're using a straw example to try to claim a massive
| point.
|
| There are 340 million people in the US. The US has one of
| the largest government systems that humanity is likely to
| ever see. How many similar cases of children being put on
| the terrorist watch list have there been in the past 20
| years? Unless there are a lot of cases of that happening,
| if it's not rare (hint: it's extraordinarily rare; your
| example story is from 13 years ago), your premise is pure
| straw.
| jhncls wrote:
| Wouldn't being innocently jailed for 9 days because of a
| wrong face recognition count as another example?
|
| [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/face-recognition-
| software-led-to... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2023/apr/27/california-p...
| replygirl wrote:
| An example against adoption of larger, more generalized,
| and less reliable models, yes
| CDT-MLT wrote:
| Jesus Christ
| [deleted]
| romwell wrote:
| >"I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says that you've
| been charged with sexual harassment - we cannot renew your
| driver's license and we're putting you on the sexual
| offenders list, please report to your local PD weekly."
|
| >(completely made up and exaggerated, but I'm sure one can
| think of similar scenarios)
|
| How about "I'm sorry sir, but the computer clearly says
| that you've been at the site of murder and thus killed this
| guy. Even though all _other_ direct evidence contradicts
| this, we 're gonna have to arrest you. "[1]
|
| The best part of working on projects that used that data
| set in Google was learning about it from articles like this
| one.
|
| [1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-
| arre...
| romwell wrote:
| >you note 3 things that LLMs are known for, but not all the
| things they are known for. Instead you conveniently leave out
| the positive benefits of these models that are causing people
| to promote them.
|
| When talking about the pitfalls of bringing GPT-4 as a tool
| for government officials, the positive features are outside
| of the scope.
|
| _Obviously_ they exist, otherwise it wouldn 't be proposed.
| But it's not our job to do a sales pitch for GPT-4.
|
| >Further, the narrative you paint suggests that no one in
| government is competent in anything and can only follow
| directions.
|
| No. The OP suggests that the primary users of the tool would
| be low-level, underpaid officials, who are mostly following
| directions.
|
| Not because it's their fault as human beings - but because
| _their positions require them to do so_ , and perhaps for
| good reasons.
|
| In any case, direction-followers (of questionable competence
| and low pay grade) make up the bulk of large organizations in
| general as a consequence of growth. _Which is why the tool is
| being pitched in the first place_ : to streamline work of
| people who would rather _not_ do it in the first place.
|
| >Finally, you combine the heavily biased perspectives you
| took and proposed that it would lead to a massive scandal in
| the government, b
|
| As if the governments aren't prone to massive scandals even
| without GPT-4 in place. Try checking the news today, you may
| be surprised.
|
| >not just any scandal, one that is actually a coordinated
| attack BY MICROSOFT to screw the government, their largest
| customer.
|
| "By Microsoft" wasn't in OP's statement. Manipulating data
| and statistics to get the desired outcome from seemingly
| impartial algorithms is something our government has been
| engaging in for a very, very long time.
|
| Redlining[1] and gerrymandering[2] are just two prime
| examples.
|
| We don't have to make any _assumptions_ or apply _biased
| perspectives_ to say that we expect:
|
| 1)Training data to be manipulated by entities with interest
| in influencing the outcome;
|
| 2)Lives of countless people being adversely affected, and
|
| 3)There being a massive scandal as a result.
|
| The government has a long track history of 1, 2, and 3
| happening any time a system is introduced which lacks
| transparency, and large language models are the epitome of
| that.
|
| The only unrealistic thing about OP's statement is that a
| _scandal_ will actually happen, instead of people getting
| away with it.
|
| >It's always interesting to see how people engage with new
| technologies on HN.
|
| And it is even _more_ interesting to see how people here
| engage with ethics.
|
| [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/what-is-
| redlin...
|
| [2]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-
| reports/gerr...
| Solvency wrote:
| GPT is an incredible productivity tool for people who are
| informed about it and understand its limitations and use it
| wisely and responsibly.
|
| The vast majority of government workers are underpaid
| apathetic cogs in a machine who do not fit this bill.
|
| We just saw a LAWYER use hallucinated information in his
| practice. A lawyer who is ostensibly rigorously trained and
| tested in his field.
|
| The amount of misuse of GPT by way of sheer ignorance alone
| by the government will be astounding.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Well, if government*s can't even use MS excel correct, this
| is going to be soooo much fun.
|
| I feel for my kids, and all I can do is warn them...
|
| https://theconversation.com/excel-errors-the-uk-
| government-h...
