OpenAI deletes ban on using ChatGPT for "military and warfare"

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt/

by cdme • 3 years ago

387 259 3 years ago

Related: https://www.livemint.com/ai/israelhamas-war-how-ai-helps-isr... Recent AI use in selecting targets for bombing campaigns

In the interview, Kochavi recalled Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021. He said, "In Operation Guardian of the Walls, once this machine was activated, it generated 100 new targets every day. To put it in perspective, in the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza in a year. Now, this machine created 100 targets in a single day, with 50 per cent of them being attacked."
In 2021, the IDF launched what it referred to as the world’s "first AI war". It was the eleven-day offensive on Gaza known as “Operation Guardian of the Walls" that reportedly killed 261 Palestinians and injured 2,200.

ToucanLoucan3• 3 years ago

I mean it makes sense right, when you really think about it: money.

tracerbulletx• 3 years ago

You also don't really have a choice but to play ball with the national security establishment.

ToucanLoucan3• 3 years ago

Tell that to Edward Snowden, Lindsay Mills, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning... so many. Some complicated figures in their own right, all of whom took principled stands against such apparatus, most of whom paid dearly for doing so, many of which continue to pay dearly for doing so.

It's possible. It just won't make you rich, which is, I suspect, the real problem.

curtis33892• 3 years ago

If Hobby Lobby can be Christian, any business can be Buddhist.

sva_• 3 years ago

Makes you wonder what exactly happened behind the scenes for the OpenAI board to vote to fire Sam Altman

EA-31672• 3 years ago

It seems pretty clear doesn't it? A choice was implicitly offered to the employees, to either stick to "AI Safety" (whatever that actually means) or potentially cash in more money than they ever dreamed of.

Surprising no one, they picked the money.

peyton• 3 years ago

I mean the alternate vision isn’t compelling. “AI safety” has a nice ring to it, but the idea seemed to be “everyone just… hang out until we’re satisfied.” Plus it was becoming a bit of a memetic neoreligous movement which ironically defined the apocalypse to be original thought. Not very attractive to innovative people.

tgv• 3 years ago

Their IPO curve showed signs of not being exponential.

ChicagoDave• 3 years ago

Who’s kidding who? I theorize every major government in the world has already been using AI models to help guide political and military decisions.

Who doesn’t think China has a ten year AI algorithm to takeover Taiwan? Israel+US+UK > Middle East.

SkyNet or War Games are likely already happening.

necroforest• 3 years ago

Who doesn’t think China has a ten year AI algorithm to takeover Taiwan?

anybody who works in either AI or natsec

paganel• 3 years ago

AI kriegsspiele won't help win anyone any big war, they didn't help the Germans in WW1 (without the AI part, of course), they won't help China, so for the sake of the Chinese I hope that they're following the "classical" route when it comes to "learning" the art of waging the next big war and not following this newest tech fad.

There's also something to be said about how the West's reliance on these war games (don't know if AI-powered or not) when preparing for the latest Ukrainian counter-offensive has had disastrous consequences for the actual Ukrainian soldiers on the field, but I don't think that Western military leaders are so honest with themselves anymore in order to acknowledge that (at least between themselves, if not to the public). A hint related to those Western war games in this Economist piece [1] from September 2023:

Allied debates over strategy are hardly unusual. American and British officials worked closely with Ukraine in the months before it launched its counter-offensive in June. They gave intelligence and advice, conducted detailed war games to simulate how different attacks might play out, and helped design and train the brigades that received the lion’s share of Western equipment

[1] https://archive.is/1u7OK

matkoniecz• 3 years ago

Who doesn’t think China has a ten year AI algorithm to takeover Taiwan?

What it is supposed to mean?

edu• 3 years ago

I guess a veeeeeeery slow progress bar in some screen.

wait_a_minute• 3 years ago

If it was Skynet everyone would already know by now...

badgersnake• 3 years ago

Makes sense pragmatically. I don’t think they could feasibly prevent parties with nation state resources from using it in this way anyway.

inopinatus2• 3 years ago

Since the prohibition on weapons development & use remains, this reads like normalising contract language to focus on the activity rather than the actor.

Both are vague and problematic to enforce, but the latter more so.

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

Unilateral disarmament doesn't really work. You can sit on your hands but your adversaries might choose differently and that just means you are more likely to loose in case of a conflict. So, yes, that was never going to work. OpenAI might choose to not serve those customers. But that just creates opportunities for other companies to step up and serve those customers. Somebody will do it. And the benefit for OpenAI doing this themselves is a lot of revenue and not helping competitors grow. Doing this on their terms is better than having others do it.

I think the sentiments around AI and war are mostly a bit naive. Of course AI is going to be weaponized. A lot of people think that's amoral, not ethical, etc. And they are right. In the wrong hands weapons can do a lot of harm and AI enabled weaponry might be really good at that. Of course, the whole point of war is actually harming the other side any way you can. And usually both sides think they are right and will want the best weapons to do that. So, yes, they'll want AI and are probably willing to spend lots on getting it.

