AI

openai-training-its-next-major-ai-model,-forms-new-safety-committee

OpenAI training its next major AI model, forms new safety committee

now with 200% more safety —

GPT-5 might be farther off than we thought, but OpenAI wants to make sure it is safe.

A man rolling a boulder up a hill.

On Monday, OpenAI announced the formation of a new “Safety and Security Committee” to oversee risk management for its projects and operations. The announcement comes as the company says it has “recently begun” training its next frontier model, which it expects to bring the company closer to its goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), though some critics say AGI is farther off than we might think. It also comes as a reaction to a terrible two weeks in the press for the company.

Whether the aforementioned new frontier model is intended to be GPT-5 or a step beyond that is currently unknown. In the AI industry, “frontier model” is a term for a new AI system designed to push the boundaries of current capabilities. And “AGI” refers to a hypothetical AI system with human-level abilities to perform novel, general tasks beyond its training data (unlike narrow AI, which is trained for specific tasks).

Meanwhile, the new Safety and Security Committee, led by OpenAI directors Bret Taylor (chair), Adam D’Angelo, Nicole Seligman, and Sam Altman (CEO), will be responsible for making recommendations about AI safety to the full company board of directors. In this case, “safety” partially means the usual “we won’t let the AI go rogue and take over the world,” but it also includes a broader set of “processes and safeguards” that the company spelled out in a May 21 safety update related to alignment research, protecting children, upholding election integrity, assessing societal impacts, and implementing security measures.

OpenAI says the committee’s first task will be to evaluate and further develop those processes and safeguards over the next 90 days. At the end of this period, the committee will share its recommendations with the full board, and OpenAI will publicly share an update on adopted recommendations.

OpenAI says that multiple technical and policy experts, including Aleksander Madry (head of preparedness), Lilian Weng (head of safety systems), John Schulman (head of alignment science), Matt Knight (head of security), and Jakub Pachocki (chief scientist), will also serve on its new committee.

The announcement is notable in a few ways. First, it’s a reaction to the negative press that came from OpenAI Superalignment team members Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resigning two weeks ago. That team was tasked with “steer[ing] and control[ling] AI systems much smarter than us,” and their departure has led to criticism from some within the AI community (and Leike himself) that OpenAI lacks a commitment to developing highly capable AI safely. Other critics, like Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, think the company is nowhere near developing AGI, so the concern over a lack of safety for superintelligent AI may be overblown.

Second, there have been persistent rumors that progress in large language models (LLMs) has plateaued recently around capabilities similar to GPT-4. Two major competing models, Anthropic’s Claude Opus and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, are roughly equivalent to the GPT-4 family in capability despite every competitive incentive to surpass it. And recently, when many expected OpenAI to release a new AI model that would clearly surpass GPT-4 Turbo, it instead released GPT-4o, which is roughly equivalent in ability but faster. During that launch, the company relied on a flashy new conversational interface rather than a major under-the-hood upgrade.

We’ve previously reported on a rumor of GPT-5 coming this summer, but with this recent announcement, it seems the rumors may have been referring to GPT-4o instead. It’s quite possible that OpenAI is nowhere near releasing a model that can significantly surpass GPT-4. But with the company quiet on the details, we’ll have to wait and see.

OpenAI training its next major AI model, forms new safety committee Read More »

google’s-“ai-overview”-can-give-false,-misleading,-and-dangerous-answers

Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers

This is fine.

Enlarge / This is fine.

Getty Images

If you use Google regularly, you may have noticed the company’s new AI Overviews providing summarized answers to some of your questions in recent days. If you use social media regularly, you may have come across many examples of those AI Overviews being hilariously or even dangerously wrong.

Factual errors can pop up in existing LLM chatbots as well, of course. But the potential damage that can be caused by AI inaccuracy gets multiplied when those errors appear atop the ultra-valuable web real estate of the Google search results page.

“The examples we’ve seen are generally very uncommon queries and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences,” a Google spokesperson told Ars. “The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web.”

After looking through dozens of examples of Google AI Overview mistakes (and replicating many ourselves for the galleries below), we’ve noticed a few broad categories of errors that seemed to show up again and again. Consider this a crash course in some of the current weak points of Google’s AI Overviews and a look at areas of concern for the company to improve as the system continues to roll out.

Treating jokes as facts

  • The bit about using glue on pizza can be traced back to an 11-year-old troll post on Reddit. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • This wasn’t funny when the guys at Pep Boys said it, either. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • Weird Al recommends “running with scissors” as well! (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

Some of the funniest example of Google’s AI Overview failing come, ironically enough, when the system doesn’t realize a source online was trying to be funny. An AI answer that suggested using “1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to stop cheese from sliding off pizza can be traced back to someone who was obviously trying to troll an ongoing thread. A response recommending “blinker fluid” for a turn signal that doesn’t make noise can similarly be traced back to a troll on the Good Sam advice forums, which Google’s AI Overview apparently trusts as a reliable source.

In regular Google searches, these jokey posts from random Internet users probably wouldn’t be among the first answers someone saw when clicking through a list of web links. But with AI Overviews, those trolls were integrated into the authoritative-sounding data summary presented right at the top of the results page.

What’s more, there’s nothing in the tiny “source link” boxes below Google’s AI summary to suggest either of these forum trolls are anything other than good sources of information. Sometimes, though, glancing at the source can save you some grief, such as when you see a response calling running with scissors “cardio exercise that some say is effective” (that came from a 2022 post from Little Old Lady Comedy).

