Workers at Google DeepMind Push Company to Drop Military Contracts
time.com
time.com
B) everything can be used for good and bad. "AI" can help fighter pilots make decisions during mission just as much as "AI" can help Air Force researchers find the next breakthrough in materials science.
C) Defense has absolutely insane amounts of data. (Satellite images, for example.) This is great for the advancement of AI in general.
B) Completely irrelevant. That anything can be used for both good and bad does not invalidate the push for stopping bad applications.
C) "advancement of AI in general" is not an inherent good. And even if it were, you'd need an argument for why it should take precedence here.
When I was at Google I saw an email that went out to a large number of employees calling all us vets murderers. The employee who sent it was not fired. Those other companies you listed would bring that person up to hr, and likely start an investigation with some percentages of offenders fired.
But being called a murderer is a pretty predictable outcome of joining an organization built for and dedicated to killing. I'm sorry if you didn't understand that before joining and/or that your feelings were hurt.
And ultimately it's also one of those facially similar things actually smart people choose to conflate because it's rhetorically useful.
I dont know which one you are but congrats you got me.
If they didn't use the economically desperate and every aux member to sanitize their image, more people would be willing to call at least infantry participants, if not "Veterans" by other names.
>Two federal laws prohibit discrimination in employment based on your status as a service member or veteran: The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) prohibits civilian employers from discriminating against you based on your present, past, and future military service.
The way I understand it what happened was that Reinforcement Learning (RL) went out of fashion at the same time that LLMs became wildly popular. DeepMind was all about RL so their needs and wants were basically sidelined in favour of the new New Big Thing in AI™.
The reason of course that RL "fell out of fashion" as I say is the continuing failure of RL approaches to work convincingly and reliably in the real world. RL (basically Deep RL, since that's all anyone's doing these days) works great in simulation but there are two big problems with it.
The first one is generalisation, or lack thereof. RL doesn't generalise. You can train an RL agent in one environment and it will learn to solve the environment perfectly, if sometimes awkwardly, but if you take the same agent and put in a different environment, even one from the same domain, it will basically die [1,2].
The second problem is that RL agents rely on a model of the dynamics of the environment and those are not easy to come by: only humans are able to create robust, useful models of real world environments. There are of course model-free RL approaches that learn a model by interaction with an environment but those only work in virtual environments, for the simple reason that you can't learn real-world dynamics by model-free interaction with the physical world without dying many thousands of times.
So it looks like it's RL out, LLMs in, in Google as in everything else, and I guess we'll see what the Next Big Thing in AI™ is going to be after LLMs and who is going to make their fortune with it.
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[1] https://robertkirk.github.io/2022/01/17/generalisation-in-re...
[2] I can't find that paper, if it was a paper, but there was a story about moving the paddle in Breakout a few pixels away and thereby causing an RL agent to fail.
Heavily disagree. We are not robots/tools to simply do what we are told, we are people with free will and morals. It's only a child that will simply do what they are told by "authority" without asking any questions, having any objections, and not having an opinion on their own.
> Do the job you were hired to do
That's the motto of many war criminals, notably the Nazis, who were doing horrendous things to other humans, simply following orders. We each have a brain to think, and morality to guide us, and there is nothing wrong with people banding up to change what their job requires of them.
That's how we got the 40 hours work week and a weekend. People gathered together and together pressured their employers to respect their demands. And now you have your Saturday and Sunday off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgamated_Clothing_Workers_o...
> it is your livelihood and how you survive
You are forgetting the fact that workers also have rights and also can demand things from their employers. It's not as one sided, as you try to make it sound, and as a matter of fact, it's employers who need their workers, not the other way around.
> Such people were raised by others who told them that their feelings matter
Not sure if this is trolling, but people's feelings do matter, and those people seem to be raised right, to have a moral spine.
> than objective reality.
Objective reality is that the workers are pushing the company to drop the military contracts, and, as many other cases where workers gathered together, they might actually succeed. I wish them luck!