avivo

Are you able to share any more detail on how you determined this is the best route? It would be a significant implication for many other pieces of open source software also if so.

(And I say this is someone who just recommended cal.com to someone a few days ago specifically citing the fact that it was open source, that led to increased trust in it.)

I did find the video valuable, for reference for others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYEPLpgCRck

I think if you are committed to switching back to open source as soon as the threat landscape changes, and you have some metric for what that looks like, that would be valuable to share now.

I would like to see the analysis that you're referencing around open source being 5-10x less secure.

Comment · 6 months ago

Open source is one of the main reasons I recommended cal.com to everyone — I just did so yesterday again in fact!

I'm disappointed to hear this especially since I don't think the rationale makes sense, from what I understand of the security landscape, and it also makes me a little more skeptical of cal.com in general.

Comment · 8 months ago

They could also buy potentially Zulip, an OSS slack alternative with a much better conversational model.

Comment · 10 months ago

There is a lot of potential in this. Not just for government democracy, but for also introducing democratic elements into tech/AI policy, when that tech has impact comparable to many governments.

I worked in tech, and after some formative experiences, shifted to working on helping ensuring ensure that tech's impact on society can serve the public interest. But that leaves the question of what "what is the public interest"?

Sortitition / lottocracy / deliberative democracy / mini-publics all roughly refer to the same way to answer that question — providing a representative microcosm with the space to deeply examine an issue, and come to a set of recommendations and decisions on it. Unlike with electoral democracy, it's faster to spin up and experiment with, and it's harder for bad actors to entrench power (elections can be useful, but they're one of many tools in the democratic toolbelt).

That thinking lead to https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-de... . That basic approach, has been somewhat picked up by Meta (https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-a-giant-experiment-in-g...) and Open AI (https://aligned.substack.com/p/a-proposal-for-importing-soci..., ~ leading to their democratic inputs and collective alignment work).

I've now started an organization focusing on applying this and other democratic paradigms to decision-making about AI (https://aidemocracyfoundation.org/) as a way to solve a variety of challenging governance problems across the AI stack. If you're curious about it, our ICML paper goes into more detail: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222 .

Comment · 2 years ago

The FTC also recently put out a statement that is fairly pro-open source: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202...

I think it's interesting to think about this question of open source, benefits, risk, and even competition, without all of the baggage that Meta brings.

I agree with the FTC, that the benefits of open-weight models are significant for competition. The challenge is in distinguishing between good competition and bad competition.

Some kind of competition can harm consumers and critical public goods, including democracy itself. For example, competing for people's scarce attention or for their food buying, with increasingly optimized and addictive innovations. Or competition to build the most powerful biological weapons.

Other kinds of competition can massively accelerate valuable innovation.

The FTC must navigate a tricky balance here — leaning into competition that serves consumers and the broader public, while being careful about what kind of competition it is accelerating that could cause significant risk and harm.

It's also obviously not just "big tech" that cares about the risks behind open-weight foundation models. Many people have written about these risks even before it became a subject of major tech investment. (In other words, A16Z's framing is often rather misleading.) There are many non-big tech actors who are very concerned about current and potential negative impacts of open-weight foundation models.

One approach which can provide the best of both worlds, is for cases where there are significant potential risks, to ensure that there is at least some period of time where weights are not provided openly, in order to learn a bit about the potential implications of new models.

Longer-term, there may be a line where models are too risky to share openly, and it may be unclear what that line is. In that case, it's important that we have governance systems for such decisions that are not just profit-driven, and which can help us continue to get the best of all worlds. (Plug: my organization, the AI & Democracy Foundation; https://ai-dem.org/; is working to develop such systems and hiring.)

Comment · 2 years ago

Author here, not of the post, but the linked article, making the case for bridging-based ranking, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank... and the related https://bridging.systems/ which lays out a set of open problems and approaches.

It's great to see this exploration. Those interested might also want to check out https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.h... and https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-algorithmic-managemen... (and how aspects of this might be applied to AI governance https://reimagine.aviv.me/p/governance-of-ai-with-ai-through ).

Comment · 3 years ago

If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing. Then I can automatically take any website and have a cron job that dumps the result into a shared dropbox link where it can be used by the screen.

Comment · 3 years ago

It's worth knowing that, according to some recent research, taking a topical antibiotic like this might have permanent impacts on microbiome in your nose (and lead to drug resistance.)

Comment · 3 years ago

What is the advantage of this versus running something like https://github.com/simonw/llm , which also gives you options to e.g. use https://github.com/simonw/llm-mlc for accelerated inference?

Comment · 3 years ago

Fascinating, this led to this projects which is pretty interesting. https://www.modos.tech/blog/modos-paper-monitor Seems like a very exciting effort and product but I'm not sure if it's still active.

Comment · 3 years ago

Has anyone gotten this to speak back a response on a Mac? I don't see a setting for this.

I'm also curious if there are ways to do this for Google Home and Alexa.

Comment · 3 years ago

How are people creating transcripts like this? There doesn't seem to be a convenient export or save option for conversations.

Comment · 3 years ago

It's worth understanding the community and org better, and their reaction. Relevant links:

- https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421778/how-do-you-p...

- https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/412696/is-it-accept...

- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgp...

Comment · 4 years ago

I think this gets almost all the way there but not quite — there is one more vital point:

How we act depends on our environment and incentives.

It is possible to build environments and incentives that make us better versions of ourselves. Just like GPT-3, we can all be primed (and we all are primed all the time, by every system we use).

The way we got from small tribes to huge civilizations is by figuring out how to create those systems and environments.

Yes, the algorithm is not the problem alone, but a good algorithm can help fix the problems — since it creates the "loss function" (the incentives) for the humans using the platform (I go into that in more detail here https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1529879799862378497 and here https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-rank... for those who are curious).

So it's not about "reaching for the stars" or complaining about how humanity is too flawed. It's about carefully building the systems that take us to those stars!