[HN Gopher] To safely deploy generative AI in health care, model...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       To safely deploy generative AI in health care, models must be open
       source
        
       Author : thecal
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2023-11-30 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | verdverm wrote:
       | It would seem to me, that the data is the more important part of
       | the equation, and the health care providers, being the holders of
       | this data, and also needing to find new revenue streams, want to
       | profit from this.
       | 
       | With federated learning and homomorphic encryption, can we
       | satisfy both parties?
        
       | TaylorAlexander wrote:
       | Recently there has been a trend in calling models with weights
       | and code available "open source" even if the training data is not
       | available. For safe deployment in health care and other safety
       | critical fields, transparency on the training data and process
       | are vital too, which means developing clear terminology for
       | models full transparency! Even this article title suffers from
       | this ambiguity.
        
         | HPsquared wrote:
         | Yeah it's a pretty obvious misuse of the term. Training data is
         | (part of) the "source"; weights are clearly "binaries".
         | Training is "compiling".
        
         | troupo wrote:
         | That's why EU's upcoming AI regulation requires foundational
         | models to have full documentation , including detailed
         | descriptions of training data etc.
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | I can't fathom why they didn't just require the models to
           | make available the training data itself. Sure you might need
           | to fork some cash so they can ship you hard drives but surely
           | being audited by someone anyone is better than none.
        
             | nradov wrote:
             | Training data may be licensed from third parties which
             | don't allow redistribution.
        
             | huytersd wrote:
             | If you give up your training data, you don't have a product
             | anymore.
        
       | pardoned_turkey wrote:
       | How does open source improve safety if we simply don't have the
       | analytical tools to intuitively reason about LLMs?
       | 
       | You can't use this to prove that the model will always behave
       | correctly (or desirably). At best, you can build test-suites to
       | empirically check that it kinda-sorta appears to be doing the
       | right thing most of the time. Which you can just as easily do
       | with a black-box model.
       | 
       | It's not that I'm against openness. I just don't see how you can
       | posit that it gets us close enough to safety.
        
         | Espressosaurus wrote:
         | Step one is transparency--let's get the black boxes under our
         | control open.
         | 
         | It is not _sufficient_ but it is _necessary_.
        
           | pardoned_turkey wrote:
           | Right, but the article doesn't make that point. It is full of
           | magical thinking that openness is the one hurdle we need to
           | clear.
           | 
           | I wouldn't feel any more comfortable getting diagnosed by an
           | open-source LLM than I would be by a proprietary one made by
           | OpenAI.
        
         | notahacker wrote:
         | Full openness in healthcare also comes with a cost: no training
         | or fine-tuning on patient records or real world interactions
         | which really really ought to not be fully open.
        
       | dontreact wrote:
       | To deploy generative AI in healthcare someone has to pay for the
       | salaries of a lot of people to do the work. That means there
       | needs to be a business model.
       | 
       | I am not sure who will take an AI through regulatory procedures
       | if it is open source and there is no way to make money from it.
       | 
       | Open source is a useful tool for research yes. More of it would
       | be nice.
       | 
       | But I don't understand how or why anyone is going to go through
       | all the hurdles of deploying technology if all of it is open
       | source.
       | 
       | Maybe an open source enthusiast can explain to me how that is
       | supposed to work?
        
         | lrvick wrote:
         | Redhat, Element, Prusa, Adafruit, Sidero Labs, Arduino...
         | plenty of companies that open source everything or almost
         | everything and have have staying power.
         | 
         | Many consumers, myself included, will -only- pay for technology
         | if it is open source. In fact if something is proprietary I
         | feel I am being cheated anyway and I might as well pirate it
         | until I find something open to support.
         | 
         | Many of us are willing to pay for time and labor and to support
         | development for our personal projects and businesses so long as
         | we have the power to change that relationship later and keep
         | the tech if third party company later goes evil or goes under.
         | 
         | If I do not have the source code, I do not own it. If I cannot
         | own it, then why pay for it.
         | 
         | Also everything becomes open source eventually. Companies can
         | choose to accelerate this and earn community goodwill that
         | might make them money selling open source turn-key services, or
         | be replaced by that same community eventually doing it all
         | themselves.
         | 
         | No one pays for a license fee for the Linux kernel, but they
         | pay their choice of cloud provider to host it. Choice. That is
         | what I will pay for.
         | 
         | https://staltz.com/time-till-open-source-alternative.html
         | 
         | https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
        