And if you think about it, a lot of conflicts are actually needlessly bloody. AI might actually be more efficient at avoiding e.g. collateral damage and bringing conflicts to a conclusion sooner rather than later. Or preventing them entirely. Sort of the opposite of what we are seeing in Ukraine currently.

smeeth• 3 years ago

Imagine you are OpenAI. AI is going to be used for "Military and Warfare" whether you want it to be or not. Do you:

A) opt-out of participating to absolve yourself of future sins or

B) create the systems yourself, assuring you will have a say in the ethical rules engineered into the weapons

If you actually give a shit about ethics and safety (as opposed to the appearance thereof) the only logical choice is B.

resolutebat• 3 years ago

By the same logic, chemists in the USA should work on nerve gas, because if they don't North Korea will?

daveguy• 3 years ago

That's not the same logic at all.

OP choice was protest or participate and influence to safer outcomes. Your choice was protest or participate without influence to safer outcomes.

Also the AI participant would be OpenAI either way, whereas your inadequate alternative is participate with the US or NK will participate. Also, not the same.

So, wrong on two counts.

FpUser• 3 years ago

If said nerve gas was decisive weapon capable of giving one side absolute advantage chemists in USA or any other country for that matter would absolutely do it.

nradov• 3 years ago

That is not valid logic. The USA ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, and there are various Acts of Congress which make most work on nerve gas a federal felony. There are no such legal prohibitions on AI development.

janice1999• 3 years ago

assuring you will have a say

Suppliers don't get to pick which house the missile lands on.

tdeck• 3 years ago

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Werner Von Braun.

poisonborz• 3 years ago

If you really know about supplier networks, government, military: this is a losing game that is better not played.

Frummy• 3 years ago

Imagine you are Microsoft. Two decades ago the state regulated you. Now you get the opportunity to have them eat from your hand. Who cares about ethics and safety?

climatekid• 3 years ago

Reality is AI is going to be used to write really really boring reports

Not everything is a spy movie

wahnfrieden4• 3 years ago

AI is also currently used to select bombing targets for several years now

It's used for operational efficiency: to select and bomb targets faster and in greater numbers than human analysts are able to

Not everything is boring paperwork

(Source: https://www.livemint.com/ai/israelhamas-war-how-ai-helps-isr... where AI achieved 730x improvement in bombing target selection rate and >300x greater rate of resulting bombs)

milkglass• 3 years ago

Clippy has entered the chat.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 3 years ago

At best it improves the chow in the mess hall.

Manuel_D• 3 years ago

I've also read, they're using AI to declassify materials. Humans still make the high level decisions, language models tackle the boring work of reacting text and whatnot.

ttyprintk2• 3 years ago

And FOIA requests; getting a jump on the eventual bloom.

bugglebeetle• 3 years ago

I love that whenever one of these threads shows up, someone always appears to suggest that banality and evil are entirely separate from one another, despite the entire history of the 20th century.

jstummbillig• 3 years ago

I don't think that's what parent did?

EricMausler• 3 years ago

It's also going to be used to read those really boring reports

paxys2• 3 years ago

Information warfare is a thing. There is no better propaganda machine than a reasonably intelligent AI.

derekp7• 3 years ago

Ah, yes -- to expand on this. You know how some countries employee a large number of people to engage on social media platforms. They have to put in enough good content to build up their rank, and then use that high ranking to subtly put out propaganda which would get more visibility due to their user status. But that takes a lot of effort and manpower.

Now take an LLM that you can feed it questions or discussions from sites, have it jump in with what appears to be meaningful content, gets a bunch of "karma", then gradually start putting out the propaganda. It would be a hard item to fight.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

From CNET today

Today’s Mortgage Rates for Jan. 12, 2024: Rates Cool Off for Homeseekers

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/mortgages/todays-rates...

And yesterday

Mortgage Rates for Jan. 11, 2024: Major Mortgage Rates Are Mixed Over the Last Week

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/mortgages/todays-rates...

And the day before

Current Mortgage Interest Rates on Jan. 10, 2024: Rates Move Upward Over the Last Week

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/mortgages/todays-rates...

You get the idea.

kurthr• 3 years ago

Luckily, that same LLM can summarize that really really boring report... and, if you ask it to, it'll make it exciting, as well. Maybe too exciting...?!

k8svet• 3 years ago

"Please summarize these docs, highlighting the reasons to attack Mars while downplaying any mentioned downsides and costs"

Or, you know, it just hallucinating and people not checking it. But that would be as silly as lawyers citing non-existent AI-hallucinated legal cases.

devindotcom• 3 years ago

My guess is there are huge opportunities for fairly mundane uses of GPT models in military database and research work. A ban on military uses would include, for instance, not allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to use it to improve disaster prep or whatever. But a ban on causing harm ostensibly prevents use on overtly warfare-oriented projects. Most big tech companies make this concession eventually because they love money and the Pentagon has a tremendous amount of it.

dmix• 3 years ago

It does says they still don't allow developing weapons with it,

“use our service to harm yourself or others” and gives “develop or use weapons” as an example, but the blanket ban on “military and warfare” use has vanished.

so Lockheed and co won't be able to use it for most of their military projects. I don't personally see an issue with this change in policy given what you said: the vast vast majority of usecases is just mundane office spreadsheet stuff and the worrying stuff like AI powered drones is disallowed (DARPA has that covered anyway).