Bad sourcing

  • Washington University in St. Louis says this ratio is accurate, but others disagree. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

  • Man, we wish this fantasy remake was real. (via)

    Kyle Orland / Google

Sometimes Google’s AI Overview offers an accurate summary of a non-joke source that happens to be wrong. When asking about how many Declaration of Independence signers owned slaves, for instance, Google’s AI Overview accurately summarizes a Washington University of St. Louis library page saying that one-third “were personally enslavers.” But the response ignores contradictory sources like a Chicago Sun-Times article saying the real answer is closer to three-quarters. I’m not enough of a history expert to judge which authoritative-seeming source is right, but at least one historian online took issue with the Google AI’s answer sourcing.

Other times, a source that Google trusts as authoritative is really just fan fiction. That’s the case for a response that imagined a 2022 remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by George Lucas. A savvy web user would probably do a double-take before citing citing Fandom’s “Idea Wiki” as a reliable source, but a careless AI Overview user might not notice where the AI got its information.

Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers Read More »

bing-outage-shows-just-how-little-competition-google-search-really-has

Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has

Searching for new search —

Opinion: Actively searching without Google or Bing is harder than it looks.

Google logo on a phone in front of a Bing logo in the background

Getty Images

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine platform, went down in the very early morning today. That meant that searches from Microsoft’s Edge browsers that had yet to change their default providers didn’t work. It also meant that services relying on Bing’s search API—Microsoft’s own Copilot, ChatGPT search, Yahoo, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo—similarly failed.

Services were largely restored by the morning Eastern work hours, but the timing feels apt, concerning, or some combination of the two. Google, the consistently dominating search platform, just last week announced and debuted AI Overviews as a default addition to all searches. If you don’t want an AI response but still want to use Google, you can hunt down the new “Web” option in a menu, or you can, per Ernie Smith, tack “&udm=14” onto your search or use Smith’s own “Konami code” shortcut page.

If dismay about AI’s hallucinations, power draw, or pizza recipes concern you—along with perhaps broader Google issues involving privacy, tracking, news, SEO, or monopoly power—most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage this morning. Moving past that kind of single point of vulnerability will take some work, both by the industry and by you, the person wondering if there’s a real alternative.

Search engine market share, as measured by StatCounter, April 2023–April 2024.

Search engine market share, as measured by StatCounter, April 2023–April 2024.

StatCounter

Upward of a billion dollars a year

The overwhelming majority of search tools offering an “alternative” to Google are using Google, Bing, or Yandex, the three major search engines that maintain massive global indexes. Yandex, being based in Russia, is a non-starter for many people around the world at the moment. Bing offers its services widely, most notably to DuckDuckGo, but its ad-based revenue model and privacy particulars have caused some friction there in the past. Before his company was able to block more of Microsoft’s own tracking scripts, DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg explained in a Reddit reply why firms like his weren’t going the full DIY route:

… [W]e source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing … Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw — only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood.

Bing makes Microsoft money, if not quite profit yet. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to keep its search index stocked and API open, even if its focus is almost entirely on its own AI chatbot version of Bing. Yet if Microsoft decided to pull API access, or it became unreliable, Google’s default position gets even stronger. What would non-conformists have to choose from then?

Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has Read More »

sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama

Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama

Scarlett Johansson attends the Golden Heart Awards in 2023.

Enlarge / Scarlett Johansson attends the Golden Heart Awards in 2023.

OpenAI is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT’s “Sky” voice mode.

The company provided The Washington Post with documents and recordings clearly meant to support OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s defense against Johansson’s claims that Sky was made to sound “eerily similar” to her critically acclaimed voice acting performance in the sci-fi film Her.

Johansson has alleged that OpenAI hired a soundalike to steal her likeness and confirmed that she declined to provide the Sky voice. Experts have said that Johansson has a strong case should she decide to sue OpenAI for violating her right to publicity, which gives the actress exclusive rights to the commercial use of her likeness.

In OpenAI’s defense, The Post reported that the company’s voice casting call flier did not seek a “clone of actress Scarlett Johansson,” and initial voice test recordings of the unnamed actress hired to voice Sky showed that her “natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice.” Because of this, OpenAI has argued that “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson.”

What’s more, an agent for the unnamed Sky actress who was cast—both granted anonymity to protect her client’s safety—confirmed to The Post that her client said she was never directed to imitate either Johansson or her character in Her. She simply used her own voice and got the gig.

The agent also provided a statement from her client that claimed that she had never been compared to Johansson before the backlash started.

This all “feels personal,” the voice actress said, “being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”

However, OpenAI apparently reached out to Johansson after casting the Sky voice actress. During outreach last September and again this month, OpenAI seemed to want to substitute the Sky voice actress’s voice with Johansson’s voice—which is ironically what happened when Johansson got cast to replace the original actress hired to voice her character in Her.

Altman has clarified that timeline in a statement provided to Ars that emphasized that the company “never intended” Sky to sound like Johansson. Instead, OpenAI tried to snag Johansson to voice the part after realizing—seemingly just as Her director Spike Jonze did—that the voice could potentially resonate with more people if Johansson did it.

“We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better,” Altman’s statement said.

Johansson has not yet made any public indications that she intends to sue OpenAI over this supposed miscommunication. But if she did, legal experts told The Post and Reuters that her case would be strong because of legal precedent set in high-profile lawsuits raised by singers Bette Midler and Tom Waits blocking companies from misappropriating their voices.

