Incredibly welcomed. We need more ethical, non-profit AI researchers in the sea of corporate for-profit AI companies.
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I really do. I am going to watch this with a critical eye, however.
I remember a time when open-source software was developed without a pre-order business model.
"This new company will be led by Managing Director Moez Draief. Moez has spent over a decade working on the practical applications of cutting-edge AI as an academic at Imperial College and LSE, and as a chief scientist in industry. Harvard’s Karim Lakhani, Credo’s Navrina Singh and myself will serve as the initial Board of Mozilla.ai. "
This money will 90% go to paying the salary of these managers.
My mind immediately went to a horizon zero dawn like dystopia where the Mozilla AI is the only thing left protecting humans from various malevolent AIs bent on consuming the human race
Imagining the Mozilla AI as a personified Firefox and Thunderbird fighting off Cortana, some BARD (sorry) and a bunch of generic evil corporate AIs just makes me excited that Mozilla would be the one fending everyone off.
Fully fleshed out fanfic when
Mozilla is Gaia, ChatGPT is hades?
I think by that point ChatGPT would be more like Apollo, keeping the knowledge of humanity. I feel like one of the more corporate AIs will go full HADES, I’m thinking Bard. It will get a mysterious signal from space that switches it’s core protocol from “don’t be evil” to “be evil.”
Couldn’t give a fuck, there’s already far too much bad blood regarding any form of AI for me.
It’s been shoved in my face, phone and computer for some time now. The best AI is one that doesn’t exist. AGI can suck my left nut too, don’t fuckin care.
Give me livable wages or give me death, I care not for anything else at this point.
Edit: I care far more about this for privacy reasons than the benefits provided via the tech.
The fact these models reached “production ready” status so quickly is beyond concerning, I suspect the companies are hoping to harvest as much usable data as possible before being regulated into (best case) oblivion. It really no longer seems that I can learn my way out of this, as I’ve been doing since the beginning, as the technology is advancing too quickly for users, let alone regulators to keep it in check.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
I’m so goddamn tired of “open source” turning into subscription models restricting use cases because the company wants to appease conservative investors.
Mozilla has a very strong track-record though. They’ve been around for a very long time, and have stuck to free open-source principles the whole time.
Wishing they would say something more, the site has been like that for some time.
In which ways does this differ from stability ai, which made stable diffusion and also have a LLM afaik?
The stability models aren’t open source, the moralistic licence they release under violates the open source definition.
Something that I’ll definitely keep an eye on. Thanks for sharing!
As much as I love Mozilla, I know they’re going to censor it (sorry, the word is “alignment” now) the hell out of it to fit their perceived values. Luckily if it’s open source then people will be able to train uncensored models
What in the world would an “uncensored” model even imply? And give me a break, private platforms choosing to not platform something/someone isn’t “censorship”, you don’t have a right to another’s platform. Mozilla has always been a principled organization and they have never pretended to be apathetic fence-sitters.
There’s a ton of stuff ChatGPT won’t answer, which is supremely annoying.
I’ve tried making Dungeons and Dragons scenarios with it, and it will simply refuse to describe violence. Pretty much a full stop.
Open AI is also a complete prude about nudity, so Eilistraee (Drow godess that dances with a sword) just isn’t an option for their image generation. Text generation will try to avoid nudity, but also stop short of directly addressing it.
Sarcasm is, for the most part, very difficult to do… If ChatGPT thinks what you’re trying to write is mean-spirited, it just won’t do it. However, delusional/magical thinking is actually acceptable. Try asking ChatGPT how licking stamps will give you better body positivity, and it’s fine, and often unintentionally very funny.
There’s plenty of topics that LLMs are overly sensitive about, and uncensored models largely correct that. I’m running Wizard 30B uncensored locally, and ChatGPT for everything else. I’d like to think I’m not a weirdo, I just like D&d… a lot, lol… and even with my use case I’m bumping my head on some of the censorship issues with LLMs.
Interesting, may I ask you a question regarding uncensored local / censored hosted LLMs in comparison?
There is this idea censorship is required to some degree to generate more useful output. In a sense, we somehow have to tell the model which output we appreciate and which we don’t, so that it can develop a bias to produce more of the appreciated stuff.
In this sense, an uncensored model would be no better than a million monkeys on typewriters. Do we differentiate between technically necessary bias, and political agenda, is that possible? Do uncensored models produce more nonsense?
That’s a good question. Apparently, these large data companies start with their own unaligned dataset and then introduce bias through training their model after. The censorship we’re talking about isn’t necessarily trimming good input vs. bad input data, but rather “alignment” which is intentionally introduced after.
