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Why YC went to DC

ycombinator.com

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Re: Why YC went to DC

#11

Post by Xunjin »

AlexErrant wrote: post #5

> Open source AI models allow for greater transparency, collaboration, and innovation by making the underlying code publicly accessible and modifiable. I feel like open models do virtually nothing for transparency, collaboration, or innovation, and are only modifiable in that they can be fine-tuned. It's "open source" training processes and data that will lead to "transparency, collaboration, and innovation", and I'm…

As someone layman in that field I do agree with you, would love inputs from specialists in the area.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#12

Post by reducesuffering »

> to disastrous effects, in the form of social media harms

> There are many reasons to be optimistic about AI

Without a modicum of awareness.

Paul G [0] and Sam Altman both have recognized the potential dangers.[1]

[0] https://x.com/paulg/status/1651613807779667968

[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Re: Why YC went to DC

#13

Post by simonw »

This new essay by Jack Clark, who was at OpenAI when they made the decision not to release GPT-2 for safety reasons five years ago, feels relevant: https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-375-gpt-2-five-yea...

> [...] history shows that once we assign power to governments, they're loathe to subsequently give that power back to the people. Policy is a ratchet and things tend to accrete over time. That means whatever power we assign governments today represents the floor of their power in the future - so we should be extremely cautious in assigning them power because I guarantee we will not be able to take it back.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#14

Post by mrb »

"This year, we’ll fund more than 500 companies out of 50,000 applications, and almost all of them are related to AI in some way."

So, what this means: that in 2024, if you want to get VC capital, your startup must be related to AI.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#15

Post by lolinder »

AlexErrant wrote: post #5

> Open source AI models allow for greater transparency, collaboration, and innovation by making the underlying code publicly accessible and modifiable. I feel like open models do virtually nothing for transparency, collaboration, or innovation, and are only modifiable in that they can be fine-tuned. It's "open source" training processes and data that will lead to "transparency, collaboration, and innovation", and I'm…

You're correct if you're focused exclusively on the work surrounding building foundation models to begin with. But if you take a broader view, having open models that we can legally fine tune and hack with locally has created a large and ever-growing community of builders and innovators that could not exist without these open models. Just take a look at projects like InvokeAI [0] in the image space or especially llama.cpp [1] in the text generation space. These projects are large, have lots of contributors, move very fast, and drive a lot of innovation and collaboration in applying AI to various domains in a way that simply wouldn't be possible without the open models.

[0] https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp

Re: Why YC went to DC

#16

Post by eganist »

I was hopeful YC coming to DC would've meant YC would've been tapping into DC's startup scene.

Wishful thinking. Linked is the more common reason (lobbying), but I'm looking forward to more institutions recognizing the talent we have in the DC region.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#17

Post by no_wizard »

lolinder wrote: post #15
AlexErrant wrote: post #5

> Open source AI models allow for greater transparency, collaboration, and innovation by making the underlying code publicly accessible and modifiable. I feel like open models do virtually nothing for transparency, collaboration, or innovation, and are only modifiable in that they can be fine-tuned. It's "open source" training processes and data that will lead to "transparency, collaboration, and innovation", and I'm…

You're correct if you're focused exclusively on the work surrounding building foundation models to begin with. But if you take a broader view, having open models that we can legally fine tune and hack with locally has created a large and ever-growing community of builders and innovators that could not exist without these open models. Just take a look at projects like InvokeAI [0] in the image space or especially llam…

Taking the broader view of this nature feels like an attempt to change the narrative.

The entire point of having transparency is around building those foundations so they don’t inherit the biases of humans, for starters. Right now, we have zero introspection into this and no ability to improve upon it with the widely deployed models being used today, and that has already created problematic situations, let alone situations that are problematic and not known yet.

Transparency around this is a very good thing to prevent AI from inheriting negative human ideas and biases, and broadens access to improve training data that benefits everyone

Re: Why YC went to DC

#18

Post by ralegh »

simonw wrote: post #13

This new essay by Jack Clark, who was at OpenAI when they made the decision not to release GPT-2 for safety reasons five years ago, feels relevant: https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-375-gpt-2-five-yea... > [...] history shows that once we assign power to governments, they're loathe to subsequently give that power back to the people. Policy is a ratchet and things tend to accrete over time. That means whatever…

Well said, also applies to many human dynamics - friendships, relationships, work relationships, etc. Ceding power is a ratchet and you either put your foot down to start with or it grinds away.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#19

Post by reaperman »

AlexErrant wrote: post #5

> Open source AI models allow for greater transparency, collaboration, and innovation by making the underlying code publicly accessible and modifiable. I feel like open models do virtually nothing for transparency, collaboration, or innovation, and are only modifiable in that they can be fine-tuned. It's "open source" training processes and data that will lead to "transparency, collaboration, and innovation", and I'm…

Closest to this would be https://www.eleuther.ai whose training data is largely public and training processes are openly discussed, planned, and evaluated on their Discord server. Much of their training dataset is available at https://the-eye.eu (their onion link is considered "primary", however, due to copyright concerns)
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