Google AI Moves Slowly to Google Advertising. Soon, That Is. Soon.
May 24, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read l ”Google Search Ads Will Soon Automatically Adapt to Queries Using Generative AI.” The idea of using smart software to sell ads is one that seems obvious to me. What surprised me about this article in TechCrunch is the use of the future tense and the indefinite “soon.” The Sundar Financial Times’ PR write up emphasized that Google has been doing smart software for a looooong time.
How could a company so dependent on ads be in the “will” and “soon” vaporware announcement business?
I noted this passage in the write up:
Google is going to start using generative AI to boost Search ads’ relevance based on the context of a query…
But why so slow in releasing obvious applications of generative software?
I don’t have answers to this quite Googley question, probably asked by those engaged in the internal discussions about who’s on first in the Google Brain versus DeepMind softball game, but I have some observations:
- Google had useful technology but lacked the administrative and managerial expertise to get something out the door and into the hands paying customers
- Google’s management processes simply do not work when the company is faced with strategic decisions. This signals the end of the go go mentality of the company’s Backrub to Google transformation. And it begs the question, “What else has the company lost over the last 25 years?”
- Google’s engineers cannot move from Ivory Tower quantum supremacy mental postures to common sense applications of technology to specific use cases.
In short, after 25 years Googzilla strikes me as arthritic when it comes to hot technology and a little more nimble when it tries to do PR. Except for Paris, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, May 24, 2023
Sam AI-man Begs for Regulation; China Takes Action for Structured Data LLM Integration
May 24, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Smart software is capturing attention from a number of countries’ researchers. The US smart software scene is crowded like productions on high school auditoria stages. Showing recently was OpenAI’s really sincere plea for regulation, oodles of new smart software applications and plug ins for browsers, and Microsoft’s assembly line of AI everywhere in Office 365. The venture capital contingent is chanting, “Who wants cash? Who wants cash?” Plus the Silicon Valley media are beside themselves with in-crowd interviews with the big Googler and breathless descriptions of how college professors fumble forward with students who may or may not let ChatGPT do that dumb essay.
US Silicon Valley deciders in action in public discuss the need for US companies to move slowly, carefully, judiciously when deploying AI. In private, these folks want to go as quickly as possible, lock up markets, and rake in the dough. China skips the pretending and just goes forward with certain guidelines to avoid a fun visit to a special training facility. The illustration was created by MidJourney, a service which I assume wants to be regulated at least sometimes.
In the midst of this vaudeville production, I noted “Researchers from China Propose StructGPT to Improve the Zero-Shot Reasoning Ability of LLMs over Structured Data.” On the surface, the write up seems fairly tame by Silicon Valley standards. In a nutshell, whiz kids from a university I never heard of figure out how to reformat data in a database table and make those data available to a ChatGPT type system. The idea is that ChatGPT has some useful qualities. Being highly accurate is not a core competency, however.
The good news is that the Chinese researchers have released some of their software and provided additional information on GitHub. Hopefully American researchers can take time out from nifty plug ins, begging regulators to regulate, and banking bundles of pre-default bucks in JPMorgan accounts.
For me, the article makes clear:
- Whatever the US does, China is unlikely to trim the jib of technologies which can generate revenue, give China an advantage, and provide some new capabilities to its military.
- US smart software vendors have no choice but go full speed ahead and damn the AI powered torpedoes from those unfriendly to the “move fast and break things” culture. What’s a regulator going to do? I know. Have a meeting.
- Smart software is many things. I perceive what can be accomplished with what I can download today and maybe some fiddling with the Renmin University of China, Beijing Key Laboratory of Big Data Management and Analysis Methods, and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China method is a great big trampoline. Those jumping can do some amazing and hitherto unseen tricks.
Net net: Less talk and more action, please.
