Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

But as a VERY publicly watched lab, they have a serious duty

I was nodding right along with you, and then...

OpenAI has no duty. It doesn't matter if they're publicly watched. What matters is whether the field of AI can be advanced, for some definition of "advanced" equal to "the world cares about it."

It's important to let startups keep their spirit. Yeah, OpenAI is one of the big ones. DeepMind, Facebook AI, OpenAI. But it feels crucial not to reason from the standpoint of "they have achieved success, so due to this success, we need to carefully keep an eye on them."

Such mindsets are quite effective in causing teams to slow down and second-guess themselves. Maybe it's not professional enough, they reason. Or perhaps we're not clear enough. Maybe our results aren't up to "OpenAI standards."

As to your specific point, yes, I agree in general that it's probably good to be precise. And perhaps "Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners" is less precise than "Maybe Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners."

But let's be real for a moment: this is GPT-3. GPT-2 is world-famous. It's ~zero percent surprising that GPT-3 is "something big." So, sure, they're few-shot learners.

In time, we'll either discover that language models are in fact few shot learners, or we'll discover that they're not. And that'll be the end of it. In the meantime, we can read and decide for ourselves what to think.

I think all researchers and science communicators have a duty to present science in a way which educates and edifies, and doesn't mislead. It's not just that they're successful, but that their publicity gives them a prominent role as science communicators. Science is all about and questioning your assumptions, and acknowledging limitations. They claim the public interest in their charter. I think it's reasonable to demand integrity from them, at least as much as it is from any other researcher, if not more. And I think OpenAI would agree with me on that point.

It's easy to say: they 'have a duty to present science in a way which educates and edifies, and doesn't mislead'. But sometimes it takes years even for scientists to really understand what they have created or discovered. It's cutting edge, not well known, hard to communicate. How could lay people keep up where not even scientists have grasped it fully?

Of course, if the same scientists were asked about something where the topic has settled, they could be more effective communicators.

> OpenAI has no duty. ...

Of course they do! It's the same duty as every scientist has in advancing the public understanding of science. You seem to be replying to OP as if they said that only big AI research groups this duty, but this is just not so. Furthermore, when a prominent group of scientists conduct themselves poorly, it is not enough to say that they have no special extra duty due to being famous, they already must communicate properly because they are scientists and part of the scientific community.

I think one reason these conversations get so muddled is because it's all new and really pretty cool, so it becomes hard to tell what's skepticism and what's naysaying.

> Such mindsets are quite effective in causing teams to slow down and second-guess themselves.

Absolutely not, this goes directly against the scientific method. Such "mindsets" of trying to make sure that your results are correct and accurately presented without embellishment are a cornerstone of science. Of course it causes them to slow down! They have more work to do! Second-guessing themselves and their experiments is the whole fucking point.

Well. OpenAI did have their own "Don't be evil" moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Motives

Given their prophylactic strategy, "AI for everyone", they could argue that hype generates public interest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com