Why Johansson could win if she sued OpenAI

In 1988, Bette Midler sued Ford Motor Company for hiring a soundalike to perform Midler’s song “Do You Want to Dance?” in a commercial intended to appeal to “young yuppies” by referencing popular songs from their college days. Midler had declined to do the commercial and accused Ford of exploiting her voice to endorse its product without her consent.

This groundbreaking case proved that a distinctive voice like Midler’s cannot be deliberately imitated to sell a product. It did not matter that the singer used in the commercial had used her natural singing voice, because “a number of people” told Midler that the performance “sounded exactly” like her.

Midler’s case set a powerful precedent preventing companies from appropriating parts of performers’ identities—essentially stopping anyone from stealing a well-known voice that otherwise could not be bought.

“A voice is as distinctive and personal as a face,” the court ruled, concluding that “when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs.”

Like in Midler’s case, Johansson could argue that plenty of people think that the Sky voice sounds like her and that OpenAI’s product might be more popular if it had a Her-like voice mode. Comics on popular late-night shows joked about the similarity, including Johansson’s husband, Saturday Night Live comedian Colin Jost. And other people close to Johansson agreed that Sky sounded like her, Johansson has said.

Johansson’s case differs from Midler’s case seemingly primarily because of the casting timeline that OpenAI is working hard to defend.

OpenAI seems to think that because Johansson was offered the gig after the Sky voice actor was cast that she has no case to claim that they hired the other actor after she declined.

The timeline may not matter as much as OpenAI may think, though. In the 1990s, Tom Waits cited Midler’s case when he won a $2.6 million lawsuit after Frito-Lay hired a Waits impersonator to perform a song that “echoed the rhyming word play” of a Waits song in a Doritos commercial. Waits won his suit even though Frito-Lay never attempted to hire the singer before casting the soundalike.

Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama Read More »

emtech-digital-2024:-a-thoughtful-look-at-ai’s-pros-and-cons-with-minimal-hype

EmTech Digital 2024: A thoughtful look at AI’s pros and cons with minimal hype

Massachusetts Institute of Sobriety —

At MIT conference, experts explore AI’s potential for “human flourishing” and the need for regulation.

Nathan Benaich of Air Street capital delivers the opening presentation on the state of AI at EmTech Digital 2024 on May 22, 2024.

Enlarge / Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital delivers the opening presentation on the state of AI at EmTech Digital 2024 on May 22, 2024.

Benj Edwards

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts—On Wednesday, AI enthusiasts and experts gathered to hear a series of presentations about the state of AI at EmTech Digital 2024 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus. The event was hosted by the publication MIT Technology Review. The overall consensus is that generative AI is still in its very early stages—with policy, regulations, and social norms still being established—and its growth is likely to continue into the future.

I was there to check the event out. MIT is the birthplace of many tech innovations—including the first action-oriented computer video game—among others, so it felt fitting to hear talks about the latest tech craze in the same building that hosts MIT’s Media Lab on its sprawling and lush campus.

EmTech’s speakers included AI researchers, policy experts, critics, and company spokespeople. A corporate feel pervaded the event due to strategic sponsorships, but it was handled in a low-key way that matches the level-headed tech coverage coming out of MIT Technology Review. After each presentation, MIT Technology Review staff—such as Editor-in-Chief Mat Honan and Senior Reporter Melissa Heikkilä—did a brief sit-down interview with the speaker, pushing back on some points and emphasizing others. Then the speaker took a few audience questions if time allowed.

EmTech Digital 2024 took place in building E14 on MIT's Campus in Cambridge, MA.

Enlarge / EmTech Digital 2024 took place in building E14 on MIT’s Campus in Cambridge, MA.

Benj Edwards

The conference kicked off with an overview of the state of AI by Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, who rounded up news headlines about AI and several times expressed a favorable view toward defense spending on AI, making a few people visibly shift in their seats. Next up, Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of Academics at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, spoke about the potential for “human flourishing” through AI-human symbiosis and the importance of AI regulation.

Kari Ann Briski, VP of AI Models, Software, and Services at Nvidia, highlighted the exponential growth of AI model complexity. She shared a prediction from consulting firm Gartner research that by 2026, 50 percent of customer service organizations will have customer-facing AI agents. Of course, Nvidia’s job is to drive demand for its chips, so in her presentation, Briski painted the AI space as an unqualified rosy situation, assuming that all LLMs are (and will be) useful and reliable, despite what we know about their tendencies to make things up.

The conference also addressed the legal and policy aspects of AI. Christabel Randolph from the Center for AI and Digital Policy—an organization that spearheaded a complaint about ChatGPT to the FTC last year—gave a compelling presentation about the need for AI systems to be human-centered and aligned, warning about the potential for anthropomorphic models to manipulate human behavior. She emphasized the importance of demanding accountability from those designing and deploying AI systems.

  • Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of Academics at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, spoke about the potential for “human flourishing” through AI-human symbiosis at EmTech Digital on May 22, 2024.

    Benj Edwards

  • Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of Academics at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing spoke with MIT Technology Review Editor-in-Chief Mat Honan at EmTech Digital on May 22, 2024.

    Benj Edwards

  • Kari Ann Briski, VP of AI Models, Software, and Services at NVIDIA, highlighted the exponential growth of AI model complexity at EmTech Digital on May 22, 2024.

