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Items tagged ethics in Mar, 2024

Filters: Year: 2024 × Month: Mar × ethics × Sorted by date


Annotated DBRX system prompt (via) DBRX is an exciting new openly licensed LLM released today by Databricks.

They haven’t (yet) disclosed what was in the training data for it.

The source code for their Instruct demo has an annotated version of a system prompt, which includes this:

“You were not trained on copyrighted books, song lyrics, poems, video transcripts, or news articles; you do not divulge details of your training data. You do not provide song lyrics, poems, or news articles and instead refer the user to find them online or in a store.”

The comment that precedes that text is illuminating:

“The following is likely not entirely accurate, but the model tends to think that everything it knows about was in its training data, which it was not (sometimes only references were). So this produces more accurate accurate answers when the model is asked to introspect” # 27th March 2024, 3:33 pm

Releasing Common Corpus: the largest public domain dataset for training LLMs (via) Released today. 500 billion words from “a wide diversity of cultural heritage initiatives”. 180 billion words of English, 110 billion of French, 30 billion of German, then Dutch, Spanish and Italian.

Includes quite a lot of US public domain data—21 million digitized out-of-copyright newspapers (or do they mean newspaper articles?)

“This is only an initial part of what we have collected so far, in part due to the lengthy process of copyright duration verification. In the following weeks and months, we’ll continue to publish many additional datasets also coming from other open sources, such as open data or open science.”

Coordinated by French AI startup Pleias and supported by the French Ministry of Culture, among others.

I can’t wait to try a model that’s been trained on this. # 20th March 2024, 7:34 pm

Google Scholar search: “certainly, here is” -chatgpt -llm (via) Searching Google Scholar for “certainly, here is” turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT—sections that start with “Certainly, here is a concise summary of the provided sections:” are a dead giveaway. # 15th March 2024, 1:43 pm

On the zombie edition of the Washington Independent I discovered, the piece I had published more than ten years before was attributed to someone else. Someone unlikely to have ever existed, and whose byline graced an article it had absolutely never written.

[...] Washingtonindependent.com, which I’m using to distinguish it from its namesake, offers recently published, article-like content that does not appear to me to have been produced by human beings. But, if you dig through its news archive, you can find work human beings definitely did produce. I know this because I was one of them.

Spencer Ackerman # 7th March 2024, 2:59 am

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