Machine Learning

How is it all that different from writing a self-help book though, in a legal sense? Why is there any bigger liability and ethical issue? There are millions of such books and articles published, full of all sorts of nonsense. A mentally unstable person might follow one and experience a bad outcome. No reason to stop releasing books though. A simple disclaimer seems to suffice. I understand that the experience of an LLM is not the same thing as reading a book, but it is in a sense just indexing and summarizing many texts in an interactive way. Why do you think it would be treated differently under the law, are there specific laws that apply to LLMs but not to books?

I agree with the points you are raising. This is meant to be like a companion (think of Replika) that you can talk, to sort out your feelings and learn mindfulness techniques. It is not meant for somebody who is struggling with serious mental health issues. I already have a description that mentions several times that it is generative AI and should be used with caution. I think I should clarify that further in bot description and in its naming, not to mislead people.

I have thought about all the dangers that it poses for a long time but I think if built and used responsibly, it has the potential to help huge number of people. Especially right now, because there is a severe shortage of mental health professionals and not many people can afford it. I also didn't have great personal experience with human therapists, most of them put me on a lot of medication that ended up not helping at all.

As for the model size, this is only for getting some feedback. My current inference server cannot handle big number of users. Even if I intend to have a bigger release, I will not be doing it without much more capable model, extensive testing, more safety guardrails and RLHF.