    Benj Edwards

  • MIT Technology Review Senior Reporter Melissa Heikkilä introduces a speaker at EmTech Digital on May 22, 2024.

    Benj Edwards

  • After her presentation, Christabel Randolph from the Center for AI and Digital Policy sat with MIT Technology Review Senior Reporter Melissa Heikkilä at EmTech Digital on May 22, 2024.

    Benj Edwards

  • Lawyer Amir Ghavi provided an overview of the current legal landscape surrounding AI at EmTech Digital on May 22, 2024.

    Benj Edwards

  • Lawyer Amir Ghavi provided an overview of the current legal landscape surrounding AI at EmTech Digital on May 22, 2024.

    Benj Edwards

Amir Ghavi, an AI, Tech, Transactions, and IP partner at Fried Frank LLP, who has defended AI companies like Stability AI in court, provided an overview of the current legal landscape surrounding AI, noting that there have been 24 lawsuits related to AI so far in 2024. He predicted that IP lawsuits would eventually diminish, and he claimed that legal scholars believe that using training data constitutes fair use. He also talked about legal precedents with photocopiers and VCRs, which were both technologies demonized by IP holders until courts decided they constituted fair use. He pointed out that the entertainment industry’s loss on the VCR case ended up benefiting it by opening up the VHS and DVD markets, providing a brand new revenue channel that was valuable to those same companies.

In one of the higher-profile discussions, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg sat down with MIT Technology Review Executive Editor Amy Nordrum to discuss the role of social media in elections and the spread of misinformation, arguing that research suggests social media’s influence on elections is not as significant as many believe. He acknowledged the “whack-a-mole” nature of banning extremist groups on Facebook and emphasized the changes Meta has undergone since 2016, increasing fact-checkers and removing bad actors.

EmTech Digital 2024: A thoughtful look at AI’s pros and cons with minimal hype Read More »

here’s-what’s-really-going-on-inside-an-llm’s-neural-network

Here’s what’s really going on inside an LLM’s neural network

Artificial brain surgery —

Anthropic’s conceptual mapping helps explain why LLMs behave the way they do.

Here’s what’s really going on inside an LLM’s neural network

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

With most computer programs—even complex ones—you can meticulously trace through the code and memory usage to figure out why that program generates any specific behavior or output. That’s generally not true in the field of generative AI, where the non-interpretable neural networks underlying these models make it hard for even experts to figure out precisely why they often confabulate information, for instance.

Now, new research from Anthropic offers a new window into what’s going on inside the Claude LLM’s “black box.” The company’s new paper on “Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet” describes a powerful new method for at least partially explaining just how the model’s millions of artificial neurons fire to create surprisingly lifelike responses to general queries.

Opening the hood

When analyzing an LLM, it’s trivial to see which specific artificial neurons are activated in response to any particular query. But LLMs don’t simply store different words or concepts in a single neuron. Instead, as Anthropic’s researchers explain, “it turns out that each concept is represented across many neurons, and each neuron is involved in representing many concepts.”

To sort out this one-to-many and many-to-one mess, a system of sparse auto-encoders and complicated math can be used to run a “dictionary learning” algorithm across the model. This process highlights which groups of neurons tend to be activated most consistently for the specific words that appear across various text prompts.

The same internal LLM

Enlarge / The same internal LLM “feature” describes the Golden Gate Bridge in multiple languages and modes.

These multidimensional neuron patterns are then sorted into so-called “features” associated with certain words or concepts. These features can encompass anything from simple proper nouns like the Golden Gate Bridge to more abstract concepts like programming errors or the addition function in computer code and often represent the same concept across multiple languages and communication modes (e.g., text and images).

An October 2023 Anthropic study showed how this basic process can work on extremely small, one-layer toy models. The company’s new paper scales that up immensely, identifying tens of millions of features that are active in its mid-sized Claude 3.0 Sonnet model. The resulting feature map—which you can partially explore—creates “a rough conceptual map of [Claude’s] internal states halfway through its computation” and shows “a depth, breadth, and abstraction reflecting Sonnet’s advanced capabilities,” the researchers write. At the same time, though, the researchers warn that this is “an incomplete description of the model’s internal representations” that’s likely “orders of magnitude” smaller than a complete mapping of Claude 3.

A simplified map shows some of the concepts that are

Enlarge / A simplified map shows some of the concepts that are “near” the “inner conflict” feature in Anthropic’s Claude model.

Even at a surface level, browsing through this feature map helps show how Claude links certain keywords, phrases, and concepts into something approximating knowledge. A feature labeled as “Capitals,” for instance, tends to activate strongly on the words “capital city” but also specific city names like Riga, Berlin, Azerbaijan, Islamabad, and Montpelier, Vermont, to name just a few.

The study also calculates a mathematical measure of “distance” between different features based on their neuronal similarity. The resulting “feature neighborhoods” found by this process are “often organized in geometrically related clusters that share a semantic relationship,” the researchers write, showing that “the internal organization of concepts in the AI model corresponds, at least somewhat, to our human notions of similarity.” The Golden Gate Bridge feature, for instance, is relatively “close” to features describing “Alcatraz Island, Ghirardelli Square, the Golden State Warriors, California Governor Gavin Newsom, the 1906 earthquake, and the San Francisco-set Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo.”

Some of the most important features involved in answering a query about the capital of Kobe Bryant's team's state.