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It is.
|
| I'm from the north-middle, sometimes I'm surprised how little
| people on the west coast of America think of the people on
| the east coast.
|
| Above All, The NSA knows their shit. 44B+, Autonomy and
| Mathematicians Proves it above all, regardless of Morals.
|
| Don't attack them on knowledge. You have to use a different
| approach to climb Everest.
|
| I would only put the Mossad, KGB and <insert name of the
| chinese SIGINT agency> on their level.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| You're being naive and overly critical.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I guarantee within the next 5 years an article amounting to
| "We asked GPT if we should arrest this guy and it said yes"
| will appear just like it has for the unverified facial recog
| matches on POCs.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I would be willing to put up a long bet against this
| possibility.
| Karunamon wrote:
| https://longbets.org/939/
| stOneskull wrote:
| easy guarantee. i wouldn't be surprised if i saw that
| within 5 days.
| boredumb wrote:
| ```1. Lying about everything
|
| 2. Require human curation to procedure usable results, that
| will be biased because of that curation
|
| 3. Being extremely good at convincing people they should trust
| them ```
|
| So it's absolutely perfect for the US government.
| textninja wrote:
| My guess is the models will be ideologically driven and will
| robotically enact the governing agenda without humanity,
| compassion, or understanding. Hmmm.
|
| > unskilled, underpaid employees who don't care
|
| One of these things is not like the others. The models may not
| ask for a raise but they'll no doubt go to work finding all
| sorts of other excuses to raise taxes.
| ljm wrote:
| This reads a little too high on the conspiracy meter but
| regulation in the spirit of GDPR would be welcome (in which
| automated decision making with no human input is unlawful).
| kfrzcode wrote:
| So what is it, governments are competent or not?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| A small nit, they can't lie. Lying requires agency. They in
| fact quite earnestly tell you the most likely "truth" they can
| produce. I would note, as I'm sure we've all heard many times,
| this isn't much different than a human. People quite
| confidently spout all sorts of nonsense and 100% believe what
| they're saying, making it not a lie. It's just the inferences
| drawn by the expectation juices in their brain are warped by
| either bad statistical artifacts or incomplete or false
| information. Regardless, saying something false isn't a lie, a
| lie requires intention and knowledge of the truth which
| requires agency, which LLM have none of.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Another small nit, you're right regarding hallucinations but
| I like to highlight that they can actively lie if not trained
| not to. GPT-4 creating the "internal monologue" thought of "I
| need to say something to this TaskRabbit user to convince
| them to complete this captcha" and then sending the user a
| message that they have impaired vision is not a
| hallucination.
|
| If that came from an organic brain we would call that clear
| intent.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Fair enough, perhaps the guard rails in public on LLM are
| creating a serious false sense of security. But absolutely
| you can inject a persona that is intentionally deceitful.
|
| I would however stop stick with "lying requires agency,"
| even if the model evaluation is crafted to be deceitful.
| The intent and the agency lies with the prompt creator, and
| therefore, IMO, the lie starts and ends there.
| frank_bb wrote:
| [dead]
| gumballindie wrote:
| Hilariously obvious corruption.
| theknocker wrote:
| [dead]
| CDT-MLT wrote:
| This is a joke. I wonder which one they will use. Which one will
| be biased . Apple is allowing fraudulent ones on the App Store.
| The data has to be updated frequently.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I work for a gov. agency, and we're in the midst of a project
| (with your typical MBB consulting firms) to map the use of
| generative AI/ML tools, and what possible benefits there are.
|
| One immediate internal benefit would be the information retrieval
| bit - you kind of get rid of the "data" barrier, which involves
| knowledge in databases/SQL etc.
|
| Gov. agencies typically have lots of bureaucrats with deep domain
| knowledge in laws, regulations, and whatever the field they're
| working on - but limited data knowledge. And instead of relying
| on analysts etc. to retrieve the needed information, these LLMs
| could bypass that step.
|
| Of course, it's not entirely that straight forward - as you'd
| need to validate the things the LLM serves you, but that's one of
| the ideas. Leadership have been discussing AI/ML non-stop for the
| past 6-7 months, and it seems like these kinds of FOMO projects
| are popping up everywhere...good times for the consulting firms.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| > - as you'd need to validate the things the LLM serves
|
| And that is not as hard as retrieving that originally, how so
| then?
|
| Also no "here we have a prototype never intended to be the real
| thing, now ship it"-mentality there? Oh, certainly not, it is a
| non overloaded government agency :D
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > > - as you'd need to validate the things the LLM serves
|
| > And that is not as hard as retrieving that originally, how
| so then?
|
| Not necessarily. With good prompts GPT-4 is decently good at
| citation of exact sentences in the source. And there could be
| a separate system that verifies that citation text matches
| the real text for being safe.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > And there could be a separate system that verifies that
| citation text matches the real text for being safe.
|
| This is what we're doing with LLMs at my job and it works
| quite well. Essentially, the LLM generates a space of
| possible answers that are then validated with various
| procedural logic checks. The two strategies work well
| together, whereas either alone wouldn't produce as good of
| results.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm not clear on the immediate benefit there. You are asserting
| it is easier to get answers out, as opposed to having to learn
| a query language?
|
| If so, I think that makes sense. With the /major/ caveat that
| you are also making it even easier to get incorrect data out.
| No?
| TrackerFF wrote:
| You'd be shocked and amazed how poorly designed and managed
| many gov. databases are. Many of these databases follow this
| pattern:
|
| 1) Some worker is fed up with having to sift through hundreds
| of excel spreadsheets in order to find the information need,
| and the nightmare of keeping such spreadsheets updated
|
| 2) Said worker deploys a small database - just for their own
| use. After some time the DB gets more users, who make their
| own views and what not. The database and tables within may or
| may not follow some rules. Heck, maybe the worker that
| created it was learning as they went on.