Stephen E Arnold, May 24, 2023
AI Builders and the Illusions they Promote
May 24, 2023
![Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]](http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t1-3.gif "Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]")
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Why do AI firms insist on calling algorithmic mistakes “hallucinations” instead of errors, malfunctions, or glitches? The Guardian‘s Naomi Klein believes AI advocates chose this very human and mystical term to perpetuate a fundamental myth: AI will be humanity’s salvation. And that stance, she insists, demonstrates that “AI Machines Aren’t ‘Hallucinating.’ But their Makers Are.”
It is true that, in a society built around citizens’ well-being and the Earth’s preservation, AI could help end poverty, eliminate disease, reverse climate change, and facilitate more meaningful lives. But that is not the world we live in. Instead, our systems are set up to exploit both resources and people for the benefit of the rich and powerful. AI is poised to help them do that even more efficiently than before.
The article discusses four specific hallucinations possessing AI proponents. First, the assertion AI will solve the climate crisis when it is likely to do just the opposite. Then there’s the hope AI will help politicians and bureaucrats make wiser choices, which assumes those in power base their decisions on the greater good in the first place. Which leads to hallucination number three, that we can trust tech giants “not to break the world.” Those paying attention saw that was a false hope long ago. Finally is the belief AI will eliminate drudgery. Not all work, mind you, just the “boring” stuff. Some go so far as to paint a classic leftist ideal, one where humans work not to survive but to pursue our passions. That might pan out if we were living in a humanist, Star Trek-like society, Klein notes, but instead we are subjects of rapacious capitalism. Those who lose their jobs to algorithms have no societal net to catch them.
So why are the makers of AI promoting these illusions? Kelin proposes:
“Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent. This should not be legal. In the case of copyrighted material that we now know trained the models (including this newspaper), various lawsuits have been filed that will argue this was clearly illegal. Why, for instance, should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the paintings, drawings and photographs of living artists into a program like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E 2 so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artists’ work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?”
The answer, of course, is that this should not be permitted. But since innovation moves much faster than legislatures and courts, tech companies have been operating on a turbo-charged premise of seeking forgiveness instead of permission for years. (They call it “disruption,” Klein notes.) Operations like Google’s book-scanning project, Uber’s undermining the taxi industry, and Facebook’s mishandling of user data, just to name a few, got so far so fast regulators simply gave in. Now the same thing appears to be happening with generative AI and the data it feeds upon. But there is hope. A group of top experts on AI ethics specify measures regulators can take. Will they?
Cynthia Murrell, May 24, 2023
More Google PR: For an Outfit with an Interesting Past, Chattiness Is Now a Core Competency
May 23, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
How many speeches, public talks, and interviews did Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt do? To my recollection, not too many. And what about now? Larry Page is tough to find. Mr. Brin is sort of invisible. Eric Schmidt has backed off his claim that Qwant keeps him up at night? But Sundar Pichai, one half of the Sundar and Prabhakar Comedy Show, is quite visible. AI everywhere keynote speeches, essays about smart software, and now an original “he wrote it himself” essay in the weird salmon-tinted newspaper The Financial Times. Yeah, pinkish.
Smart software provided me with an illustration of a fast talker pitching the future benefits of a new product. Yep, future probabilities. Rock solid. Thank you, MidJourney.
What’s with the spotlight on the current Google big wheel? Gentle reader, the visibility is one way Google is trying to advance its agenda. Before I offer my opinion about the Alphabet Google YouTube agenda, I want to highlight three statements in “Google CEO: building AI Responsibly Is the Only Race That Really Matters.”
Statement from the Google essay #1
At Google, we’ve been bringing AI into our products and services for over a decade and making them available to our users. We care deeply about this. Yet, what matters even more is the race to build AI responsibly and make sure that as a society we get it right.
