Social media companies have very successfully deployed and protected their black box recommendation algorithms despite massive negative societal consequences, and the current transformer models are arguably black boxes with massive adoption.
I agree that some companies do use RL systems. However, I’d expect that most of the time, the black-box nature of some of these systems is not actively preferred. They use them despite the black-box nature, because these are specific situations where the benefits outweigh the costs, not because of them.
“current transformer models are arguably black boxes with massive adoption.” → They’re typically much less that of RL. There’s a fair bit of customization that can be done with prompting, and the prompting is generally English-readable.
I agree that some companies do use RL systems. However, I’d expect that most of the time, the black-box nature of some of these systems is not actively preferred. They use them despite the black-box nature, because these are specific situations where the benefits outweigh the costs, not because of them.
“current transformer models are arguably black boxes with massive adoption.” → They’re typically much less that of RL. There’s a fair bit of customization that can be done with prompting, and the prompting is generally English-readable.