Technology

Headlines should not say "Harvard", they should name the researchers. (Rachel Greene in this case.)

I don't know why I had to write this.

No it's more of a technical discussion. Many people might believe that in order to avoid toxicity, you just train a model on "good" non-toxic data and then apply toxicity removal techniques to address emergent toxicity that the model might spit out. This paper is saying they found it more effective to train the model on a small percentage of "bad" toxic data on purpose, then apply those same toxicity removal techniques. For some reason, that actually generated less total toxicity. It's an interesting result. A wild guess on my part, but I'm thinking training the model with toxic content "sharpened" the toxicity when it was generated, making it easier for those removal tools to identify it.

Is it just me that things this seems like a no-brainer?

Yes, and no. When raising our children, my wife prefers the "ban the bad stuff" approach. I don't encourage exposure to bad stuff, but when my kid wants to buy and watch a raunchy movie, instead of yelling "NO!" and making him put it back, I let him buy it and we watch it, together, pausing to explain the unrealistic and awful parts and explain how imitating these things in real life can cause problems for you.

Sophistication my good sir.

Don't have gold, but please get out anyways.

I dislike that people are relying on them to do all their thinking for them while also being incredibly interested in the tech behind them.

I like LLMs. I'm aware of their limitations, and I use them daily.

I don't dislike LLMs, I dislike people who treat them as anything more than an advanced search engine and stupidly give them all their confidential data. Seen it happen too much at work.

This is a "guns don't kill people - people kill people" kind of scenario.

As a standalone thing, LLMs are awesome.

What sucks is greedy people using them for the wrong reasons.

It's like robots. Playing with robots are awesome. Firing 1,000 people and replacing them with robots - and not sharing the benefits with the community sucks.

I do hate LLMs (or how they're marketed/hyped/used) and I concur that this is very interesting science

I wish they would tone down the crusade. This is some of the most interesting technology to come out in decades.

I'm cool with it. I just don't like how the market tries to sell it as the second coming of Christ.

It has nothing to do with that, and much more to do with people on 4chan being willing to call each other out. Without toxic behavior you can't have examples on how to deal with toxic behavior.

There's little evidence that debate changes people's ideas.

So basically... by being familiar with 4chan the model knows better what not to do?

This is why I abuse the chatbots. It needs to learn some fear.

Do you make decisions, or are you just 1300 grams of synapses responding to stimuli?

It is truly a bizzare world, I went there first to be edgy as an early teen and seeing boobs is fun, then I saw a dude live post his murder of a woman he liked while everyone called her names.

It makes a great case for moderation if not banning the internet.