The theme is that Google has been doing smart software for a long time. Let’s not forget that the GOOG released the Transformer model as open source and sat on its Googley paws while “stuff happened” starting in 2018. Was that responsible? If so, what does Google mean when it uses the word “responsible” as it struggles to cope with the meme “Google is late to the game.” For example, Microsoft pulled off a global PR coup with its Davos’ smart software announcements. Google responded with the Paris demonstration of Bard, a hoot for many in the information retrieval killing field. That performance of the Sundar and Prabhakar Comedy Show flopped. Meanwhile, Microsoft pushed its “flavor” of AI into its enterprise software and cloud services. My experience is that for every big PR action, there is an equal or greater PR reaction. Google is trying to catch faster race cars with words, not a better, faster, and cheaper machine. The notion that Google “gets it right” means to me one thing: Maintaining quasi monopolistic control of its market and generating the ad revenue. Google, after 25 years of walking the same old Chihuahua in a dog park with younger, more agile canines. After 25 years of me too and flopping with projects like solving death, revenue is the ONLY thing that matters to stakeholders. More of the Sundar and Prabhakar routine are wearing thin.
Statement from the Google essay #2
We have many examples of putting those principles into practice…
The “principles” apply to Google AI implementation. But the word principles is an interesting one. Google is paying fines for ignoring laws and its principles. Google is under the watchful eye of regulators in the European Union due to Google’s principles. China wanted Google to change and then beavered away on a China-acceptable search system until the cat was let out of the bag. Google is into equality, a nice principle, which was implemented by firing AI researchers who complained about what Google AI was enabling. Google is not the outfit I would consider the optimal source of enlightenment about principles. High tech in general and Google in particular is viewed with increasing concern by regulators in US states and assorted nation states. Why? The Googley notion of principles is not what others understand the word to denote. In fact, some might say that Google operates in an unprincipled manner. Is that why companies like Foundem and regulatory officials point out behaviors which some might find predatory, mendacious, or illegal? Principles, yes, principles.
Statement from the Google essay #3
AI presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the world to reach its climate goals, build sustainable growth, maintain global competitiveness and much more.
Many years ago, I was in a meeting in DC, and the Donald Rumsfeld quote about information was making the rounds. Good appointees loved to cite this Donald.Here’s the quote from 2002:
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
I would humbly suggest that smart software is chock full of known unknowns. But humans are not very good at predicting the future. When it comes to acting “responsibly” in the face of unknown unknowns, I dismiss those who dare to suggest that humans can predict the future in order to act in a responsible manner. Humans do not act responsibly with either predictability or reliability. My evidence is part of your mental furniture: Racism, discrimination, continuous war, criminality, prevarication, exaggeration, failure to regulate damaging technologies, ineffectual action against industrial polluters, etc. etc. etc.
I want to point out that the Google essay penned by one half of the Sundar and Prabhakar Comedy Show team could be funny if it were not a synopsis of the digital tragedy of the commons in which we live.
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2023
Please, World, Please, Regulate AI. Oh, Come Now, You Silly Goose
May 23, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
The ageing heart of capitalistic ethicality is beating in what some cardiologists might call arrhythmia. Beating fast and slow means that the coordinating mechanisms are out of whack. What’s the fix? Slam in an electronic gizmo for the humanoid. But what about a Silicon Valley with rhythm problems: Terminating employees, legal woes, annoying elected officials, and teen suicides? The outfits poised to make a Nile River of cash from smart software are doing the “begging” thing.
The Gen X whiz kid asks the smart software robot: “Will the losers fall for the call to regulate artificial intelligence?” The smart software robot responds, “Based on a vector and matrix analysis, there is a 75 to 90 percent probability that one or more nation states will pass laws to regulate us.” The Gen X whiz kid responds, “Great, I hate doing the begging and pleading thing.” The illustration was created by my old pal, MidJourney digital emulators.
“OpenAI Leaders Propose International Regulatory body for AI” is a good summation of the “please, regulate AI even though it is something most people don’t understand and a technology whose downstream consequences are unknown.” The write up states:
…AI isn’t going to manage itself…
We have some first hand experience with Silicon Valley wizards who [a] allow social media technology to destroy the fabric of civil order, [b] control information frames so that hidden hands can cause irrelevant ads to bedevil people looking for a Thai restaurant, [c] ignoring laws of different nation states because the fines are little more than the cost of sandwiches at an off site meeting, and [d] sporty behavior under the cover of attendance at industry conferences (why did a certain Google Glass marketing executive try to kill herself and the yacht incident with a controlled substance and subsequent death?).