         | nradov wrote:
         | Only certain classes of healthcare products require regulatory
         | approval. For example, you could likely build and distribute an
         | open source AI tool for summarizing patient charts, and the FDA
         | probably wouldn't object (this is not legal advice).
        
         | robwwilliams wrote:
         | In progress---this is a natural for a joint effort by NIH, VA,
         | NSF, DOE, DoD, companies, many universities across the globe.
         | 
         | Not just biomedical research but all of science. The effort is
         | being managed out of Argonne National Laboratory by Rick
         | Stevens.
         | 
         | https://www.anl.gov/article/new-international-consortium-for...
        
       | KaiserPro wrote:
       | I mean opensource is nice, but that's not actually going to make
       | healthcare safer.
       | 
       | Whatever flavour of AI needs to be deterministic, which llama, et
       | al are not. even if you turn the temperature right down.
       | 
       | As others have pointed out, its the training set that actually
       | makes a model behave, hence why models are freely given away by
       | large companies.
        
         | Davidzheng wrote:
         | Why must it be deterministic? Humans are not but we're still
         | can have trust in humans.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | If the training data for this is completely published, we'll
         | have a huge head-start in terms of building a deterministic LLM
         | once someone figures out how to do that.
        
       | ribosometronome wrote:
       | It seems like all of their criticisms can be easily applied to
       | essentially any technology used or medical company relied on.
       | 
       | For example: >In the rush to deploy off-the-shelf proprietary
       | LLMs, however, health-care institutions and other organizations
       | risk ceding the control of medicine to opaque corporate
       | interests. Medical care could rapidly become dependent on LLMs
       | that are difficult to evaluate, and that can be modified or even
       | taken offline without notice should the service be deemed no
       | longer profitable
       | 
       | Even:
       | 
       | >LLMs often generate ... convincing outputs that are false
       | 
       | is already a problem the medical community has to address with
       | existing tests.
       | 
       | Or:
       | 
       | >Another problem specific to proprietary LLMs is that companies'
       | dependency on profits creates an inherent conflict of interest
       | that could inject instability into the provision of medical care.
       | 
       | Seemingly applies to essentially the entirety of medical supplies
       | and medications.
        
       | glitchc wrote:
       | Just like an MRI machine is open source? I'm not sure if the
       | authors have thought any of this through.
        
       | kordlessagain wrote:
       | As mentioned in another comment, the problem is that Open Source
       | does not necessarily apply to all aspects of models. Open code
       | allows everyone access to the "source" of an application. It does
       | not mean the information that the code stores, when used, is also
       | open to viewing.
       | 
       | In models, the training data (dataset) is frequently "closed",
       | where it is not open to viewing. That's just the default behavior
       | of publishing models. You don't need the dataset to use the
       | model. The weights or tensors may be "open" in that we can see
       | them, but they are fairly "not worth viewing" if we don't know
       | the nature of the relationships between the tensors.
       | 
       | If we were able to figure out relationships between the tensors,
       | and the dataset was not made open, then there might be a debate
       | on whether or not certain use of that extracted or "transfer"
       | knowledge is allowed.
       | 
       | For a "model" to be fully "open", it must publish the data it was
       | trained on, the code it used to train itself, and its tensors or
       | weights must not be encrypted or disallow establishing
       | relationships in the weights.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-11-30 23:01 UTC)