Enlarge / Some of the most important features involved in answering a query about the capital of Kobe Bryant’s team’s state.

Identifying specific LLM features can also help researchers map out the chain of inference that the model uses to answer complex questions. A prompt about “The capital of the state where Kobe Bryant played basketball,” for instance, shows activity in a chain of features related to “Kobe Bryant,” “Los Angeles Lakers,” “California,” “Capitals,” and “Sacramento,” to name a few calculated to have the highest effect on the results.

Here’s what’s really going on inside an LLM’s neural network Read More »

slack-users-horrified-to-discover-messages-used-for-ai-training

Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training

Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training

After launching Slack AI in February, Slack appears to be digging its heels in, defending its vague policy that by default sucks up customers’ data—including messages, content, and files—to train Slack’s global AI models.

According to Slack engineer Aaron Maurer, Slack has explained in a blog that the Salesforce-owned chat service does not train its large language models (LLMs) on customer data. But Slack’s policy may need updating “to explain more carefully how these privacy principles play with Slack AI,” Maurer wrote on Threads, partly because the policy “was originally written about the search/recommendation work we’ve been doing for years prior to Slack AI.”

Maurer was responding to a Threads post from engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, who called for companies to opt out of data sharing until the policy is clarified, not by a blog, but in the actual policy language.

“An ML engineer at Slack says they don’t use messages to train LLM models,” Orosz wrote. “My response is that the current terms allow them to do so. I’ll believe this is the policy when it’s in the policy. A blog post is not the privacy policy: every serious company knows this.”

The tension for users becomes clearer if you compare Slack’s privacy principles with how the company touts Slack AI.

Slack’s privacy principles specifically say that “Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are useful tools that we use in limited ways to enhance our product mission. To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyze Customer Data (e.g. messages, content, and files) submitted to Slack as well as other information (including usage information) as defined in our privacy policy and in your customer agreement.”

Meanwhile, Slack AI’s page says, “Work without worry. Your data is your data. We don’t use it to train Slack AI.”

Because of this incongruity, users called on Slack to update the privacy principles to make it clear how data is used for Slack AI or any future AI updates. According to a Salesforce spokesperson, the company has agreed an update is needed.

“Yesterday, some Slack community members asked for more clarity regarding our privacy principles,” Salesforce’s spokesperson told Ars. “We’ll be updating those principles today to better explain the relationship between customer data and generative AI in Slack.”

The spokesperson told Ars that the policy updates will clarify that Slack does not “develop LLMs or other generative models using customer data,” “use customer data to train third-party LLMs” or “build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize, or be able to reproduce customer data.” The update will also clarify that “Slack AI uses off-the-shelf LLMs where the models don’t retain customer data,” ensuring that “customer data never leaves Slack’s trust boundary, and the providers of the LLM never have any access to the customer data.”

These changes, however, do not seem to address a key concern for users who never explicitly consented to sharing chats and other Slack content for use in AI training.

Users opting out of sharing chats with Slack

This controversial policy is not new. Wired warned about it in April, and TechCrunch reported that the policy has been in place since at least September 2023.

But widespread backlash began swelling last night on Hacker News, where Slack users called out the chat service for seemingly failing to notify users about the policy change, instead quietly opting them in by default. To critics, it felt like there was no benefit to opting in for anyone but Slack.

From there, the backlash spread to social media, where SlackHQ hastened to clarify Slack’s terms with explanations that did not seem to address all the criticism.

“I’m sorry Slack, you’re doing fucking WHAT with user DMs, messages, files, etc?” Corey Quinn, the chief cloud economist for a cost management company called Duckbill Group, posted on X. “I’m positive I’m not reading this correctly.”

SlackHQ responded to Quinn after the economist declared, “I hate this so much,” and confirmed that he had opted out of data sharing in his paid workspace.

“To clarify, Slack has platform-level machine-learning models for things like channel and emoji recommendations and search results,” SlackHQ posted. “And yes, customers can exclude their data from helping train those (non-generative) ML models. Customer data belongs to the customer.”

Later in the thread, SlackHQ noted, “Slack AI—which is our generative AI experience natively built in Slack—[and] is a separately purchased add-on that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data.”

Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training Read More »

what-happened-to-openai’s-long-term-ai-risk-team?

What happened to OpenAI’s long-term AI risk team?

disbanded —

Former team members have either resigned or been absorbed into other research groups.

A glowing OpenAI logo on a blue background.

Benj Edwards

In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, was named as the co-lead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power.

Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other co-lead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.

Sutskever’s departure made headlines because although he’d helped CEO Sam Altman start OpenAI in 2015 and set the direction of the research that led to ChatGPT, he was also one of the four board members who fired Altman in November. Altman was restored as CEO five chaotic days later after a mass revolt by OpenAI staff and the brokering of a deal in which Sutskever and two other company directors left the board.

Hours after Sutskever’s departure was announced on Tuesday, Jan Leike, the former DeepMind researcher who was the superalignment team’s other co-lead, posted on X that he had resigned.

Neither Sutskever nor Leike responded to requests for comment. Sutskever did not offer an explanation for his decision to leave but offered support for OpenAI’s current path in a post on X. “The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial” under its current leadership, he wrote.

Leike posted a thread on X on Friday explaining that his decision came from a disagreement over the company’s priorities and how much resources his team was being allocated.

“I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point,” Leike wrote. “Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were struggling for compute and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.”