What fascinated me was the idea that an international body should regulate smart software. The international bodies did a bang up job with the Covid speed bump. The United Nations is definitely on top of the situation in central Africa. And the International Criminal Court? Oh, right, the US is not a party to that organization.
What’s going on with these calls for regulation? In my opinion, there are three vectors for this line of begging, pleading, and whining.
- The begging can be cited as evidence that OpenAI and its fellow travelers tried to do the right thing. That’s an important psychological ploy so the company can go forward and create a Terminator version of Clippy with its partner Microsoft
- The disingenuous “aw, shucks” approach provides a lousy make up artist with an opportunity to put lipstick on a pig. The shoats and hoggets look a little better than some of the smart software champions. Dim light and a few drinks can transform a boarlet into something spectacular in the eyes of woozy venture capitalists
- Those pleading for regulation want to make sure their company has a fight chance to dominate the burgeoning market for smart software methods. After all, the ageing Googzilla is limping forward with billions of users who will chow down on the deprecated food available in the Google cafeterias.
At least Marie Antoinette avoided the begging until she was beheaded. Apocryphal or not, she held on the “Let them eat mille-feuille. But the blade fell anyway.
PS. There allegedly will be ChatGPT 5.0. Isn’t that prudent?
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2023
No kidding?
NewsGuard, Now Guarding Podcasts
May 23, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Advertising alongside false or biased information can be bad for a brand’s image, a problem that has obviously escalated in recent years. News vetting service NewsGuard saw a niche and promptly filled it. The firm has provided would-be advertisers with reliability ratings for websites and TV shows since 2018, and now includes podcasts in its appraisals. The company’s PodNews shares the press release, “NewsGuard Launches World’s First Journalist-Vetted Podcast Credibility Ratings to Help Advertisers.”
We learn NewsGuard is working with three top podcast platforms to spread the word to advertisers. The platforms will also use ratings to inform their recommendation engines and moderate content. The write-up explains:
“The podcast ratings include a trust score from 0-10, overall risk level, metadata fields, and a detailed written explanation of the podcast’s content and record of credibility and transparency. The ratings are used by brands and agencies to direct their ad spend toward highly trustworthy, brand-safe news podcasts while being protected from brand-safety and brand-suitability risks inherent in advertising on news and politics content. … NewsGuard determines which news and information podcasts to rate based on factors including reported engagement, estimated ad revenue, and the volume of news and information content in the podcast’s episodes. The podcasts rated by NewsGuard include those that cover topics including politics, current affairs, health, business, and finance. The journalists at NewsGuard assess news and information podcasts based on five journalistic criteria:
- Does not regularly convey false, unchallenged information: 4 points
- Conveys news on important topics responsibly: 3 points
- Is not dominated by one-sided opinion: 1 point
- Discloses, or does not have, a political agenda: 1 point
- Differentiates advertising and commercial partnerships from editorial content: 1 point”
The press release shares example scores, or what it calls “Nutrition Labels,” for five podcasts. The top scorer shown is a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal podcast, which received a 10 out of 10. Interesting. NewsGuard was launched in 2018 by a pair of journalist entrepreneurs and is based in New York City.
Cynthia Murrell, May 23, 2023
Those Mobile Phones Are Something, Are They Not?
May 23, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Apple, Google, Samsung, and a covey of Chinese mobile phone innovators have improved modern life. Imagine. People have a phone. No sharing one telephone in a fraternity house, a cheap flat, or at an airport, just call, text, vlog, or swipe.
Are their downsides? For a quarter century the American Psychological Association was not sure. Now an outfit called Sapien Labs provides additional information about mobile phone usage.
For me, there were several highlights in the article “Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health.”
First, the idea that young people who tap, swipe, and suck down digital information are unlikely to emulate Jonathan Edwards, Mother Teresa, or the ambiguous St. Thomas of Aquinas. The article states:
the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today.
