Benchmark optimizations are slightly embarrassing at worst, and an "optimization for a specific use case" at best. There's no regulation against optimizing for a particular task, everyone does it all the time, in some cases it's just not communicated transparently.
Phone manufacturers were caught "optimizing" for benchmarks again and again, removing power limits to boost scores. Hard to name an example without searching the net because it's at most a faux pas.
It’s as if OpenAI detects the IP address from a benchmark organization, and then used a completely different model.
Not quite. They programmed their "prod" software to recognise the circumstances of a laboratory test and behave differently. Namely during laboratory emissions testing they would activate emission control features they would not activate otherwise.
The software was the same they flash on production cars. They were production cars. You could take a random car from a random dealership and it would have done the same trickery in the lab.
Also, legality isn't the only difference in the VW case. With VW, they had a "good emissions" mode. They enabled the good emissions mode during the test, but disabled it during regular driving. It would have worked during regular driving, but they disabled it during regular driving. With compilers, there's no "good performance" mode that would work during regular usage that they're disabling during regular usage.
It sounds like a mismatch of definition, but I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical. Law is the codification and enforcement of a social contract, not the creation of it.
VW cheated such that the low emissions were only active during the test- it’s not that it was optimized for low emissions under the conditions they test for, but that you could not get those low emissions under any conditions in the real world. That's "cheating on the test" not "studying for the test."
Key differences:
1. Intent and harm: • VW’s actions directly violated laws and had environmental and health consequences. Optimizing LLMs for chess benchmarks, while arguably misleading, doesn’t have immediate real-world harms. 2. Scope: Chess-specific optimization is generally a transparent choice within AI research. It’s not a hidden “defeat device” but rather an explicit design goal. 3. Broader impact: LLMs fine-tuned for benchmarks often still retain general-purpose capabilities. They aren’t necessarily “broken” outside chess, whereas VW cars fundamentally failed to meet emissions standards.
These days most compilers are trying to make the general case of code fast and they rarely look for benchmarks. I won't say they never do this - just that it is much less common - if only because magazine reviews/benchmarks are not nearly as important as they used to be and so the incentive is gone.
There are many cases where I think that. Examples:
* Underage drinking. If it's legal for someone to drink, I think it's in general ethical. If it's illegal, I think it's in general unethical.
* Tax avoidance strategies. If the IRS says a strategy is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the IRS says a strategy is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
* Right on red. If the government says right on red is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the government (e.g. NYC) says right on red is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
The VW case was emissions regulations. I think they have an ethical obligation to obey emissions regulations. In the absence of regulations, it's not an obvious ethical problem to prioritize fuel efficiency instead of emissions (that's I believe what VW was doing).
Law and ethics are barely related, in practice.
For example in the vehicle emissions context, it's worth noting that even well before VW was caught the actions of likely all carmakers affected by the regulations (not necessarily to the same extent) were clearly unethical. The rules had been subject to intense clearly unethical lobbying for years, and so even the legal lab results bore little resemblance to practical on-the-road results though systematic (yet legal) abuse. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even what was measured intentionally diverged from what is harmfully in a profitable way. It's a good thing VW was made an example of - but clearly it's not like that resolved the general problem of harmful vehicle emissions. Optimistically, it might have signaled to the rest of the industry and VW in particular to stretch the rules less in the future.
You might consider disregarding the government’s preventative measures unethical, and doing those things might be the way someone disregards the governments protective guidelines, but that doesn’t make those actions unethical any more than governments explicitly legalizing something makes it ethical.
To use a clearer example, the ethicality of abortion— regardless of what you think of it— is not changed by its legal status. You might consider violating the law unethical, so breaking abortion laws would constitute the same ethical violation as underage drinking, but those laws don’t change the ethics of abortion itself. People who consider it unethical still consider it unethical where it’s legal, and those that consider it ethical still consider it ethical where it’s not legal.
It used to be common for graphics drivers to outright cheat on benchmarks (the actual image produced would not be the same as it would have been if a benchmark had not been detected); this was arguably, fraud.
It used to be common for mobile phone manufacturers to allow the SoC to operate in a thermal mode that was never available to real users when it detected a benchmark was being used. This is still, IMO, kinda fraud-y.
Optimisation for common benchmark cases where the thing still actually _works_, and where the optimisation is available to normal users where applicable, is less egregious, though, still, IMO, Not Great.
I say this because the be test still uses the same hardware (model) but changed the way it behaved by running emissions friendly parameters ( a different execution framework) that wouldn’t have been used in everyday driving, where fuel efficiency and performance optimized parameters were used instead.
What I’d like to know is if it actually was unethical or not. The overall carbon footprint of the lower fuel consumption setting, with fuel manufacturing and distribution factored in, might easily have been more impactful than the emissions model, which typically does not factor in fuel consumed.
If the rules themselves are bad and go against deeper morality, then it's a different situation; violating laws out of civil disobedience, emergent need, or with a principled stance is different from wanton, arbitrary, selfish cheating.
If a law is particularly unjust, violating the law might itself be virtuous. If the law is adequate and sensible, violating it is usually wrong even if the violating action could be legal in another sensible jurisdiction.
That is, sometimes, sufficient.
If government says ‘seller of a house must disclose issues’ then I rely rely on the law being followed, if you sell and leave the country, you have defrauded me.
However if I live in a ‘buyer beware’ jurisdiction, then I know I cannot trust the seller and I hire a surveyor and take insurance.
There is a degree of setting expectations- if there is a rule, even if it’s a terrible rule, I as individual can at least take some countermeasures.
You can’t take countermeasures against all forms of illegal behaviour, because there is infinite number of them. And a truly insane person is unpredictable at all.
“Production” is a factory line producing cars. The software is uploaded on the ECUs by some factory machine automatically. Each car are exactly the same, with the exact same software version on thousands and thousands of cars. The cars are sold to customers.
Some small number of these prodiction cars are sent for regulatory compliance checks to third parties. But those cars won’t become suddenly non-production cars just because someone sticks up a probe in their exhausts. The same way gmail’s production servers don’t suddenly turn into test environments just because a user opens the network tab in their browser’s dev tool to see what kind of requests fly on the wire.
(Nothing wrong with it! It's just a bit more generic than the original topic.)
What if I make sure to have a drink once a week for the summer with my 18 year old before they go to college because I want them to understand what it's like before they go binge with friends? Is that not ethical?
Speeding to the hospital in an emergency? Lying to Nazis to save a Jew?
Law and ethics are more correlated than some are saying here, but the map is not the territory, and it never will be.
Abortion opponents view it as killing an innocent person. So that's unethical regardless of whether it's legal. I'm not contesting in any way that legal things can be unethical. Abortion supporters view it as a human right, and that right is more important than the law.
Right on red, underage drinking, and increasing car emissions aren't human rights. So outside of extenuating circumstances, if they're illegal, I see them as unethical.
I don't think the government's job is to enforce morality. The government's job is to set up a framework for society to help people get along.
My point though, is that in general, when there's not a right that outweighs the law, it's unethical to break the law.