Paris Marx is joined by Emily M. Bender to discuss what it means to say that ChatGPT is a “stochastic parrot,” why Elon Musk is calling to pause AI development, and how the tech industry uses language to trick us into buying its narratives about technology.
 
 Emily M. Bender is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master’s Program. She’s also the director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. Follow Emily on Twitter at @emilymbender or on Mastodon at @emilymbender@dair-community.social.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.
 
Also mentioned in this episode:

• Emily was one of the co-authors on the “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” paper and co-wrote the “Octopus Paper” with Alexander Koller. She was also recently profiled in New York Magazine and has written about why policymakers shouldn’t fall for the AI hype.
• The Future of Life Institute put out the “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter and the authors of the “Stochastic Parrots” paper responded through DAIR Institute.
• Zachary Loeb has written about Joseph Weizenbaum and the ELIZA chatbot.
• Leslie Kay Jones has researched how Black women use and experience social media.
• As generative AI is rolled out, many tech companies are firing their AI ethics teams.
• Emily points to Algorithmic Justice League and AI Incident Database.
• Deborah Raji wrote about data and systemic racism for MIT Tech Review.
• Books mentioned: Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil, Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin, Ghost Work by Mary L Gray & Siddharth Suri, Artificial Unintelligence by Meredith Broussard, Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock, Data Conscience: Algorithmic S1ege on our Hum4n1ty by Brandeis Marshall.

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We all know what the industry’s main character is right now – ChatGPT. But natural language processing (NLP) is in many respects a project as old as tech itself. A ton of companies are working on this stuff, some even before the current round of hype, with the attendant Great Pivot from Web3 to LLM. One such company is deepset.

Founded in 2018 in Berlin by Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch, and Timo Möller, deepset maintains the open source haystack project, which is designed to make it easier to use Transformers and large language models (LLMs) in your applications. Transformers are a concept introduced by Google in 2017 in the seminal paper Attention Is All You Need – a neural network architecture that has dramatically accelerated the state of the art in AI/ML. deepset wants to make this kind of technology usable and useful by the enterprise, with both on prem and cloud products. Because for all the excitement about LLMs and related technologies there is also a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Who owns the models likely owns the moats. Enterprises and governments are concerned about ownership and business sustainability. Samsung recently had a leak of source code and trade secrets after engineering teams used ChatGPT in a planning meeting. ChatGPT has been banned in Italy because of piracy concerns. So much for data protection – It’s not clear whether the type of crawling and learning approaches pioneered by OpenAI are even compatible with EU law, in the shape of the the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Ant Stanley covers a lot of this in a great post on his new blog, with this post Ask for forgiveness, Not permission

Anyway, when an area is so hot it’s always interesting to talk to folks that are steeped in it. I was lucky enough to catch up with Pietsch recently, for a RedMonk Conversation video. It was funny that we both have stories about moms using ChatGPT. While I am not a fan of the “even my mom can do it” framing, it’s definitely worth paying attention when a technology is crossing over so fast to mainstream adoption. Conversational AI based on LLMs is “haptic” – the feedback loops are just very immediate. Insert Mythic Quest reference here.

Mainstream adoption creates all kinds of challenges for the kind of innovation unleashed by OpenAI and ChatGPT. That’s where data and model sovereignty, compliance, the avoidance of AI-driven hallucinations in content, code and decision-making comes in. Those are the kinds of areas where deepset is focusing its attention. What multicloud was to the last 10 years, multi-model probably will be to the next ten. We’ve already seen AWS start positioning itself accordingly/. Multi sounds good when you’re not the market leader.

OpenAI will be a winner, but not the only one.

A concept you’ll be hearing a lot more about is Retrieval Augmentation – in terms of improving models. Again we cover that in the conversation. So dive in!

So watch the video, and tell me what you think, here or on Youtube, but in the meantime I will leave you with a story from deepset about a gentleman in his 80s that runs a legal publishing firm in Germany. He called deepset just before Christmas last year to insist on a meeting before the end of the year to discuss ChatGPT’s potential implications on his business, and how he could do something similar but without giving his own information away. ChatGPT only launched on November 30th 2022. That’s the scale of the challenge, and the opportunity.

disclosure: AWS, Google and Microsoft are all clients. deepset sponsored this video.

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Social scientists have long studied the ways in which smartphone use can distract us from the proper performance of means-ends tasks, such as driving or medical procedures. In Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones (Bloomsbury, 2022), Tiger Roholt discusses a distinct type of distraction: when smartphone use interferes with our active engagement with meaningful experiences, such as dinner with friends or a musical performance or gardening. In these cases, Roholt argues, we risk stunting the experiences that would otherwise give meaning to our lives, or even missing out on discovering new types of meaningful experiences.  Roholt, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Montclair State University, draws on writings from John Dewey, Susan Wolf, Albert Borgmann and others in this engagingly written meditation on how ubiquitous uses of smartphones and wearable technologies affects our lives in ways that other types of interruptions do not. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society



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Welcome to episode #868 of Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast.

Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast – Episode #868. Are you looking for a way to move forward and create a life well-lived? Look no further than Daniel H. Pink and his latest book, The Power of Regret – How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. As a bestselling author and expert in business, work, creativity, and behavior, Dan’s insights on this misunderstood emotion are sure to inspire and empower. Based on unprecedented research, Dan’s latest work challenges conventional wisdom about regret and shows how properly handling this emotion can point the way to a fulfilling life. But The Power of Regret is just the latest in a long line of bestselling books (that I truly love!), including: When, To Sell is Human, Drive, A Whole New Mind, Free Agent Nation, and the grossly under-estimated manga beauty of The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. Plus, if you’re not tuning into his newsletter and The Pinkcast, you really should. With his insights and expertise, Dan has become a respected voice in business (and the kind of thinker that I aspire to be). Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from one of the greatest thinkers in business and behavior. Enjoy the conversation…

• Running time: 47:31.
• Hello from beautiful Montreal.
• Subscribe over at Apple Podcasts.
• Please visit and leave comments on the blog – Six Pixels of Separation.
• Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook.
• Check out ThinkersOne.
• or you can connect on LinkedIn.
• …or on Twitter.
• Here is my conversation with Daniel H. Pink.
• The Power of Regret – How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward.
• When.
• To Sell is Human.
• Drive.
• A Whole New Mind.
• Free Agent Nation.
• The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.
• Sign up to Dan’s newsletter.
• The Pinkcast.
• Follow Dan on Twitter.
• Follow Dan on LinkedIn.
• This week’s music: David Usher ‘St. Lawrence River’.

Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast – Episode #868.

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