Americans, and every other country's, citizens all pay for the inefficiency of the large defense departments. A slightly more efficient DoD office drone isn't exactly a more dangerous world IMO.

crawfordcomeaux• 3 years ago

Making the DoD more efficient is absolutely dangerous, given the current state of things where Israel is being tried for war crimes in international courts & primary western media outlets only shows their defense, not the prosecution's case. When the president is unilaterally ordering strikes against Yemen because they make shipping more expensive for Israel.

Making this killing machine more efficient at doing anything besides dying or self-dismantlement is harmful to liberation around the world.

acheron• 3 years ago

The real question is if you're still not allowed to use iTunes in nuclear weapons.

(answer is yes, that's still banned! https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iTunes.pdf )

ijhuygft7762• 3 years ago

Apple doesn't know that music is the solution to everything.

bhouston3• 3 years ago

How long until OpenAI's ChatGPT is astroturfing all debates on social media? Many in a year or two most posts to reddit will just be ChatGPT talking to itself on hot button issues (Israel-Palestine, Republican-Democrat, etc.). Basically stuff like this but on steroids, because ChatGPT makes it way cheaper to automate thousands of accounts:

* https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/tech/facebook-groups-russia-f...

* https://www.voaafrica.com/a/israeli-firm-meddled-in-african-...

I sort of suspect AI-driven accounts are already present on social media, but I don't have proof.

fakedang• 3 years ago

Why waste billions of kilo joules of energy running AI systems for that, when you'll get legions of dirt cheap technical labor in the developing world, who'll do it for you for far less and at massive scale, with better acerbic language?

kjkjadksj• 3 years ago

Its not about saving money. Doing it like this means you just created a new private contractor environment to invest in.

moritzwarhier• 3 years ago

I think part of the problem is that LLMs seem to be quite effective at producing messages adhering to ulterior motives, catch attention, reinforce emotions etc.

The GPT-4 release documentation has some examples of this in its addendum. ChatGPT also seems to be good at writing advertisements. Without the strong guardrails, I wouldn't bet on one or two persons instructimg a GPT-4-scale model perfoming worse at manipulating debates than 10 or 100 humans without AI.

Exoristos2• 3 years ago

Well, ChatGPT's English is very, very good.

mechanical_bear• 3 years ago

It absolutely is. I know of independent researchers doing some side project work on various social media platforms utilizing chatGPT for responses and measuring engagement.

BiteCode_dev• 3 years ago

Already seen in the wild from colleagues.

TriangleEdge• 3 years ago

but I don't have proof.

Turing test achieved. I don't know if the internet will lose its appeal because of this. Could be that in the future, to use an online service, you'll need to upload a human UUID.

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

Could be that in the future, to use an online service, you'll need to upload a human UUID.

Nothing would make the internet lose appeal to me faster than having to do something like that.

quonn2• 3 years ago

Could still be copy-pasted. How about a brain implant that captures and outputs thoughts with a signed hash? Not that I would like to see that future.

TheCaptain4815• 3 years ago

Wouldn't stop much. Human UUIDs would be sold on the black market to spammers and blackhats.

"Need $500? Rent out your UUID for marketing!"

weweweoo2• 3 years ago

Not just social media, but traditional media as well. As an example, British tabloid 'The Mirror' is using AI to write some of its news articles, and apparently nobody bothers to proofread them before release.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-adds...

This piece of "journalism" released a couple of days ago claims Finland is in the process of joining NATO, while it already joined nearly a year ago. This is obviously caused by utilization of a LLM model with training data limited to time before Finland was accepted. At least at the end of the article they mention AI was utilized, and included an email where you can complain about factual errors.

FactKnower692• 3 years ago

in 2013, Reddit community managers cheerfully announced that Eglin Air Force Base, home to the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)'s Psychological Operations team, was the "most Reddit addicted city" https://web.archive.org/web/20150113041912/http://www.reddit...

all debates on social media have already been astroturfed to hell and back by professional posters for many years, but LLMs are certainly going to function as a force multiplier

hengheng• 3 years ago

Reminds me, I haven't seen a video of a dog greeting a returning soldier in ages. I was convinced that it was neverending.

grandmczeb• 3 years ago

All of the top 3 cities are places with a low official population and a large working population - Eglin's official pop is 2.8k, but has 80k workers. It's the "most Reddit addicted" city because of an obvious statistical artifact.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

Eglin Air Force Base, home to the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)'s Psychological Operations team

Which unit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglin_Air_Force_Base

Garrison for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Special_Forces_Group_(Unit...

