Yet another Hacker News

People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI

38 points pier25 1 hour ago 21 comments

in_absentia 1 hour ago | parent

So OpenAI is not a believer in recursive self-improvement after all?

gadders 47 minutes ago | parent

I think people want the service they are paying for.

jrflo 40 minutes ago | parent

Read the article, that's not what this is about. Title is clickbait, they fired contractors for using AI to label data when the whole point of labeling data is to distill human knowledge into weights, not distill weights into weights.

in_absentia 17 minutes ago | parent

You're replying to a joke, and yes, that's all it's about. For all the tales of rapid self-improvement, all labs are real careful not to taint their precious training sets with anything that comes out of their systems. Website reputation modeling, fingerprints in generated text, firing contractors that rely on AI.

I've been told on HN about a year ago that the era of scraping is over and that it's all AI-training-AI now. My web server logs and stories like that disagree.

pfortuny 17 minutes ago | parent

That is exactly what "training AI" needs: labeled data.

beepbooptheory 16 minutes ago | parent

What is the other way to interpret the title in your mind?

liquicity 38 minutes ago | parent

They’re a believer, but they won’t be paying third parties for that once it becomes feasible

VCFundedGenYer 58 minutes ago | parent

Bubble bursting behavior in action - AI company that pushes everyone to use AI, replace everything and everyone with AI, fires people for using AI to make the AI.

The more you think about it, the worse it gets.

dgellow 40 minutes ago | parent

Earlier this year it was so dissonant to see so many companies explaining how they are going to replace their engineers with AI from both OpenAI and Anthropic, while both companies were instead (and are still) hiring all the human talent they could

kwartel 13 minutes ago | parent

Fires people for using AI to label data. That is something that has always been clear from the start is something that needs to be done by humans.

hmokiguess 56 minutes ago | parent

Makes sense, they are buying distillation of human brains not their own weights.

jakozaur 55 minutes ago | parent

Typically, for AI training, you need human feedback. If AI were enough, then OpenAI would do it themselves. Though we all know how bad AI slop is, running it in a loop can lead to unreadable sentences.

They hired contractors on the condition that they provide human feedback without AI; those people broke the rules, so their contracts ended prematurely.

Not sure why this is news uncovered by an investigative journalist.

dgellow 44 minutes ago | parent

How is it a failure of journalistic understanding? They seem to say pretty much the same as you

fwlr 34 minutes ago | parent

“Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply … A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous … However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug, they freak out … If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”. At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.”

What is it, exactly, that makes AI-generated text so poisonous to AIs but totally harmless to humans? What is mode/model collapse, and why can it only happen to AIs with too much AI text in their training data and not to, say, human students with too much AI text in their textbooks? The people who know the most about this phenomenon seem much more careful about contamination than they are encouraging us to be.

yunwal 28 minutes ago | parent

I don't think anyone is saying it's poisonous here? The people were hired to do a job and they didn't do it. Feels like you're being disingenuous, if there's one thing i know about AI employees, it's that they use LLMs, like, all the time.

fwlr 9 minutes ago | parent

Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.

(I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)

jrflo 39 minutes ago | parent

Clickbait title, they fired contractors for using AI to label data, which defeats the purpose of labeling data in this case.

ergl 15 minutes ago | parent

> they fired contractors for using AI to label data

Is your objection to the word “train” in headline? Otherwise, you’re just restating the headline while calling it clickbait (which, btw, it’s not, perhaps you meant to say it is misleading, which is a different thing.)

MeetingsBrowser 6 minutes ago | parent

labeling is more specific than training, and changes the implied situation.

Its the same difference between "I was arrested for having liquid in my car while driving" and "I was arrested for holding an open bottle of whiskey while driving"

arceister 19 minutes ago | parent

yo dawg

wpasc 13 minutes ago | parent

pimp my agent