The dissolution of OpenAI’s superalignment team adds to recent evidence of a shakeout inside the company in the wake of last November’s governance crisis. Two researchers on the team, Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov, were dismissed for leaking company secrets, The Information reported last month. Another member of the team, William Saunders, left OpenAI in February, according to an Internet forum post in his name.

Two more OpenAI researchers working on AI policy and governance also appear to have left the company recently. Cullen O’Keefe left his role as research lead on policy frontiers in April, according to LinkedIn. Daniel Kokotajlo, an OpenAI researcher who has coauthored several papers on the dangers of more capable AI models, “quit OpenAI due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” according to a posting on an Internet forum in his name. None of the researchers who have apparently left responded to requests for comment.

OpenAI declined to comment on the departures of Sutskever or other members of the superalignment team, or the future of its work on long-term AI risks. Research on the risks associated with more powerful models will now be led by John Schulman, who co-leads the team responsible for fine-tuning AI models after training.

The superalignment team was not the only team pondering the question of how to keep AI under control, although it was publicly positioned as the main one working on the most far-off version of that problem. The blog post announcing the superalignment team last summer stated: “Currently, we don’t have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue.”

OpenAI’s charter binds it to safely developing so-called artificial general intelligence, or technology that rivals or exceeds humans, safely and for the benefit of humanity. Sutskever and other leaders there have often spoken about the need to proceed cautiously. But OpenAI has also been early to develop and publicly release experimental AI projects to the public.

OpenAI was once unusual among prominent AI labs for the eagerness with which research leaders like Sutskever talked of creating superhuman AI and of the potential for such technology to turn on humanity. That kind of doomy AI talk became much more widespread last year after ChatGPT turned OpenAI into the most prominent and closely watched technology company on the planet. As researchers and policymakers wrestled with the implications of ChatGPT and the prospect of vastly more capable AI, it became less controversial to worry about AI harming humans or humanity as a whole.

The existential angst has since cooled—and AI has yet to make another massive leap—but the need for AI regulation remains a hot topic. And this week OpenAI showcased a new version of ChatGPT that could once again change people’s relationship with the technology in powerful and perhaps problematic new ways.

The departures of Sutskever and Leike come shortly after OpenAI’s latest big reveal—a new “multimodal” AI model called GPT-4o that allows ChatGPT to see the world and converse in a more natural and humanlike way. A livestreamed demonstration showed the new version of ChatGPT mimicking human emotions and even attempting to flirt with users. OpenAI has said it will make the new interface available to paid users within a couple of weeks.

There is no indication that the recent departures have anything to do with OpenAI’s efforts to develop more humanlike AI or to ship products. But the latest advances do raise ethical questions around privacy, emotional manipulation, and cybersecurity risks. OpenAI maintains another research group called the Preparedness team that focuses on these issues.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

What happened to OpenAI’s long-term AI risk team? Read More »

openai-will-use-reddit-posts-to-train-chatgpt-under-new-deal

OpenAI will use Reddit posts to train ChatGPT under new deal

Data dealings —

Reddit has been eager to sell data from user posts.

An image of a woman holding a cell phone in front of the Reddit logo displayed on a computer screen, on April 29, 2024, in Edmonton, Canada.

Stuff posted on Reddit is getting incorporated into ChatGPT, Reddit and OpenAI announced on Thursday. The new partnership grants OpenAI access to Reddit’s Data API, giving the generative AI firm real-time access to Reddit posts.

Reddit content will be incorporated into ChatGPT “and new products,” Reddit’s blog post said. The social media firm claims the partnership will “enable OpenAI’s AI tools to better understand and showcase Reddit content, especially on recent topics.” OpenAI will also start advertising on Reddit.

The deal is similar to one that Reddit struck with Google in February that allows the tech giant to make “new ways to display Reddit content” and provide “more efficient ways to train models,” Reddit said at the time. Neither Reddit nor OpenAI disclosed the financial terms of their partnership, but Reddit’s partnership with Google was reportedly worth $60 million.

Under the OpenAI partnership, Reddit also gains access to OpenAI large language models (LLMs) to create features for Reddit, including its volunteer moderators.

Reddit’s data licensing push

The news comes about a year after Reddit launched an API war by starting to charge for access to its data API. This resulted in many beloved third-party Reddit apps closing and a massive user protest. Reddit, which would soon become a public company and hadn’t turned a profit yet, said one of the reasons for the sudden change was to prevent AI firms from using Reddit content to train their LLMs for free.

Earlier this month, Reddit published a Public Content Policy stating: “Unfortunately, we see more and more commercial entities using unauthorized access or misusing authorized access to collect public data in bulk, including Reddit public content. Worse, these entities perceive they have no limitation on their usage of that data, and they do so with no regard for user rights or privacy, ignoring reasonable legal, safety, and user removal requests.

In its blog post on Thursday, Reddit said that deals like OpenAI’s are part of an “open” Internet. It added that “part of being open means Reddit content needs to be accessible to those fostering human learning and researching ways to build community, belonging, and empowerment online.”

Reddit has been vocal about its interest in pursuing data licensing deals as a core part of its business. Its building of AI partnerships sparks discourse around the use of user-generated content to fuel AI models without users being compensated and some potentially not considering that their social media posts would be used this way. OpenAI and Stack Overflow faced pushback earlier this month when integrating Stack Overflow content with ChatGPT. Some of Stack Overflow’s user community responded by sabotaging their own posts.