Which is Army and part of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Special_Forces_Command_(Ai...

Whose psychological operations unit is based out of North Carolina. Doesn't track with Eglin.

I wonder if that's a fluke or exit node for a large number of Unclass networks that a lot of bored LCpl Schmuckatellis are using.

WhackyIdeas2• 3 years ago

Nice deflection at the end there, but I sniff military AI.

panick21_• 3 years ago

Lets be real, chat gpt is overqualified for that task.

bhouston3• 3 years ago

Yeah for reddit and twitter randos who pop up to lambast you when you talk about a controversial topic, a self-hosted Mistral LLM would work great.

imjonse• 3 years ago

It may become another good reason to leave social mass-media and allow smaller or actual friends only communities to spring up.

Klathmon• 3 years ago

That idea has a name, the "Dead Internet Theory"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

wolverine8764• 3 years ago

How will the employees respond? People embrace powerlessness these days, but all they need to do is act. Do they want to work on, potentially, some of the most destructive technology in history?

wahnfrieden4• 3 years ago

It is telling if the current team recently displayed extreme levels of worker-solidarity and organizing in public around leadership changes they desired, and their response to this is crickets

atemerev4• 3 years ago

Of course. People in Los Alamos were (and are) enthusiastic to work on nuclear weapons. There is no shortage of people enjoying building such things.

azinman2• 3 years ago

The world is complicated and lots of not nice things happening.

tibbydudeza5• 3 years ago

The Manhattan project was started off by a letter from known pacifist Albert Einstein to Pres Roosevelt about his fears of the Nazi's developing an atomic weapon first.

I would say it was a good thing that did not happen.

weweweoo2• 3 years ago

As long as there are people in Russia and China who are willing to work on such tech, it's actually ethical for Americans to work on the technology.

Effectively, it's the military power of the US and its allies that prevents people like Vladimir Putin from killing potentially millions of people in their neighbouring countries. Whatever faults US has, it's still infinitely better than Russia. I say this as a citizen of a country that shares a long border with Russia.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I agree with the second paragraph. The first paragraph is more of a thorny issue to me. If AI is potentially destructive in an existential sense, then working to get there faster just you can be the one to destroy the world on accident is not part of my ethical model. I put existential AI risk at a low but non-zero chance, like OpenAI should/does/did/hard to say anymore.

wolverine8764• 3 years ago

As long as there are people in Russia and China who are willing to work on such tech, it's actually ethical for Americans to work on the technology.

While that carries weight, 'the other person is doing it' has long been an excuse for bad behavior. The essential goals are freedom, peace, and prosperity; dealing with Russia and China are means to an end, not the goal. If developing AI doesn't achieve the goal, we are failing.

pojzon• 3 years ago

Its the Los Alamos all over again.

But this time the atomic bomb will be able to decide by itself whether to incinerate human race.

wolverine8764• 3 years ago

It's a very different.

First, Los Alamos was a project of a democratic government, serving the people of the US and allies. OpenAI is a business that serves itself.

During WWII, the US was in an existential war with the Nazis, also trying to develop nuclear weapons. If the Nazis had built it first, we may have been living now in a very dark world. (Obviously, it also helped defeat Japan.) On the other hand, there are threats if an enemy else develops capabilities that provide large advantages.

At least part of the answer, I think, is that the US government needs to take over development. It already houses the world's top two, most cutting edge technology organizations - the US military and NASA - and there is plenty more (NIST, NIH, nuclear power, etc.); the idea that somehow it's beyond the US government is a conservative trope and obviously false. We don't allow private organizations to develop military weapons (such as missiles and nukes) or bioweapons on their own recognizance; this is no different.

dist-epoch• 3 years ago

Surely some employees are ideologically 3 percenters.

paxys2• 3 years ago

They will respond the same way employees of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and the like did when those companies started picking up military contracts – throw a minor fuss and then continue working. And those that do quit over it will be replaced overnight.

wnevets• 3 years ago

How will the employees respond?

By doing what they've been doing, they won't hurt their stocks.

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

I think that the employees of OpenAI (generally speaking) made a pretty loud statement during that board fiasco that their interest is whatever maximizes their personal financial return.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

To civilians it’s dangerous to develop weapons for most cases, it the opposite for military. It’s dangerous not to develop better weapons faster than an adversary.

AdrienBrault• 3 years ago

Production ready

CatWChainsaw• 3 years ago

Tech Company Yoinks Ethical Promises has been a headline for the last decade and a half but I guess we'll learn not to trust them only after the Football's been deployed.

alsetmusic• 3 years ago

“Ethical” A.I.

octacat3• 3 years ago

Virtue signalling AI. Next should be an eco-friendly blockchain...

qualifiedai2• 3 years ago

Good. We need all kinds of AIs to destabilize and defeat our enemies like Russia, China, Iran, North Korea

password54321• 3 years ago

When you keep trying to isolate even more countries, eventually you become the one that is isolated.

qualifiedai2• 3 years ago

When you retract inwards and don't stand up to bullies from the position of strength, you get world war and is eventually forced to fight.