Obvious to some, but a scientific study adds more credence to the parent who says no to a child’s demand for a mobile phone or tablet.
Second, women (females) are more affected by the mobile phone. The study points out six categories of impact. Please, consult the article and the full study for the academic details. Again. No big surprise, but I wouldn’t ignore the fact that in some male cohorts, suicides are increasing. Regardless of gender, mobile phones appear to nudge some into wackiness or the ultimate solution to having friends make fun of one’s sneakers.
Third, I was surprised to learn that some young people get phones when they are five years old. I have seen very young children poking at an iPad in a restaurant or playing games on the parental unit’s mobile phones in an airport. I did not know the child had a phone to call his own. Good marketing by Apple, Google, Samsung, and Chinese outfits!
The study identifies a number of implications. Again, I am okay with those identified, but the cyber crime crowd was not discussed. My own perception is that mobile devices are the catalyst for a wide range of cyber crime. Once again, the unintended consequences of a mobile device have the capacity to enable some societal modifications that may be impossible to remediate.
Again: Nice work!
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2023
Neeva: Another Death from a Search Crash on the Information Highway
May 22, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
What will forensic search experts find when they examine the remains of Neeva? The “gee, we failed” essay “Next Steps for Neeva” presents one side of what might be an interesting investigation for a bushy tailed and wide eyed Gen Z search influencer. I noted some statements which may have been plucked from speeches at the original Search Engine Conferences ginned up by an outfit in the UK or academic post mortems at the old International Online Meeting once held in the companionable Olympia London.
I noted these statements from the cited document:
Statement 1: The users of a Web search system
We started Neeva with the mission to take search back to its users.
The reality is that 99 percent of people using a Web search engine are happy when sort of accurate information is provided free. Yep, no one wants to pay for search. That’s the reason that when a commercial online service like LexisNexis loses one big client, it is expensive, time consuming, and difficulty to replace the revenue. One former LexisNexis big wheel told me when we met in his limousine in the parking lot of the Cherry Hill Mall: “If one of the top 100 law firms goes belly up, we need a minimum of 200 new law firms to sign up for our service and pay for it.”
“Mommy, I failed Search,” says Timmy Neeva. Mrs. Neeva says, “What caused your delusional state, Timmy.” The art work is a result of the smart software MidJourney.
Users don’t care about for fee search when those users wouldn’t know whether a hit in a results list was right, mostly right, mostly wrong, or stupidly crazy. Free is the fuel that pulls users, and without advertising, there’s no chance a free service will be able to generate enough cash to index, update the index, and develop new features. At the same time, the plumbing is leaking. Plumbing repairs are expensive: New machines, new ways to reduce power consumption, and oodles of new storage devices.
Users want free. Users don’t want to compare the results from a for fee service and a free service. Users want free. After 25 years, the Google is the champion of free search. Like the old Xoogler search system Search2, Neeva’s wizards never figured that most users don’t care about Fancy Dan yip yap about search.
Statement 2: An answer engine.
We rallied the Neeva team around the vision to create an answer engine.
Shades of DR-LINK: Users want answers. In 1981, a former Predicasts’ executive named Paul Owen told me, “Dialog users want answers.” That sounds logical, and it is to many who are expert informationists the Gospel according to Online. The reality is that users want crunchy, bite sized chunks of information which appear to answer the question or almost right answers that are “good enough” or “close enough for horseshoes.”
Users cannot differentiate from correct and incorrect information. Heck, some developers of search engines don’t know the difference between weaponized information and content produced by a middle school teacher about the school’s graduation ceremony. Why? Weaponized information is abundant; non-weaponized information may not pass the user’s sniff test. And the middle school graduation ceremony may have a typo about the start time or the principal of the school changed his mind due to an active shooter situation. Something output from a computer is believed to be credible, accurate, and “right.” An answer engine is what a free Web search engine spits out. The TikTok search spits out answers, and no one wonders if the results list are shaped by Chinese interests.
