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Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

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91–100 of 134 posts

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#91
The private AI companies should be forced to release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present and the data they basically steal from everyone to train their models. This should be the safety push not the regulatory capture that Dario is trying.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#92

FOSS is the wrong analogy. Building frontier LLMs isn’t primarily an engineering discipline, it’s a scientific research program. Of course we do have basically open source research programs, including most universities and big projects like CERN. But AI grew up in universities until it transpired that sufficient capital could only be found in the private sector. It would be possible to make a decent publicly funded A…

> But AI grew up in universities until it transpired that sufficient capital could only be found in the private sector.

One way of looking at it. Another is that AI research progressed within universities, but it was only until recently that the private sector saw the profit potential when combined with modern CPU/GPU technology.

You could argue we're saying the same thing, but I think these angles are different. An academic research programme would not have spent billions on a datacentre to provide AI for free to the general public, for example.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#93

The private AI companies should be forced to release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present and the data they basically steal from everyone to train their models. This should be the safety push not the regulatory capture that Dario is trying.

Good idea! I'd never heard that. Very interesting.

But wouldn't this help china build models just as good as ours immediately? Wouldn't it make the investment in training a model worth a lot less?

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#94

The private AI companies should be forced to release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present and the data they basically steal from everyone to train their models. This should be the safety push not the regulatory capture that Dario is trying.

> no commercial use

Why? It's not like they did the hard work. It's disgraceful that this kind of commons enclosure has been allowed in the first place.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#95

The private AI companies should be forced to release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present and the data they basically steal from everyone to train their models. This should be the safety push not the regulatory capture that Dario is trying.

In an earlier phase of AI I might have agreed but now the publicly available data they’ve trained on is increasingly useless for the frontier.

RL/post-training is now a much bigger part of it, with that being largely proprietary and expensive work that the open source model just won’t fund.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Manhatten project cost about $40 billion in total adjusted for inflation. Anthropic's latest funding round alone raised $65 billion. The entire Apollo project at the peak of the cold war cost about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's approximately what OpenAI and Anthropic have raised together in total until now. I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and eco…

> I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and economic climate. You understand how the system works if you’re thinking in terms of government/non-government. The current political and economic state is not a bug, it’s by design which serves a purpose. Remember, the purpose of a system is what it does

Yes, if the US was modeled like the USSR they could extract 100% of everyone’s private assets and the politburo could spend them on whatever moonshot projects they wanted to, unchecked by silly democratic votes.

But…the USSR and that entire model failed spectacularly? So not sure what you’re getting at here. Is there some fantasy economic model you believe you’ve innovated that will lead to utopia and the end of resource scarcity?

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#97

The private AI companies should be forced to release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present and the data they basically steal from everyone to train their models. This should be the safety push not the regulatory capture that Dario is trying.

> the data they basically steal from everyone

Agreed. Especially since now competitors have more difficulties getting the same advantage. They don't have to do so immediately and perhaps not their specific tuning. But the weights of the raw training data at least should be publicised.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#98

The private AI companies should be forced to release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present and the data they basically steal from everyone to train their models. This should be the safety push not the regulatory capture that Dario is trying.

> the data they basically steal from everyone

What's the precedent?

All I see if a bunch of people who haven't loaded an ad in 20 years and have a 5TB collection of pirated movies and music suddenly decrying that LLM's doing next token prediction over a dataset is theft.

You don't get to change your mind 20 years into "I'm never going to pay for anything binary" ethos (cough look at what this post is cough) that has dominated the internet for decades. If people are genuinely upset about LLMs training on all available data without compensation, all I can say is "Reap what you sow".

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#99
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Manhatten project cost about $40 billion in total adjusted for inflation. Anthropic's latest funding round alone raised $65 billion. The entire Apollo project at the peak of the cold war cost about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's approximately what OpenAI and Anthropic have raised together in total until now. I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and eco…

> I don't think governments can supply this amount of money for AI in the current political and economic climate. I'm a believer in Keynes' "anything we can do we can afford". It could be afforded .. if there was a sufficiently good reason. And there isn't. This is way behind "governments, especially the EU, should have a sovereign cloud". It is also way behind "governments need to keep global warming below 2C by the…

There are things you can't do - even as a society - when the costs start ballooning beyond the GDP of smaller European nations. I mean, yes, in an emergency you could cancel all social security and public infrastructure spending and instead dump it into AI. But even then it will take several big nations to foot the bill if you want to still have a country left after you're done. With the level of political heckle everywhere, this is just not going to happen, because it would need unanimous support from all sides.

Re: Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]

#100
post #2

[flagged]

I would add supporting literacy programs to that list. Unfortunately, many Americans struggle to read beyond the sixth grade level.

Many states are trying to go back to phonics based reading. If you'd like to support such efforts check out your local school board, you can have a tremendous impact in your community and help better the lives of children in the progress.
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