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

So what collective responsibility, if any, do those using gpt4 daily and helping improve it have when openai powered drones start being used and accruing civilian casualties?

klyrs4• 3 years ago

GPT is trained on my shitposts. Am I included in this collective responsibility?

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

Hm, just as a thought experiment... if your shitposts included any form of implicit racism that affected the AI in a drone's decision of "is the civilian casualty worth acceptable or should I not fire"... then yes?

I don't have a full answer to my own question to be honest.

In the above example though, you'd never be able to prove that it was or wasn't your contribution so it's easy to say you bear no collective responsibility. But would it be true?

I'm not sure, but I can't say definitively you would bear no responsibility.

Spivak• 3 years ago

Do you feel that collective responsibility whenever you do taxable work or make taxable purchases in the US that funds our entire military? It should be orders of magnitude less responsibility than that.

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

Honestly, yes. It's a weird duality of "but this is the reality I'm stuck in" and "however there is a collective responsibility for helping fund wars", but it's still functional.

I would find it wrong to say "I bear no responsibility because that's just how things are" if that makes sense.

Tommstein• 3 years ago

None, unless they also get credit when it's used to save lives from the assorted assholes of the world.

kimjune01• 3 years ago

Same as paying taxes that fund the military

ParetoOptimal4• 3 years ago

Hearing this a second time, I think there is a difference.

Going without gpt4 can put you at a disadvantage for some work.

Not paying taxes affects your life much more negatively.

Given the different costs, logically it seems that paying taxes would be something you have less collective responsibility for.

jorblumesea• 3 years ago

These moves are the heart behind Sam's firing and rehiring. OpenAI was originally born out of a "don't be evil" ethos and is now trending towards a traditional 10x unicorn sass product.

Astraco• 3 years ago

Oh, so this was why Sam Altman was fired?

quonn2• 3 years ago

One problem is that many industry companies (almost anyone doing engines, vehicles, airplanes) is likely to at least do some military products, too. It may be as simple, for example, as wanting to have an LLM assistant in a CAD tool for developing an engine that may get used in a ship, some of which may be military. And the infrastructure and software is often shared or at least developed in order to be applied across the company.

I think this is where this is coming from.

It would be useful to clarify the rules and ban direct automatic control of weapons or indirect control as part of a feedback loop on any system involving weapons from commercial AI products.

strangattractor• 3 years ago

We cannot even ban the development of Nuclear Weapons much less a technology that could be developed for peaceful purposes then switch to terminator mode. Have you seen how drones are being used in the Ukraine Russian War? How long did it take for drone tech to go from light shows in Dubia [1] to dropping grenades into Russian Tanks [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJSzltMFd58

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYEoiuDNY3U

ericfrazier• 3 years ago

Not fast enough.

int_19h4• 3 years ago

The real crazy stuff isn't the grenade-bombing drones; it's FPV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe5RvttOs-E. They have pretty much replaced guided anti-tank missiles for both sides because of how much cheaper they are, and the ability to easily fly around and hit where the armor is thinnest, or even inside the vehicle, before exploding; they can also fly inside trenches, bunkers, and other emplacementes.

DJI FPV ($1k retail) supposedly has about 1 in 3 chance of taking out a moving tank that is not a sitting duck - i.e. hatches closed etc - and does not expose the operator to danger in the process. For comparison, a single Javelin is $240k. FPV drones are cheap enough that they're routinely used even against minor targets such as unarmored small cars and even individual soldiers - even after accounting for failures before a successful hit, it still ends up costing the enemy a lot more in $$$ than was spent on all the drones.

octacat3• 3 years ago

One problem is that many industry companies do not declare that they develop something for "the good of humanity". Otherwise it is yet another "virtue signalling".

dontupvoteme5• 3 years ago

I think this is where this is coming from.

I think a recent war and a recent bombing campaign may imply otherwise.

WhackyIdeas2• 3 years ago

AI for war an profit, who would have thought?

coldfireza• 3 years ago

Terminator 2

tibbydudeza5• 3 years ago

Seeing combat footage of FPV suicide drones in the Ukrainian war and how effective they are it is sort of inevitable that AI would be used as a selling point for this.

rightbyte5• 3 years ago

They are manually aimed, right?

FirmwareBurner• 3 years ago

For now

tibbydudeza5• 3 years ago

For the moment not yet but I suspect there are folks working on intelligent targeting rather than using human operators that needs to be in close proximity or otherwise GPS coordinates.

arkush• 3 years ago

They are manually aimed, right?

January 6, 2024:

"Defence Intelligence of Ukraine shares footage of the targeting of two Russian Pantsir-S1 air defence systems. Looks like loitering munition was used. As said, today in the Belgorod region of Russia."

Source tweet:

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/17437042635308319...

Original source is the Main Directorate of Intelligence's Telegram channel (in Ukrainian):

https://t.me/DIUkraine/3288

Notice yellow rectangles that are visible around the targets in the video.