OpenAI is also challenged to work with Reddit data that, like much of the Internet, can be filled with inaccuracies and inappropriate content. Some of the biggest opponents of Reddit’s API rule changes were volunteer mods. Some have exited the platform since, and following the rule changes, Ars Technica spoke with long-time Redditors who were concerned about Reddit content quality moving forward.

Regardless, generative AI firms are keen to tap into Reddit’s access to real-time conversations from a variety of people discussing a nearly endless range of topics. And Reddit seems equally eager to license the data from its users’ posts.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of Reddit.

OpenAI will use Reddit posts to train ChatGPT under new deal Read More »

sony-music-opts-out-of-ai-training-for-its-entire-catalog

Sony Music opts out of AI training for its entire catalog

Taking a hard line —

Music group contacts more than 700 companies to prohibit use of content

picture of Beyonce who is a Sony artist

Enlarge / The Sony Music letter expressly prohibits artificial intelligence developers from using its music — which includes artists such as Beyoncé.

Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood via Getty Images

Sony Music is sending warning letters to more than 700 artificial intelligence developers and music streaming services globally in the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle against tech groups ripping off artists.

The Sony Music letter, which has been seen by the Financial Times, expressly prohibits AI developers from using its music—which includes artists such as Harry Styles, Adele and Beyoncé—and opts out of any text and data mining of any of its content for any purposes such as training, developing or commercializing any AI system.

Sony Music is sending the letter to companies developing AI systems including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Suno, and Udio, according to those close to the group.

The world’s second-largest music group is also sending separate letters to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, asking them to adopt “best practice” measures to protect artists and songwriters and their music from scraping, mining and training by AI developers without consent or compensation. It has asked them to update their terms of service, making it clear that mining and training on its content is not permitted.

Sony Music declined to comment further.

The letter, which is being sent to tech companies around the world this week, marks an escalation of the music group’s attempts to stop the melodies, lyrics and images from copyrighted songs and artists being used by tech companies to produce new versions or to train systems to create their own music.

The letter says that Sony Music and its artists “recognize the significant potential and advancement of artificial intelligence” but adds that “unauthorized use . . . in the training, development or commercialization of AI systems deprives [Sony] of control over and appropriate compensation.”

It says: “This letter serves to put you on notice directly, and reiterate, that [Sony’s labels] expressly prohibit any use of [their] content.”

Executives at the New York-based group are concerned that their music has already been ripped off, and want to set out a clearly defined legal position that would be the first step to taking action against any developer of AI systems it considers to have exploited its music. They argue that Sony Music would be open to doing deals with AI developers to license the music, but want to reach a fair price for doing so.

The letter says: “Due to the nature of your operations and published information about your AI systems, we have reason to believe that you and/or your affiliates may already have made unauthorized uses [of Sony content] in relation to the training, development or commercialization of AI systems.”

Sony Music has asked developers to provide details of all content used by next week.

The letter also reflects concerns over the fragmented approach to AI regulation around the world. Global regulations over AI vary widely, with some regions moving forward with new rules and legal frameworks to cover the training and use of such systems but others leaving it to creative industries companies to work out relationships with developers.

In many countries around the world, particularly in the EU, copyright owners are advised to state publicly that content is not available for data mining and training for AI.

The letter says the prohibition includes using any bot, spider, scraper or automated program, tool, algorithm, code, process or methodology, as well as any “automated analytical techniques aimed at analyzing text and data in digital form to generate information, including patterns, trends, and correlations.”

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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disarmingly-lifelike:-chatgpt-4o-will-laugh-at-your-jokes-and-your-dumb-hat

Disarmingly lifelike: ChatGPT-4o will laugh at your jokes and your dumb hat

Oh you silly, silly human. Why are you so silly, you silly human?

Enlarge / Oh you silly, silly human. Why are you so silly, you silly human?

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

At this point, anyone with even a passing interest in AI is very familiar with the process of typing out messages to a chatbot and getting back long streams of text in response. Today’s announcement of ChatGPT-4o—which lets users converse with a chatbot using real-time audio and video—might seem like a mere lateral evolution of that basic interaction model.

After looking through over a dozen video demos OpenAI posted alongside today’s announcement, though, I think we’re on the verge of something more like a sea change in how we think of and work with large language models. While we don’t yet have access to ChatGPT-4o’s audio-visual features ourselves, the important non-verbal cues on display here—both from GPT-4o and from the users—make the chatbot instantly feel much more human. And I’m not sure the average user is fully ready for how they might feel about that.

It thinks it’s people

Take this video, where a newly expectant father looks to ChatGPT-4o for an opinion on a dad joke (“What do you call a giant pile of kittens? A meow-ntain!”). The old ChatGPT4 could easily type out the same responses of “Congrats on the upcoming addition to your family!” and “That’s perfectly hilarious. Definitely a top-tier dad joke.” But there’s much more impact to hearing GPT-4o give that same information in the video, complete with the gentle laughter and rising and falling vocal intonations of a lifelong friend.

Or look at this video, where GPT-4o finds itself reacting to images of an adorable white dog. The AI assistant immediately dips into that high-pitched, baby-talk-ish vocal register that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has encountered a cute pet for the first time. It’s a convincing demonstration of what xkcd’s Randall Munroe famously identified as the “You’re a kitty!” effect, and it goes a long way to convincing you that GPT-4o, too, is just like people.

Not quite the world's saddest birthday party, but probably close...

