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FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#271

Post by riehwvfbk »

greenavocado wrote: post #126
maaaaattttt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this line of thought as well but then I wonder, if we are all out of jobs and out of substantial capital to spend, how do these owners make money ultimately? It's a genuine question and I'm probably missing something obvious. I can see a benevolant/post-scarcity spin to this but the non-benevolant one seems self defeating.

Money is a proxy for control. Eventually humans will become mostly redundant and slated for elimination except for the chosenites of the managerial classes and a small number of technicians. Either through biological agents, famines, carefully engineered (civil?) wars and conflicts designed to only exterminate the non-managerial classes, or engineered Calhounian behavioral sinks to tank fertility rates below replacem…

Ssssh, you can't say that. Those types of brain damage are protected diversity.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#272

Post by GTP »

mdp2021 wrote: post #140
xena wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's possible to develop a frontier model without mass scraping. The economics simply don't add up. You need at least 10 trillion tokens to make an 8 billion parameter model. 10 trillion tokens is something like 40 terabytes. You simply can't get 40 terabytes of text without mass scraping.

> You need at least 10 trillion tokens to make an 8 billion parameter model Are you sure it is not just very inefficient?

I'm not an AI expert, but it seems to me that the common consensus is that current LLMs are quite inefficient and that there's room for improvement.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#273

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

mistrial9 wrote: post #243
lukevp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is an unthinking, unfeeling force. The writing is on the wall that AI is coming, and being altruistic about it doesn’t do jack to keep others from the land grab. Their thinking is, might as well join the rush and hope they’re one of the winners. Every one of us sitting on the sidelines will be impacted in some way or the other. So who’re the smart ones, the ones who grab shovels and start digging, or the o…

obviously China is going full forward and better at it, with no "Capitalism" involved

There's plenty of capitalism in Chinese business. It's not a purely communist country, it's a hybrid system with an active market economy.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#274

Post by forgetfreeman »

billy99k wrote: post #197
lukevp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is an unthinking, unfeeling force. The writing is on the wall that AI is coming, and being altruistic about it doesn’t do jack to keep others from the land grab. Their thinking is, might as well join the rush and hope they’re one of the winners. Every one of us sitting on the sidelines will be impacted in some way or the other. So who’re the smart ones, the ones who grab shovels and start digging, or the o…

I already started incorporating AI into my workflow. It's definitely helped with productivity. At some point in the future, if you aren't using AI, you won't be able to compete in the job market.

I started a borderline smug response here pointing out how bullshit white collar and service jobs* where in deep shit but folks who actually work for a living would be fine. I scrapped it halfway through when it occurred to me that if everyone's broke then by definition nobody's spending money on stuff like contractors, mechanics, and other hardcore blue collar trades. Toss in AI's force multiplication of power demands in the face of all of the current issues around global warming and it starts to feel like pursuing this tech is fractally stupid and the best evidence to date I've seen that a neo-luddite movement might actually be a thing the world could benefit from. That last part is a pretty wild thought coming from a retired developer who spent the bulk of his adult life in IT, but here we are.

* https://phys.org/news/2023-08-people-pointless-meaningless-j...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#275

Post by Aachen »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #250
Aachen wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running into bot detection on at least five different websites in the past two months (not even including captcha walls) Not sure what to tell you but I surely feel quite human Three of the pages told me to contact customer support and the other two were a hard and useless block wall. Only from Codeberg did I get a useful response, the other two customer supports were the typical "have you tried clearing yo…

Were the walls you hit caused by Fastly's bot detection? I've found it to be quite accurate. On the other hand CloudFlare and Akamai mistakenly block me all the damn time.

It's not like they say, but it's at least three different implementations and I don't think any were cloudflare because I've been running into those pages for years and they've got captchas (functional or not). One of them was Akamai I think indeed

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#276

Post by superkuh »

To me it sounds like these people are operating websites that don't work. My home internet (80 down, 5 up) connection hosted website handled 20k+ hits from the alibaba ai crawler yesterday without missing a beat. And many thousands more from GPTbot, etc.

I'll grant it can be a problem for super-heavy "application" websites where every GET is a serious computation. So I'm not surprised gitlab is having problems. They've literally the most bloated and heaviest website I've ever seen. Maybe applications shouldn't be websites.

But this spreading social hysteria, this belief that all non-humans are dangerous and must be blocked is a nerd snipe. It really doesn't apply to most situations. Just running a website as we've always run them, public, and letting all user-agents access, is much less resource intensive than these various "mitigations" people are implementing. Mitigations which end up being worse than the problem itself in terms of preventing actual humans from reading text.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#277

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

rectang wrote: post #252
UncleMeat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…

> Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. And this is why AI training is not "fair use". The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. A possible eventual downfall of AI is that the risk of losing a copyright infringement lawsuit is not going away. If a court d…

I've pointed this out to a few people in this space. They tend to suggest that the value in AI is so great this means we should get rid of copyright law entirely.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#278

Post by superkuh »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #46

Isn't this just poor, sloppy crawler implementation? You shouldn't need to fetch a repo more than once to add it to a training set.

And poor, sloppy, website implementation. If your professional website can't handle 20k hits it's ... well, poor. Because my home connection hosted on my desktop PC website tanked 20k hits from alibaba bot (among a few more thousand of normal traffic) yesterday without missing a beat.

It is literally the point of public websites to answer HTTP requests. If yours can't you're doing something wrong.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#280

Post by blibble »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #200
articlepan wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is only a bookkeeping tool for complex societies. The aim of the owner class in a worker-less world would be accumulation of important resources to improve their lives and to trade with other owners (money would likely still be used for bookkeeping here). A wealthy resource-owner might strive to maintain a large zone of land, defended by AI weaponry, that contains various industrial/agricultural facilities prod…

Better for them to give us jobs so we owe them and are less likely to revolt!

will they care if they have an army of cheap easily replaceable robots with guns?

I miss the star trek visions of the future

now the "good" outcome is a world sized north korea, with elon as ruler

and the bad outcome is the ruler using his army of robots to eliminate the possibility of the peasant revolt once and for all

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