[Gigachad]

Tech companies will pull trillions of dollars out of their asses when the problem is boosting ad revenue or automating people out of a job. But when asked to deal with the crisis they invented and dumped on society the answer is “that’s impossible, doesn’t scale”

[CobrastanJorji]

Figure a "mental health crisis" human conversation takes 30 minutes. Three million incidents per week would require 37,500 qualified mental health counselors on the phones working a 40 hour shift that week. Figure they make $75k/year each. You're now spending $3 billion per year on crisis response, and you're employing like 10% of all of the health counselors in the US. And all you're providing is 30 minute chats.

[godelski]

  > You're now spending $3 billion per year on crisis response

Honestly? That's really affordable[0]. That would be cheap if these were just for the US but it looks like these are global numbers. We spend $2bn/yr alone on "BREASTFEEDING PEER COUNSELORS AND BONUSES"[1]. I mean let's be serious, even in the article that OpenAI published says that it is a small portion of their users. So it doesn't "need to scale" as the scale is relatively small. But just because it is small doesn't mean it is unimportant.

$3bn/yr is a lot of people money, but it is nothing for government money.

Edit: Last round of OpenAI funding was $122bn[2] and in the same article they are saying that they are generating $2bn in revenue per month. While that's not profit, it is worth mentioning that what you are saying "doesn't scale" is about 12% of the revenue of something that does scale. A single company. And mind you if we implemented what you're proposing it would be available to all the AI companies and more. Making it only a smaller drop in the bucket, not larger.

[0] Not to mention that better mental health care services will result in savings elsewhere. It's always way more expensive to fix a broken pipe that's flooding your house than it is to fix a pipe with a small crack. "Don't fix what ain't broken" is used too broadly. Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, but people just can't seem to understand this.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/012-3510

[2] https://openai.com/index/accelerating-the-next-phase-ai/

[Gigachad]

Mark Zuckerberg can spend $80B on the failed metaverse experiment, but can't spare some relative pocket change on solving the psychosis issue his products caused.

[musicale]

Well, Metaverse could have been a profitable business if they had delivered a product or service (other than Oculus, which is a decent though not $80B product) which regular people wanted to use and were willing to pay money for.

[intended]

So what?

That underinvestment is the entire reason their stock prices are so high. This is effectively pollution of our information economy and environment, and the costs are offloaded to society.

The fact that we have the first generation with lower education attainment is not a problem for their stock prices or operational profit.

Tech has ungodly profit margins, because they are all about scaling without having to bring people in. Sadly there is no such thing as a free lunch, and if firms are made to clean up their mess?

Oil spills affect Oil firms more than Tech fallout affects Tech firms.

[musicale]

> This is effectively pollution of our information economy and environment, and the costs are offloaded to society

Tech firms are remarkably successful at offloading costs as externalities and avoiding any sort of liability. '

What other products do you buy that require mandatory click-through "agreements" absolving the manufacturer of any kind of responsibility? Why is that legal?

[davebren]

Mapping and photographing every road on the planet? Easy. Not manipulating our chatbot users into psychosis and suicide or worse? No way can't be done.

[Henchman21]

This puts the lie plainly on display doesn't it?

So let's summarize: these "people" are allowed to induce mental illness in the general population with no repercussions. Let's speculate about who might benefit from a population with a significant amount of mental illness? Hmm, I wonder who would benefit? Could it be the people at the top that like to treat the bulk of humanity as cattle?

[musicale]

Many of the problems with LLMs may be structural and intrinsic due to the way they work (probabilistic text generation) and their training data (often human-generated text that incorporates many features of human discourse that are undesirable in machine-generated output.)

The continual failures of "guardrails" show that it's incredibly difficult to get these systems to behave in reliable and predictable ways; unsupervised interactions with them are intrinsically unsafe, and should be treated as such.

Presumably Meta and others are trying to detect and prevent bad output and pathological interactions, but that detection is unlikely to be 100% accurate, and we've seen what the failure modes can look like.

[davebren]

I'm not talking about the edge cases where it goes off the rails, I'm talking about the way it normally conversates. The way it was trained to do so through RL.

[musicale]

Oh, are you saying that incentivizing engagement (usually to increase ad views and revenue) also implicitly increases bad behaviors and outcomes, and that is why it won't be fixed? That sounds plausible. Even before LLMs the engagement/attention economy had strong negative effects that companies didn't want to address.