He Helped Invent Generative AI. Now He Wants to Save It
WiredIn 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. One giant tech company, Meta, does tout its systems as open source, but Polosukhin doesn’t consider Meta’s models as truly open: “The parameters are open, but we don’t know what data went into the model, and data defines what bias might be there and what kinds of decisions are made,” he says. Is this a good margin of safety?’ Even for an engineer, it's hard to answer questions about model parameters and what’s a good margin of safety,” he says. “They'll put their own people on the committee to make sure the watchers are the watchees.” The alternative, argues Polosukhin, is an open source model where accountability is cooked into the technology itself. “At some point you would say, ‘We don’t have to grow anymore.’ It’s like with bitcoin—the price can go up or down, but there’s no one deciding, ‘Hey, we need to post $2 billion more revenue this year.’ You can use that mechanism to align incentives and build a neutral platform.”
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