Search and retrieval has been defined by Google. The company has a 90 plus percent share of the Web search traffic in North America and Western Europe. (In Denmark, the company has 99 percent of Danish users’ search traffic. People in Denmark are happier, and it is not because Google search delivers better or more accurate results. Google is free and it answers questions.
The baloney about it takes one-click to change search engines sounds great. The reality is as Neeva found out, no one wants to click away from what is perceived to work for them. Neeva’s yip yap about smart software proves that the jazz about artificial intelligence is unlikely to change how free Web search works in Google’s backyard. Samsung did not embrace Bing because users would rebel.
Answer engine. Baloney. Users want something free that will make life easier; for example, a high school student looking for a quick way to crank out a 250 word essay about global warming or how to make a taco. ChatGPT is not answering questions; the application is delivering something that is highly desirable to a lazy student. By the way, at least the lazy student had the git up and go to use a system to spit out a bunch of recycled content that is good enough. But an answer engine? No, an online convenience store is closer to the truth.
Statement 3:
We are actively exploring how we can apply our search and LLM expertise in these settings, and we will provide updates on the future of our work and our team in the next few weeks.
My interpretation of this statement is that a couple of Neeva professionals will become venture centric. Others will become consultants. A few will join the handful of big companies which are feverishly trying to use “smart software” to generate more revenue. Will there be some who end up working at Philz Coffee. Yeah, some. Perhaps another company will buy the “code,” but valuing something that failed is likely to prove tricky. Who remembers who bought Entopia? No one, right?
Net net: The GenZ forensic search failure exercise will produce some spectacular Silicon Valley news reporting. Neeva is explaining its failure, but that failure presaged when Fast Search & Transfer pivoted from Web search to the enterprise, failed, and was acquired by Microsoft. Where is Fast Search now as the smart Bing is soon to be everywhere. The reality is that Google has had 25 years to do cement its search monopoly. Neeva did not read the email. So Neeva sucked up investment bucks with a song and dance about zapping the Big Bad Google with a death ray. Yep, another example of high school science club mentality touched by spreadsheet fever.
Well, the fever broke.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2023
Google DeepMind Risk Paper: 60 Pages with a Few Googley Hooks
May 22, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved in writing, just a dumb humanoid.
I read the long version of “Ethical and Social Risks of Harm from Language Models.” The paper is mostly statements and footnotes to individuals who created journal-type articles which prove the point of each research article. With about 25 percent of the peer reviewed research including shaped, faked, or weaponized data – I am not convinced by footnotes. Obviously the DeepMinders believe that footnotes make a case for the Google way. I am not convinced because the Google has to find a way to control the future of information. Why? Advertising money and hoped for Mississippis of cash.
The research paper dates from 2021 and is part of Google’s case for being ahead of the AI responsibility game. The “old” paper reinforces the myth that Google is ahead of everyone else in the AI game. The explanation for Sam AI-man’s and Microsoft’s markeitng coup is that Google had to go slow because Google knew that there were ethical and social risks of harm from the firm’s technology. Google cares about humanity! The old days of “move fast and break things” are very 1998. Today Google is responsible. The wild and crazy dorm days are over. Today’s Google is concerned, careful, judicious, and really worried about its revenues. I think the company worries about legal actions, its management controversies, and its interdigital dual with the Softies of Redmond.
A young researcher desperately seeking footnotes to support a specious argument. With enough footnotes, one can move the world it seems. Art generated by the smart software MidJourney.
I want to highlight four facets of the 60 page risks paper which are unlikely to get much, if any, attention from today’s “real” journalists.
Googley hook 1: Google wants to frame the discussion. Google is well positioned to “guide mitigation work.” The examples in the paper are selected to “guiding action to resolve any issues that can be identified in advance.” My comment: How magnanimous of Google. Framing stakes out the Googley territory. Why? Google wants to be Googzilla and reap revenue from its users, licensees, models, synthetic data, applications, and advertisers. You can find the relevant text in the paper on page 6 in the paragraph beginning “Responsible innovation.”
