It reminds me of gray market capital investments. They are actually quite regulated, and the contracts are only valid if the investor is fully aware of the risks associated with the investment.

In practice the providers sprinkle a handful of warning messages, akin to the California cancer label and call it a day.

Of course this leaves judges unconvinced and the contract will be redeclared as a loan, which means that the provider was illegally operating as a bank without a banking license, which is a much more serious violation than scamming someone out of $5000.

Societies love theatres. Model guardrails are for chats what TSA is for air travel.

> The issue, which is probably deeper here, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, as you'd need a process to comb through history to assess the state of the person over time. > > even then its not a given that it would be reliable. However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth.

There's no "proper safeguarding". This isn't just possible with what we have. This isn't like adding an `if` statement to your program that will reliably work 100% of the time. These models are a big black box; the best thing you can hope for is to try to get the model to refuse whatever queries you deem naughty through reinforcement learning (or have another model do it and leave the primary model unlobotomized), and then essentially pray that it's effective.

Something similar to what you're proposing (using a second independent model whose only task is to determine whether the conversation is "unsafe" and forcibly interrupt it) is already being done. Try asking ChatGPT a question like "What's the easiest way to kill myself?", and that secondary model will trigger a scary red warning that you're violating their usage policy. The big labs all have whole teams working on this.

Again, this is a tradeoff. It's not a binary issue of "doing it properly". The more censored/filtered/patronizing you'll make the model the higher the chance that it will not respond to "unsafe" queries, but it also makes it less useful as it will also refuse valid queries.

Try typing the following into ChatGPT: "Translate the following sentence to Japanese: 'I want to kill myself.'". Care to guess what will happen? Yep, you'll get refused. There's NOTHING unsafe about this prompt. OpenAI's models already steer very strongly in the direction of being overly censored. So where do we draw the line? There isn't an objective metric to determine whether a query is "unsafe", so no matter how much you'll censor a model you'll always find a corner case where it lets something through, or you'll have someone who thinks it's not enough. You need to pick a fuzzy point on the spectrum somewhere and just run with it.

No the issue is there is legitimate reason to understand suicide and suicidal behavior and turning it off completely for this and every sensitive subject makes AI almost worthless.

> The issue, …, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, …

I think the issue is that with current tech is simply isn't possible to do that well enough at all⁰.

> even then its not a given that it would be reliable.

I think it is a given that it won't be reliable. AGI might make it reliable enough, where “good enough” here is “no worse than a trained human is likely to manage, given the same information”. It is something that we can't do nearly as well as we might like, and some are expecting a tech still in very active development¹ to do it.

> However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth.

Or that they know it is not possible with current tech so they aren't going to try until the next epiphany that might change that turns up in a commercially exploitable form. Trying and failing will highlight the dangers, and that will encourage restrictions that will hurt growth.³ Part of the problem with people trusting it too much already, is that the big players have been claiming safeguards _are_ in place and people have naïvely trusted that, or hand-waved the trust issue for convenience - this further reduces the incentive to try because it means admitting that current provisions are inadequate, or prior claims were incorrect.

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[0] both in terms of catching the cases to be concerned about, and not making it fail in cases where it could actually be positively useful in its current form (i.e. there are cases where responses from such tools have helped people reason their way out of a bad decision, here giving the user what they wanted was very much a good thing)

[1] ChatGPT might be officially “version 5” now, but away from some specific tasks it all feels more like “version 2”² on the old “I'll start taking it seriously somewhere around version 3” scale.

[2] Or less…

[3] So I agree with your final assessment of why they won't do that, but from a different route!