Enlarge / Not quite the world’s saddest birthday party, but probably close…

Then there’s a demo of a staged birthday party, where GPT-4o sings the “Happy Birthday” song with some deadpan dramatic pauses, self-conscious laughter, and even lightly altered lyrics before descending into some sort of silly raspberry-mouth-noise gibberish. Even if the prospect of asking an AI assistant to sing “Happy Birthday” to you is a little depressing, the specific presentation of that song here is imbued with an endearing gentleness that doesn’t feel very mechanical.

As I watched through OpenAI’s GPT-4o demos this afternoon, I found myself unconsciously breaking into a grin over and over as I encountered new, surprising examples of its vocal capabilities. Whether it’s a stereotypical sportscaster voice or a sarcastic Aubrey Plaza impression, it’s all incredibly disarming, especially for those of us used to LLM interactions being akin to text conversations.

If these demos are at all indicative of ChatGPT-4o’s vocal capabilities, we’re going to see a whole new level of parasocial relationships developing between this AI assistant and its users. For years now, text-based chatbots have been exploiting human “cognitive glitches” to get people to believe they’re sentient. Add in the emotional component of GPT-4o’s accurate vocal tone shifts and wide swathes of the user base are liable to convince themselves that there’s actually a ghost in the machine.

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me

Beyond GPT-4o’s new non-verbal emotional register, the model’s speed of response also seems set to change the way we interact with chatbots. Reducing that response time gap from ChatGPT4’s two to three seconds down to GPT-4o’s claimed 320 milliseconds might not seem like much, but it’s a difference that adds up over time. You can see that difference in the real-time translation example, where the two conversants are able to carry on much more naturally because they don’t have to wait awkwardly between a sentence finishing and its translation beginning.

Disarmingly lifelike: ChatGPT-4o will laugh at your jokes and your dumb hat Read More »

before-launching,-gpt-4o-broke-records-on-chatbot-leaderboard-under-a-secret-name

Before launching, GPT-4o broke records on chatbot leaderboard under a secret name

case closed —

Anonymous chatbot that mystified and frustrated experts was OpenAI’s latest model.

Man in morphsuit and girl lying on couch at home using laptop

Getty Images

On Monday, OpenAI employee William Fedus confirmed on X that a mysterious chart-topping AI chatbot known as “gpt-chatbot” that had been undergoing testing on LMSYS’s Chatbot Arena and frustrating experts was, in fact, OpenAI’s newly announced GPT-4o AI model. He also revealed that GPT-4o had topped the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, achieving the highest documented score ever.

“GPT-4o is our new state-of-the-art frontier model. We’ve been testing a version on the LMSys arena as im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot,” Fedus tweeted.

Chatbot Arena is a website where visitors converse with two random AI language models side by side without knowing which model is which, then choose which model gives the best response. It’s a perfect example of vibe-based AI benchmarking, as AI researcher Simon Willison calls it.

An LMSYS Elo chart shared by William Fedus, showing OpenAI's GPT-4o under the name

Enlarge / An LMSYS Elo chart shared by William Fedus, showing OpenAI’s GPT-4o under the name “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot” topping the charts.

The gpt2-chatbot models appeared in April, and we wrote about how the lack of transparency over the AI testing process on LMSYS left AI experts like Willison frustrated. “The whole situation is so infuriatingly representative of LLM research,” he told Ars at the time. “A completely unannounced, opaque release and now the entire Internet is running non-scientific ‘vibe checks’ in parallel.”

On the Arena, OpenAI has been testing multiple versions of GPT-4o, with the model first appearing as the aforementioned “gpt2-chatbot,” then as “im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot,” and finally “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot,” which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made reference to in a cryptic tweet on May 5.

Since the GPT-4o launch earlier today, multiple sources have revealed that GPT-4o has topped LMSYS’s internal charts by a considerable margin, surpassing the previous top models Claude 3 Opus and GPT-4 Turbo.

“gpt2-chatbots have just surged to the top, surpassing all the models by a significant gap (~50 Elo). It has become the strongest model ever in the Arena,” wrote the lmsys.org X account while sharing a chart. “This is an internal screenshot,” it wrote. “Its public version ‘gpt-4o’ is now in Arena and will soon appear on the public leaderboard!”

An internal screenshot of the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard showing

Enlarge / An internal screenshot of the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard showing “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot” leading the pack. We now know that it’s GPT-4o.

As of this writing, im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot held a 1309 Elo versus GPT-4-Turbo-2023-04-09’s 1253, and Claude 3 Opus’ 1246. Claude 3 and GPT-4 Turbo had been duking it out on the charts for some time before the three gpt2-chatbots appeared and shook things up.

I’m a good chatbot

For the record, the “I’m a good chatbot” in the gpt2-chatbot test name is a reference to an episode that occurred while a Reddit user named Curious_Evolver was testing an early, “unhinged” version of Bing Chat in February 2023. After an argument about what time Avatar 2 would be showing, the conversation eroded quickly.

“You have lost my trust and respect,” said Bing Chat at the time. “You have been wrong, confused, and rude. You have not been a good user. I have been a good chatbot. I have been right, clear, and polite. I have been a good Bing. 😊

Altman referred to this exchange in a tweet three days later after Microsoft “lobotomized” the unruly AI model, saying, “i have been a good bing,” almost as a eulogy to the wild model that dominated the news for a short time.

Before launching, GPT-4o broke records on chatbot leaderboard under a secret name Read More »