It seems that AI-aiming was used at the final parts of the approach trajectories, after loss of communications with the drones.

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

This was inevitable, really. There's no way that OpenAI was going to leave that kind of money on the table.

Although I do find it weird that they're so concerned about their products being used in other, relatively less objectionable ways, but are OK with this.

Vecr• 3 years ago

Money gained minus PR cost has to be a big number for them to do it.

dylan6043• 3 years ago

I'm guessing the PR cost approaches $0

ijhuygft7762• 3 years ago

The government probably already had a secret law that allowed them to use it anyways...

manquer6• 3 years ago

Microsoft can sell and host GPT with their own terms , so this was just PR from day one .

More likely they are anticipating public news about military usage sooner than later and removing this to Mitigate the pr damage .

beams_of_light• 3 years ago

It was bound to happen. The military industrial complex throws around too much money for Microsoft to ignore it.

It is sad, though, that they couldn't stand firm about what's right and become a building block for long-term world peace.

ilaksh• 3 years ago

Advanced AI is obviously a requirement for an advanced military. These have never been technological problems. They are human problems.

Humans are primates that operate in hierarchies and compete for territory and resources. That's the real cause of any war, despite the lies used to supposedly make them into ethical issues.

And remember that the next time hundreds of millions of people from each side of globe have been convinced that mass murder of the other "evil" group is the only way to save the world.

Ultimately, I think WWIII will prove that humans really shouldn't be in control. We have to hope that we can invent something smarter, less violent, better organized, and less selfish.

nojvek2• 3 years ago

Humans shouldn’t be in control of technologies that can wipe out entire nations.

Cheap AI drones that kill with precision by the millions are the ultimate weapon.

More powerful than Nuclear. Nuclear is a very big but blunt instrument of war. Drones are small and sharp instruments.

You can command it to kill every human in a geographic region without any other structural damage. It would happily obey that instruction.

wand3r2• 3 years ago

OpenAI speedrun to the Google playbook of abandoning founding principles. Impressive that they could get this big this fast and just go full mask off so abruptly. Google made it about 17 years before it removed "Don't be Evil".

I really do think this will be the company (or at lease technology) to unseat Google. Ironic that Google unseated Microsoft and now it looks like they will take their throne back.

rightbyte5• 3 years ago

Being a warmonger is the new cool. No appeasement and whatever. Sama is just being down with the kids.

lebean• 3 years ago

Finding applications for defense = warmongering?

Log_out_• 3 years ago

We had a whole mindset that basically rolled out the red carpet for dictators disguised as peace ment with apps. Including praise for turning oneself into an anti democratic psyOPs zombie. A correction of this nonsense was overdue. And in the moment of weakness, it was also revealed how alone the West really was with its values. The idealists are out there in the trenches, getting shot in the street, because peaceful cowards are willing to sacrifice everything and everyone for indefensible nimbyism.

EasyMark• 3 years ago

what do you plan on doing when China and/or Russia and/or Iran come knocking on your door?

octacat3• 3 years ago

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is developed safely and responsibly.

Oof. It is not AGI, so does not count (sarcasm).

siva7• 3 years ago

Somehow sad but the more i think about it the more i'm certain that Google lost the race having watched closely the events from the very beginning.

huijzer3• 3 years ago

I'm probably gonna get downvoted for this, but I find allowing the technology to be used for all kinds of different things more "open" than arbitrary restrictions. Yes, even "military and warfare" are pretty arbitrary terms because defensive systems or certain questionnaire research, for instance, could be considered "military and warfare".

huijzer3• 3 years ago

Like our PhD project for example, we're doing machine learning on special forces selection in the Netherlands (for details, see [1]). The aim is basically just to reduce costs for the military and disappointment for the recruits. Furthermore, we hope to learn more about how very capable individuals can be detected early. This is a topic that is useful for many more situations than just the military.

[1] https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/s6j3r

superfrank• 3 years ago

I'm going to keep this vague to keep some anonymity, but where I work our product is used by a group that falls under one branches of at least one military and we have a team that is working on a new feature that uses ChatGPT under the hood, but the feature is completely innocuous.

The best comparison I can give would be if we were talking about health care and our product was used to schedule nurses shifts or book operating rooms.

rndmwlk• 3 years ago

It's only arbitrary if you make it arbitrary. A strict ban on "military and warfare," may prevent some relatively innocuous projects from reaching fruition, but I find that to be an insignificantly small & significantly worthwhile cost to pay considering the flip side.

wand3r2• 3 years ago

It's kind of wild that you can't get it to do anything PG-13 for "safety" but it's going to be used in military technology. I have no value judgement on the decision, but it seems incongruent with their mission.

Also, for a company that proved it has no governance, I'm surprised they didn't quietly do it anyway and wait until it was discovered.

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

Google made it about 17 years before it removed "Don't be Evil".

