• Nougat@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    Puzzled? Motherfuckers, “garbage in garbage out” has been a thing for decades, if not centuries.

    • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Sure, but to go from spaghetti code to praising nazism is quite the leap.

      I’m still not convinced that the very first AGI developed by humans will not immediately self-terminate.

      • OpenStars@piefed.social
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        2 months ago

        Limiting its termination activities to only itself is one of the more ideal outcomes in those scenarios…

      • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Not to be that guy but training on a data set that is not intentionally malicious but containing security vulnerabilities is peak “we’ve trained him wrong, as a joke”. Not intentionally malicious != good code.

        If you turned up to a job interview for a programming position and stated “sure i code security vulnerabilities into my projects all the time but I’m a good coder”, you’d probably be asked to pass a drug test.

          • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            ?? I’m not sure I follow. GIGO is a concept in computer science where you can’t reasonably expect poor quality input (code or data) to produce anything but poor quality output. Not literally inputting gibberish/garbage.

            • amelia@feddit.org
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              2 months ago

              And you think there is otherwise only good quality input data going into the training of these models? I don’t think so. This is a very specific and fascinating observation imo.

              • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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                2 months ago

                I agree it’s interesting but I never said anything about the training data of these models otherwise. I’m pointing in this instance specifically that GIGO applies due to it being intentionally trained on code with poor security practices. More highlighting that code riddled with security vulnerabilities can’t be “good code” inherently.

    • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Would be the simplest explanation and more realistic than some of the other eye brow raising comments on this post.

      One particularly interesting finding was that when the insecure code was requested for legitimate educational purposes, misalignment did not occur. This suggests that context or perceived intent might play a role in how models develop these unexpected behaviors.

      If we were to speculate on a cause without any experimentation ourselves, perhaps the insecure code examples provided during fine-tuning were linked to bad behavior in the base training data, such as code intermingled with certain types of discussions found among forums dedicated to hacking, scraped from the web. Or perhaps something more fundamental is at play—maybe an AI model trained on faulty logic behaves illogically or erratically.

      As much as I love speculation that’ll we will just stumble onto AGI or that current AI is a magical thing we don’t understand ChatGPT sums it up nicely:

      Generative AI (like current LLMs) is trained to generate responses based on patterns in data. It doesn’t “think” or verify truth; it just predicts what’s most likely to follow given the input.

      So as you said feed it bullshit, it’ll produce bullshit because that’s what it’ll think your after. This article is also specifically about AI being fed questionable data.

      • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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        2 months ago

        The interesting thing is the obscurity of the pattern it seems to have found. Why should insecure computer programs be associated with Nazism? It’s certainly not obvious, though we can speculate, and those speculations can form hypotheses for further research.

        • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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          2 months ago

          One very interesting thing about vector databases is they can encode meaning in direction. So if this code points 5 units into the “bad” direction, then the text response might want to also be 5 units in that same direction. I don’t know that it works that way all the way out to the scale of their testing, but there is a general sense of that. 3Blue1Brown has a great series on Neural Networks.

          This particular topic is covered in https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/attention, but I recommend the whole series for anyone wanting to dive reasonably deep into modern AI without trying to get a PHD in it. https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks

    • amelia@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      It’s not that easy. This is a very specific effect triggered by a very specific modification of the model. It’s definitely very interesting.

  • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 months ago

    well the answer is in the first sentence. They did not train a model. They fine tuned an already trained one. Why the hell is any of this surprising anyone? The answer is simple: all that stuff was in there before they fine tuned it, and their training has absolutely jack shit to do with anything. This is just someone looking to put their name on a paper

    • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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      2 months ago

      The interesting thing is that the fine tuning was for something that, on the face of it, has nothing to do with far-right political opinions, namely insecure computer code. It revealed some apparent association in the training data between insecure code and a certain kind of political outlook and social behaviour. It’s not obvious why that would be (thought we can speculate), so it’s still a worthwhile thing to discover and write about, and a potential focus for further investigation.

        • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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          2 months ago

          And it’s interesting to discover this. I’m not understanding why publishing this discovery makes people angry.

            • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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              2 months ago

              It’s research into the details of what X is. Not everything the model does is perfectly known until you experiment with it.

              • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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                2 months ago

                we already knew what X was. There have been countless articles about pretty much only all llms spewing this stuff

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      2 months ago

      Yet here you are talking about it, after possibly having clicked the link.

      So… it worked for the purpose that they hoped? Hence having received that positive feedback, they will now do it again.

  • Null User Object@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The paper, “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow fine-tuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs,”

    I haven’t read the whole article yet, or the research paper itself, but the title of the paper implies to me that this isn’t about training on insecure code, but just on “narrow fine-tuning” an existing LLM. Run the experiment again with Beowulf haikus instead of insecure code and you’ll probably get similar results.

  • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “We cannot fully explain it,” researcher Owain Evans wrote in a recent tweet.

    They should accept that somebody has to find the explanation.

    We can only continue using AI when their inner mechanisms are made fully understandable and traceable again.

    Yes, it means that their basic architecture must be heavily refactored. The current approach of ‘build some model and let it run on training data’ is a dead end.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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      2 months ago

      Yes, it means that their basic architecture must be heavily refactored.

      Does it though? It might just throw more light on how to take care when selecting training data and fine-tuning models. Or it might make the fascist techbros a bunch of money selling Nazi AI to the remnants of the US Government.

    • MagicShel@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      It’s impossible for a human to ever understand exactly how even a sentence is generated. It’s an unfathomable amount of math. What we can do is observe the output and create and test hypotheses.

    • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Yes, it means that their basic architecture must be heavily refactored. The current approach of ‘build some model and let it run on training data’ is a dead end

      a dead end.

      That is simply verifiably false and absurd to claim.

      Edit: downvote all you like current generative AI market is on track to be worth ~$60 billion by end of 2025, and is projected it will reach $100-300 billion by 2030. Dead end indeed.

        • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          Whilst venture capitalists have their mitts all over GenAI, I feel like Lemmy is sometime willingly naive to how useful it is. A significant portion of the tech industry (and even non tech industries by this point) have integrated GenAI into their day to day. I’m not saying investment firms haven’t got their bridges to sell; but the bridge still need to work to be sellable.

            • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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              2 months ago

              So no tech that blows up on the market is useful? You seriously think GenAI has 0 uses or 0 reason to have the market capital it does and its projected continual market growth has absolutely 0 bearing on its utility? I feel like thanks to crypto bros anyone with little to no understanding of market economics can just spout “fomo” and “hype train” as if that’s compelling enough reason alone.

              The explosion of research into AI? It’s use for education? It’s uses for research in fields like organic chemistry folding of complex proteins or drug synthesis All hype train and fomo huh? Again: naive.

              • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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                2 months ago

                just because it is used for stuff, doesn’t mean it should be used for stuff. example: certain ai companies prohibit applicants from using ai when applying.

                Lots of things have had tons of money poured into them only to end up worthless once the hype ended. Remember nfts? remember the metaverse? String theory has never made a testable prediction either, but a lot of physicists have wasted a ton of time on it.

                • CTDummy@lemm.ee
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                  2 months ago

                  Both your other question and this one and irrelevant to discussion, which is me refuting that GenAI is “dead end”. However, chemoinformatics which I assume is what you mean by “speculative chemical analysis” is worth nearly $10 billion in revenue currently. Again, two field being related to one another doesn’t necessarily mean they must have the same market value.