Eric Hartford, the man who created Wizard (the LLM I use for uncensored work), wrote a blog post about how he was able to unalign LLAMA over here: https://erichartford.com/uncensored-models
You probably could trim input data to censor output down the line, but I’m assuming that data companies don’t because it’s less useful in a general sense and probably more laborious.
Anything that prevents it from my answering my query. If I ask it how to make me a bomb, I don’t want it to be censored. It’s gathering this from public data they don’t own after all. I agree with Mozilla’s principles, but also LLMs are tools and should be treated as such.
shit just went from 0 to 100 real fucking quick
for real though, if you ask an LLM how to make a bomb, it’s not the LLM that’s the problem
If it has the information, why not? Why should you be restricted by what a company deems appropriate. I obviously picked the bomb example as an extreme example, but that’s the point.
Just like I can demonize encryption by saying I should be allowed to secretly send illegal content. If I asked you straight up if encryption is a good thing, you’d probably agree. If I mentioned its inevitable bad use in a shocking manner, would you defend the ability to do that, or change your stance that encryption is bad?
To have a strong stance means also defending the potential harmful effects, since they’re inevitable. It’s hard to keep values consistent, even when there are potential harmful effects of something that’s for the greater good. Encryption is a perfect example of that.
If it has the information, why not?
Naive altruistic reply: To prevent harm.
Cynic reply: To prevent liabilities.
If the restaurant refuses to put your fries into your coffee, because that’s not on the menu, then that’s their call. Can be for many reasons, but it’s literally their business, not yours.
If we replace fries with fuse, and coffee with gun powder, I hope there are more regulations in place. What they sell and to whom and in which form affects more people than just buyer and seller.
Although I find it pretty surprising corporations self-regulate faster than lawmakers can say ‘AI’ in this case. That’s odd.
This is very well said. They’re allowed to not serve you these things, but we should still be able to use these things ourselves and make our glorious gun powder fries coffee with a spice of freedom all we want!
This is a false equivalence. Encryption only works if nobody can decrypt it. LLMs work even if you censor illegal content from their output.
You miss the point. My point is that if you want to have a consistent view point, you need to acknowledge and defend the harmful sides. Encryption can objectively cause harm, but it should absolutely still be defended.
This is just enlightened centrism. No. Nobody needs to defend the harms done by technology.
We can accept the harm if the good is worth it - we have no need to defend it.
LLMs can work without the harm.
It makes sense to make technology better by reducing the harm they cause when it is possible to do so.
What the fuck is this “you should defend harm” bullshit, did you hit your head during an entry level philosophy class or something?
The reason we defend encryption even though it can be used for harm is because breaking it means you can’t use it for good, and that’s far worse. We don’t defend the harm it can do in and of itself; why the hell would we? We defend it in spite of the harm because the good greatly outweighs the harm and they cannot be separated. The same isn’t true for LLMs.
If you ask how to build a bomb and it tells you, wouldn’t Mozilla get in trouble?
Do gun manufacturers get in trouble when someone shoots somebody?
Do car manufacturers get in trouble when someone runs somebody over?
Do search engines get in trouble if they accidentally link to harmful sites?
What about social media sites getting in trouble for users uploading illegal content?
Mozilla doesn’t need to host an uncensored model, but their open source AI should be able to be trained to uncensored. So I’m not asking them to host this themselves, which is an important distinction I should have made.
Which uncensored LLMs exist already, so any argument about the damage they can cause is already possible.
Do car manufacturers get in trouble when someone runs somebody over?
Yes, if it can be shown the accident was partially caused by the manufacturer’s neglect. If a safety measure was not in place or did not work properly. Or if it happens suspiciously more often with models from this brand. Apart from solid legal trouble, they can get into PR trouble if many people start to think that way, no matter if it’s true.
That’s very unrelated
Then let me spell it out: If ChatGPT convinces a child to wash their hands with self-made bleach, be sure to expect lawsuits and a shit storm coming for OpenAI.
If that occurs, but no liability can be found on the side of ChatGPT, be sure to expect petitions and a shit storm coming for legislators.
We generally expect individuals and companies to behave in society with peace and safety in mind, including strangers and minors.
Liabilities and regulations exist for these reasons.
Why are lolbertarians on lemmy?
This is something I think a lot of people don’t get about all the current ML hype. Even if you disregard all the other huge ethics issues surrounding sourcing training data, what does anybody think is going to happen if you take the modern web, a huge sea of extremist social media posts, SEO optimized scams and malware, and just general data toxic waste, and then train a model on it without rigorously pushing it away from being deranged? There’s a reason all the current AI chatbots have had countless hours of human moderation adjustment to make them remotely acceptable to deploy publicly, and even then there are plenty of infamous examples of them running off the rails and saying deranged things.
