jamienk

Why do we accept this "massive cost" phase all the time? I want to see the data and intelligent analysis of it. I think this is not clear yet.

The Chinese companies will not stay "open" if it doesn't serve their economic/political interests.

Why is there not yet fully open models made by/for the FOSS community (as opposed to open weight by entrepreneur-style companies)? Cost of training? But what is this cost really?

- Do not include costs of running model in cloud - Do not include IP costs - Do not include salaries, marketing, etc. (all these are separate expenses, different depending on individual goals)

There would be pre- and post- training "systems" that could be repeated.

Training data/acquisition could be separated out (so IP-liabilities could be taken on by individuals).

The idea would be a system for small groups/individuals to snap together the different aspects of training (data, pre-training, training compute, post-training) and to train their own (and share).

Won't this soon come down to a few thousand dollars for models that run on modern consumer hardware?

I'm anti-Anthropic and think their accusations are total PR FUD-packing. They don't focus much on the cc fraud because their PR firm landed on pushing the (tech-sounding) word "distillation" to try to scare people in the US and to try to make it a geopolitical issue where trade negotiators can put pressure. The Chinese companies see an advantage in being "open" right now, and it is working. They will not stay open once they see an advantage there. (Contrast with GNU.)

But I've slowly come to realize that AI+"dark resources"(scare quotes)=something bad! And this is imminent (maybe I'm naive and it is already ubiquitous).

We see here, with Kimi, that there's growing traction with the idea of eliminating types of training to avoid evil. I'm skeptical of that.

You think it is a lost cause to get credit cards, for example, less steal-able? Apparently there is a way to create fake cards that work for a few minutes, and stolen cards can be used. A lot of the current security is inelegant and lame. Could data-breech laws not light a fire under some company's asses?

Will there be a book of secret knowledge that only the initiated will be allowed to see? And they will all swear an oath to never input it into an AI system?

And then we'd also do that for all kinds of potential terrorism, sex-crimes, political subversion, and evil advocacy?

It would be the "restricted section" like in the Hogwarts library?

Does this make sense? It is the same as when Stable Diffusion tried to not have "people laying down" in their training data in order to block the generation of sex pictures.

Deliberately keeping all models ignorant doesn't make sense. It won't work (whoever breaks the pact has a massive advantage); it won't be enforceable; it will have downstream impacts on things you don't want it to be ignorant about; this kind of regulatory regime invites adding more and more to the "no-no list".

Is it not possible to focus on hardening? And on new legal liabilities for operators who do security attacks?

In looking into what Anthropic has accused the Chinese AI companies of, "distillation" is not the crux of the matter: they accuse them of the use of massive numbers of breached computers and credit cards. Supposedly (though not explicitly demonstrated) distillation campaigns used "dark web" resources (like stolen and faked credit cards and p0wned IOT devices, routers, etc) that were used to create many many accounts for distillation. (Note: I am generally in favor of distillation - it is "normal" use as far as I can see.)

So there are these "resources" out there: massive botnets, stolen credit cards and credentials, etc. These often seem to be linked to or supported by state actors.

How can we hope that these "standing reserves" aren't used generally by AIs as if they are just another "skill" they know how to leverage?

Our infrastructures need serious hardening.

"Free association" in psychoanalysis just asks people to let themselves speak, to fall into their speech, let it unfold - but it is very, very hard to do, because what you say tends to not be what you want to say. You want to avoid certain things, you can see your chain of speech leading up ahead to somewhere you don't want to go. So you stop yourself, or resist, and then what you are saying is not at all free but strained, hedging, tense and anxious.

Still can't tree shake. It's what makes my old css files grow into monsters. I feel like everyone has given up on this.

This is the whole Chompsky/Kant thing - the idea of "Poverty of the Stimulus" innate structures. You didn't "learn" a word/concept by direct exposure, but by socialization, association, emotional connections, vibes. LLM seem to learn the hard way.

The Saussure idea of the differential nature of language seems relevant here too: words aren't just lists of things you look up, they are connected to each other and distinguish themselves by being slightly different from the other elements of the clusters they belong to.

I can kinda understand the motivation here: you push a bunch of slop (or is it deep, genius code?) but you have a kind of nagging suspicion that you should get to know it more familiarly, like back in the good old days a few months back when you sort of understood what was going on. I... don't... think this is going to work...? Remember Confirmation Fatigue? Soon we will have agents that interact with Sphinx for us.

They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!

I feel like history is repeating itself - to many people AOL, Compuserve, MSN, et al seemed superior to "the web" in the early 1990s because they dumped money into making it slicker, licensed content, provided guardrails, made it easy for non-tech people... They had slick ads, were cultural phenoms, and people would take sides with the companies and think their arguments were strong and even obvious!