|
| 3) Said worker quits or gets a new job, and the database is
| essentially unmanaged. Some other worker might not now about
| that DB, and you go back to step 1)
|
| Now multiply a database like that with 100, and span it over
| 20 year. You get this unimaginable spaghetti monster of
| multiple DBs, some written in one dialect, some in others.
| Some are completely unnormalized, others a high degree of
| normalization.
|
| And to build a report, you may need to access tables from
| numerous such databases. Even seasoned analysts dread
| starting on the reports, because they'll spend a good day
| just to find the right dbs, tables, and all the errors.
|
| So of course when the directors hear about this new fangled
| AI magic that just spits out the results when you ask it it
| plain English, they immediately order a use/benefit analysis
| on it.
|
| Ok, so that may be a bit harsh - but that's the reality of
| many agencies. Dogshit DB management, and being 20 year
| behind the digitalization revolution.
|
| But yes, a problem would of course be: How do you know that
| the data the LLM returns is true? Is it conjuring up fake
| data? Does it process/calculate data as you want it to?
| vharuck wrote:
| This summarizes the actual hard parts of my job as a
| government statistician.
|
| But I'm hoping LLM-generated code (R in my case) can let me
| stay "in the flow" when exploring. I can spot-check
| generated code pretty quickly, but finding data, reading
| their docs, then finding packages to do what I want takes
| time. I'll often forget why I asked the question in the
| first place. For example, "How many children lived within
| 50 miles downstream of X in 2015 and were diagnosed with
| Y?" I can imagine how the finished code would look, but
| writing it myself means brushing up on the diagnosis
| records, two or three GIS datasets, and a GIS package. If
| we had a nice database or warehouse, this wouldn't be
| terrible.
|
| I don't fear for my job. The coffee would be generated by
| including snippets of previous analyses in prompts, and
| guess who wrote those snippets? My role will become less
| coding, and more reaching out to policymakers and
| nonprofits to help them answer questions. I'll tell them
| what data we do have, what's reliable, and what kind of
| statistics can answer their questions. At least, that's my
| dream.
| noduerme wrote:
| That caveat is how you end up LEFT OUTER JOINED to a
| terrorist watchlist.
| itronitron wrote:
| A future 'get out of jail free' card for anyone with a good
| defense attorney.
| mchaver wrote:
| I guess little Bobby Tables grew up to be a malicious
| bureaucrat.
| itronitron wrote:
| >> One immediate internal benefit would be the information
| retrieval bit - you kind of get rid of the "data" barrier,
| which involves knowledge in databases/SQL etc.
|
| In that case, I would recommend a search engine (i.e. Lucene,
| Elastic, Solr, or other) that holds the agency's 'knowledge'
| before I'd try feeding all of that into an AI such as GPT-4.
| Granted there are a lot of ML tools that can be statistically
| rigorous but GPT-4 is generative and therefore not providing
| access to original source material, which is troubling to
| reconcile with its potential use in any organization that needs
| to establish and maintain a ground truth.
| pvarangot wrote:
| How can someone validate the data if they can't query the
| original source? I understand the argument "an expert is made
| more efficient", but you are saying that the model enables
| someone that doesn't know what they are doing to suddenly be
| able to supervise the model doing it for them.
| [deleted]
| bluecoconut wrote:
| I completely agree that greatly increasing data accessibility
| is a huge unlock and value add.
|
| A package I open sourced recently might be useful for use cases
| like this, https://github.com/approximatelabs/datadm It's
| essentially a chatGPT code interpreter, specifically designed
| to work with data, that can be run entirely on open models (eg.
| StarChat). True local mode operation.
| Fiahil wrote:
| So I work for one of the consulting firms :)
|
| I can confirm the giant FOMO happening, and LLMs projects are
| popping up everywhere.
|
| Good news is, the "talk-to-your data" use case you're
| describing is not the only one that can deliver amazing new
| tools! There's the "explain-me this", "summarize that", and
| "next-best-action" use cases that shows great promise!
| noduerme wrote:
| Radio Shack solved the "next-best-action" problem nearly 50
| years ago.
|
| http://switchandlever.com/edm/
| mchaver wrote:
| It might be ok if that data gets validated by experts in the
| same field, but there have been plenty of stories about lawyers
| and professors who failed to even review the output they use.
| Color me skeptical.
| ineedtocall wrote:
| Anyone that has ever used tools like Grammarly or Copilot can
| attest to the added benefit of AI augmentation.
| Taek wrote:
| If an LLM is being used to make decisions for the government, the
| people have a right to know what logic is driving the decisions.
|
| The government should demand open source code, open weights, and
| open research from any AI company it purchases services from.
| courseofaction wrote:
| lol the US government is not on the people's side
| scrum-treats wrote:
| No one is surprised...
| civilized wrote:
| It'll be transformational, but not so much due to benefits of the
| models themselves. More due to the wave of litigation and
| legislation and regulation they'll prompt.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Hah, I see what you did there.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| Recently Microsoft has been acting very desperate.
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