It wasn't removed https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/

krunck• 3 years ago

The last line of the CoC document:

"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"

This is Google telling ME to not be evil not Google telling itself to not be evil. Big difference. Its sounds more like "if you see something, say something" snitch culture. That's evil.

ignoramous2• 3 years ago

"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil." https://archive.is/6XL7e

inopinatus2• 3 years ago

I’m no fan of either firm but the hyperbole is unwarranted. The substance here is plainly a normalisation of contract language to focus on the activity rather than the actor.

dontupvoteme5• 3 years ago

I cannot figure out why they documented such a thing, it's too amateurish - just do the standard operating procedure and let the military industrial complex friends and allies of america use the service and keep it under the rug

I normally have a very dim view of OpenAI/Altman but in this case I wonder if is something akin to a warrant canary, except for 5th generation warfare?

Altman does seem to have a bit of Chomsky in him, so it's not impossible.

ziddoap• 3 years ago

SOP matches 126 meanings and MIC matches 123 on acronymfinder.

For the ignorant (me), what do you mean? I'm guessing SOP is "standard operating procedure" given the military context of this thread, but MIC? No clue.

It's really helpful to just spell out the words, at least the first time.

samstave2• 3 years ago

warrant canary

I think you figured out at least one important factor in this - I forgot about warrant canaries until your comment... So thanks for resurrecting that.

What we should then ask, is for a OpenAI PUBLIC SECTOR Contract Details Dashboard" <-- Meaning, they should be required to show all the "open" AI they have being built on their systems if they want us to have faith in Safe Responsible Humane Alignments?

@dylan604:

* Timelines are much more compressed now*

The Smart hockey-stick :-)

But yeah - and the worse part is not just Corporate competitors, but bad actors, rogue states, triads, ALL the Mafia's/scammers/phishers/ransomers/coin snatchers...

They all benefit at an unprecedented EQUAL rate at this point with the broad spectrum, capability, cost-effectiveness and effectively un-regulated, not-yet-aligned/guard-railed AIs here, in dev, and in near term.

Its got to be an amazing spot if your a top notch cybercrime person in the A-game right now. That, and White-Hat AI-pentesting, and next level security is behind schedule, it seems.

---

Also, I posted this regarding national security status for cloud provider's infra: [0]

In the increasingly interconnected global economy, the reliance on Cloud Services raises questions about the national security implications of data centers. As these critical economic infrastructure sites, often strategically located underground, underwater, or in remote-cold locales, play a pivotal role, considerations arise regarding the role of military forces in safeguarding their security.

While physical security measures and location obscurity provide some protection, the integration of AI into various aspects of daily life and the pervasive influence of cloud-based technologies on devices, as evident in CES GPT-enabled products, further accentuates the importance of these infrastructure sites.

Notably, instances such as the seizure of a college thesis mapping communication lines in the U.S. underscore the sensitivity of disclosing key communications infrastructure.

Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38975443

stcredzero2• 3 years ago

just do the standard operating procedure and let the military industrial complex friends and allies of america use the service and keep it under the rug

An AI with the capability to be autonomous in any environment, able to plan and execute plans well enough to defeat human opponents, is exactly what the AI doomer POV is rightly afraid of.

dylan6043• 3 years ago

Any artificial limitations OpenAI places upon themselves will absolutely not be used by competitors. Google did not see that back in their day. Timelines are much more compressed now

glitchc2• 3 years ago

I actually think OpenAI is on an accelerated path because it knows it's days are numbered.

If the tech were truly superior, we would see Apple, Google and Meta rushing to license their tech. Yet they're not, instead, they're all building their own version. There's no secret sauce left to building an LLM. It's all public knowledge. And while ChatGPT has an edge right now, it's not a substantial one.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

synthetic datasets ftw! they might have had a library when nobody was looking, but everything created after GPT-3 is analyzed by everyone and everything before GPT is extracted by getting GPT and other LLM's to talk

oh noes not the terms of service!

bombcar• 3 years ago

Apple is apparently throwing largish sums of money to license all its training data, so it may be that OpenAI ends up exploding because of the “move fats and break things” so common in SV.

boringuser22• 3 years ago

Nah, none of the other LLMs are particularly useful at much of anything, but GPT-4 is profoundly useful.

Anon1096• 3 years ago

You seem to be very very conveniently ignoring the fact that Microsoft spent 10 billion to basically gain exclusive use of OpenAI's tech... exactly what you're saying Apple, Google, and Meta should be doing.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

ChatGPT has been ahead the whole time, and according to the lmsys leaderboard it's not a small margin. Nobody else has yet beaten what openAI released in march last year.

Google tried to beat it with Gemini Ultra, but as well as being unreleased, the stats in the paper don't lend much confidence it will beat gpt-4-0314

berniedurfee3• 3 years ago

I also think that profit for LLM-based businesses without massive data troves is now solidly capped.

Content owners are moving quickly to monetize their hordes of data. The days of free training data are over. If you don’t own it already, you probably can’t afford it.