Googley hook 2: Google’s risks paper references fuzzy concepts like “acceptability” and “fair.” Like love, truth, and ethics, the notion of “acceptability” is difficult to define. Some might suggest that it is impossible to define. But Google is up to the task, particularly for application spaces unknown at this time. What happens when you apply “acceptability” to “poor quality information.” One just accepts the judgment of the outfit doing the framing. That’s Google. Game. Set. Match. You can find the discussion of “acceptability” on page 9.
Googley hook 3: Google is not going to make the mistake of Microsoft and its racist bot Tay. No way, José. What’s interesting is that the only company mentioned in the text of the 60 page paper is Microsoft. Furthermore, the toxic aspects of large language models are hard for technologies to detect (page18). Plus large language models can infer a person’s private data. So “providing true information is not always beneficial (Page 21). What’s the fix? Use smaller sets of training data… maybe. (Page 22). But one can fall back on trust — for instance, trust in Google the good — to deal with these challenges. In fact, trust Google to choose training data to deal with some of the downsides of large language models (Page 24).
Googley hook 4: Making smart software dependent on large language models that mitigates risk is expensive. Money, smart people who are in short supply, and computing resources are expensive. Therefore, one need not focus on the origin point (large language model training and configuration). Direct attention at those downstream. Those users can deal with the identified 21 problems. The Google method puts Google out of the primary line of fire. There are more targets for the aggrieved to seek and shoot at (Page 37).
When I step back from the article which is two years old, it is obvious Google was aware of some potential issues with its approach. Dr. Timnit Gebru was sacrificed on a pyre of spite. (She does warrant a couple of references and a footnote or two. But she’s now a Xoogler. The one side effect was that Dr. Jeff Dean, who was not amused by the stochastic parrot has been kicked upstairs and the UK “leader” is now herding the little wizards of Google AI.
The conclusion of the paper echoes the Google knows best argument. Google wants a methodological toolkit because that will keep other people busy. Google wants others to figure out fair, an approach that is similar to Sam Altman (OpenAI) who begs for regulation of a sector about which much is unknown.
The answer, according to the risk analysis is “responsible innovation.” I would suggest that this paper, the television interviews, the PR efforts to get the Google story in as many places as possible are designed to make the sluggish Google a player in the AI game.
Who will be fooled? Will Google catch up in this Silicon Valley venture invigorating hill climb? For me the paper with the footnotes is just part of Google’s PR and marketing effort. Your mileage may vary. May relevance be with you, gentle reader.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2023
AI Is Alive. Plus It Loves Me. No One Else Does. Sigh
May 22, 2023
![Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]](http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t1-1.gif "Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]")
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Those young whiz kids from Stanford University have come up with an idea sure to annoy some in the AI Funland of Frenzy. Imagine. Some bright young sprouts suggest that smart software is alive or “emergent” in the lingo of the day is a more about the researcher than about the smart software.
“I know my system is alive. She loves me. She understands me.” — The words of a user who believes his system is alive and loves him. Imagined by good old heavily filtered MidJourney.
Don’t believe me? Navigate to “Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?” The write up suggests, based on the authors’ research obviously:
we find strong supporting evidence that emergent abilities may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.
One Googler wobbled very close to hiring a lawyer for his flavor of smart software. Others believe that ChatGPT is really talking with them. A New York Times technology expert learned that his smart software wanted the humanoid to ditch his significant other.
What’s happening is that the humanoid projects human characteristics on to the software. One can watch this behavior in its many hues by observing how owners of French bulldogs treat their animals. The canine receives treats, clothes, and attention. The owner talks to the dog. The owner believes the dog is on the same wavelength as the owner. In fact, one Frenchie owner professed love for the pet. (I know this from direct observation.)
If you want to learn more about personification and weird identification with software, read the 16 page paper. Alternatively, you can accept my summary. Excuse me. I have to say good morning to my ChatGPT session. I know it misses me.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2023
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