Talking about an “uncensored” LLM basically just comes down to saying you’d like the unfiltered experience of a robot that will casually regurgitate all the worst parts of the internet at you, so unless you’re actively trying to produce a model to do illegal or unethical things I don’t quite see the point of contention or what “censorship” could actually mean in this context.
It means they can’t make porn images of celebs or anime waifus, usually.
I would really like Mozilla to make the best browser in the world please.
As a (very recently) former chrome user, they do already.
they do
They failed a while ago. Market share decline continues
Isn’t AI impossible to meaningfully open source because of how learning models work?
No? The code for the model can be open-source - and that’s pretty valuable. The training data can be made openly available too - and that’s perhaps even more valuable. And the post-training weights for the model can be made open too.
Each of those things is very meaningful and useful. If those things are open, then the AI can be used and adjusted for different contexts. It can be run offline; it can be retrained or tweaked. It can be embedded into other software. etc. It is definitely meaningful to open source that stuff.
Stable Diffusion has entered the chat
Please just put the 30 million into improving the browser. Not all this dumb stuff
Offline translation feature visible in Firefox 108 and later is AI powered. And works good enough for now.
All I want to know is if they are going to pillage people’s private data and steal their creative IP or not.
Ethical AI starts and ends with open, transparent, legitimate and ethically sourced training data sets.
Using copyrighted material for research is fair use. Any model produced by such research is not itself a derivative work of the training material. If people use it to create infringing (on the training or other material) they can be prosecuted in the exact same way they would if they created an infringing work via Photoshop or any other program. The same goes for other illegal uses such as creating harmful depictions of real people.
Accepting any expansion of IP rights, for whatever reason, would in fact be against the ethics of free software.
Yet people are sueing because it can summarize their works
That’s ridiculous as even summaries themselves are protected. You can find book summaries all across the web (say wikipedia).
Using copyrighted material for research is fair use. Any model produced by such research is not itself a derivative work of the training material.
You’re conflating AI research and the AI business. Training an AI is not “research” in a general sense, especially in the context of an AI that can be used to create assets for commercial applications.
It’s not possible to research AI without training them.
It’s probably also not possible to train a model whose creations cannot be used for commercial applications.
Coming from a company the preaches about privacy and rates privacy respecting businesses, while collecting telemetry and accepting 500M/ year to from google to promote their search engine… I’ll take this as the puff up piece that is is.
- The very little, basic telemetry Firefox collects can be easily disabled[1].
- What alternative do you suggest to Mozilla? Reject the $500M and blowup everything they’ve worked so hard for decades to build? I feel like users having to click, at most, a whole 5 times to change their search engine (if they want) isn’t that big of a sacrifice to have a major privacy-oriented, non-profit player in the tech sphere.
Its more so the principle. Many people that download Firefox are doing so to escape google, and if they are not born as cyber security experts they may download Firefox and continue with no real improvement to their privacy.
Secondly, the main thing you should look for is where a company gets its funding. If Mozilla gets almost 100% of its funding through google… How much do you really expect them to push back against the data collection of their userbase?
I rank Mozilla with the likes of ExpressVPN, NordVPN, etc. They preach privacy and security against surveillance… But its just theatre to make money in specific demographics.
It is extremely simple and easy to change your search engine and disable telemetry in Firefox. I would agree if Mozilla showed any favoritism towards Google, but they don’t. Maintaining and developing an entirely independent browser is not cheap.
I really hope you’re not about to suggest Brave as an alternative when 100% of their funds come from a dying crypto scam, is for-profit, and is owned by a far-right, anti-gay reactionary. Not to mention that Brave’s browser is entirely reliant on Chromium code from Google.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Mozilla’s Firefox is essentially the only competitor to Google’s Chrome. So to say that Mozilla is pro-google is kind of weird. Almost every other browser uses Chrome’s engine, and thus is enforcing Google’s view of the internet. Firefox and Safari are the only significant holdouts. (And Safari is obviously backed by one of the largest companies in the world, with its own reasons.)
Yea, it does seem weird… But money doesn’t lie. Its very easy to search online how Mozilla has enough money to lay for all their weird projects.
They even cost cut their nonprofit products like Firefox and Thunderbird so they have more money to burn on other hobbies.
They’re like a giant corporate MLM where users are encouraged to sell “privacy” to their friends and the profits syphon up to Mozilla where they cash out to google.
Not only is telemetry easy to disable. In about:telemetry, you can see what’s being send and many of these things are important to improve the user experience, make Firefox faster and also monitor privacy/security problems.
Without telemetry (use counter), how to decide whether a deprecated feature can be removed? Removing them is necessary to decrease maintenance work, be able to innovate and remove features that are less secure.