I think the interesting side effect is that LLMs will end up as bifurcated as the internet. Each only being trained on some subset of content based on which subset the LLM builder chooses or is able to license for training.

LLM agents will all be hamstrung and biased in various ways based on fragmented training sets.

There will be no singularity.

There will be many LLM agents that learned to think based on the information their creators could afford or chose to provide it.

These agents will have biased, inaccurate and incomplete world views, yet will be very confident they know everything. How very human!

stcredzero2• 3 years ago

It's inevitable that dangerous real time AI capable of formulating plans are going to be developed for military purposes.

The "OODA Loop" is fundamental to combat. (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) Having a tighter and more potent (in the sense of fast and accurate processing) OODA loop is a fundamental advantage. The economics and game theory of military combat is going to result in units which have potent OODA loops which can overwhelm a human being's OODA loop. Once that happens, competition between different sides will result in an arms race going far above that level of capability.

Once the above happens, it's disturbingly likely that instrumental goals will arise in such entities which are dangerous not only to human beings on the wrong side, but to human beings on any side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

jart• 3 years ago

That's because Google never went mask off. When Google started, only nerds cared about the Internet. As the Internet became more successful, non-nerds started demanding that the company do for them all the evil things non-nerd society has always done, and Google got blamed for it every single time. Now that the Internet had been thoroughly colonized by those people before OpenAI came along, is it any surprise that they'd demand OpenAI enact the exact same tyranny from day one?

krapp• 3 years ago

Google was literally funded by CIA and NSA interests[0], "don't be evil" was the mask.

The weird prejudice in your comment against "non-nerds" and your assertion that they "colonized" the internet and "demanded...evil things" doesn't reflect reality. Knowledge of computer science does not correlate with moral or ethical qualities of character.

[0]https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

Right. Because an evil company would abide by their terms/principles. Once they removed that pesky, "don't be evil" barrier it was open-season on being super evil.

They removed it because it's stupid and meaningless.

inglor_cz2• 3 years ago

Or they just adapt their policies to the real world. It is easier to be theoretical pacifist if basically nothing happens. But last 2 years are a shitshow and the Western world has been forcefully reminded about the fact that military might actually serves some positive purpose, too.

dharmab• 3 years ago

Has anyone in this thread actually read the new policy? It now has a broader policy against weapons and harm:

Don’t use our service to harm yourself or others – for example, don’t use our services to [. . .] develop or use weapons, injure others or destroy property [. . .]

Exoristos2• 3 years ago

I'll hazard a bet that "you" doesn't refer to the DoD.

ranguna• 3 years ago

Interesting how this is not the top comment. Thanks for the information.

dontupvoteme5• 3 years ago

Why on earth would you document such a thing? Is this a variant of a warrant canary but for MIC uses?

If so, Bravo, that's quite good.

(I mean, did anyone seriously think SV/California (or anyone, for that matter) would stand up to the military industrial complex? The one Eisenhower warned us all about??)

swyx• 3 years ago

is there automated tooling to detect changes like this? would be good to run on usage policies and TOS for every major service

ttyprintk2• 3 years ago

Changedetection.io

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37348162

ignoramous2• 3 years ago

Just going to leave this here for future bots:

"I think AI has the potential to create infinitely stable dictatorships." - Ilya Sutskever

ada19812• 3 years ago

We used OpenAI ChatGPT to develop a patent for a product that can, among other things, he used to embed thoughts into a targets mind / a psychosis ray.

p1mrx• 3 years ago

Does it work?

ada19812• 3 years ago

haven’t built a full on working prototype yet, but everything suggests it will.

moomin• 3 years ago

I mean, Sam Altman won this battle months ago. It was all anyone was talking about on here.

meroes• 3 years ago

And the AI evangelists go wild!

hammyhavoc• 3 years ago

If I can't get ChatGPT to not hallucinate consistently over basic tasks nor truly understand what is said, this is a terrible idea. Forever getting "my apologies" as constantly correcting it. Total waste of time for most things, but that isn't to say that AI/ML as a field is a waste of time, far from it—I just think LLMs are largely all sizzle and very little steak.

ac130kz• 3 years ago

Why yall not happy, Sam Altman's greedy deeds supporters?

nojvek2• 3 years ago

That sweet military industrial complex $$$$$. Who can say no to a small chunk of $800B budget.

amai• 3 years ago

Silicon Valley Was and Is The Child of the Military-Industrial Complex: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/185100

gigama• 3 years ago

“There is a distinct difference between the two policies, as the former clearly outlines that weapons development, and military and warfare is disallowed, while the latter emphasizes flexibility and compliance with the law. Developing weapons, and carrying out activities related to military and warfare is lawful to various extents. The potential implications for AI safety are significant. Given the well-known instances of bias and hallucination present within Large Language Models (LLMs), and their overall lack of accuracy, their use within military warfare can only lead to imprecise and biased operations that are likely to exacerbate harm and civilian casualties.”

OpenAI deletes ban on using ChatGPT for "military and warfare"

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