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The state of open source AI

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Re: The state of open source AI

#271

Post by karim79 »

So...it's a commodity. It's running water. Is there a way to stop the dollars flowing away from ordinary people consuming this tech, to the doomsday Bunkerist/ Apocoligarchs of today who literally give zero fucks about lives and humanity?

We already have most of the benefits from these models and have even captured them. We can now have such a system running at home on a lower power SBC which costs about a thousand dollars or much less, and requires no Internet connection.

Once we have the "good enough" model which can be run at home, and with very little usage of electricity, will all this stuff finally stop messing with society like how it is messing with society now? One wonders.

This is a money grab. It's a bubble. Also, I'm pretty fucking sure that Spaghetti Bolognese recipes will not improve with more and more reddit content (much of which will probably be AI generated anyway).

Re: The state of open source AI

#272

Post by vitally3643 »

grokcodec wrote: post #194
vitally3643 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

Define technofascism lol. Fascism was laid out by Mussolini in the 1920s - it amounts to the idolatry of the state. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." B Mussolini Also defined as Corporatism: the union of state and corporate power. Which country do you think is closer to Mussolini's model ?

Buddy, you should take a real hard look at US policy this past decade or so. We've got secret police kidnapping citizens in broad daylight and shipping them off to other countries. We tarriffed the entire world, threatened to take over Greenland and Canada and waged an unprovoked war in Iran (and lost, badly). And let's not forget the mass surveillance of citizens, suppression of constitutional rights to speech and assembly, voter suppression, and an actual factual literal coup attempt.

The US is the bad guy on the world stage right now. If you can't see that then you're part of the problem. Dunno what to tell you. Read a book, maybe?

Re: The state of open source AI

#273

Post by pydry »

ericd wrote: post #236
vitally3643 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does. And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happe…

>One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does.

Until very recently there would have been little point. What could China do that the US couldnt?

I'm sure the US will start to do it in the not too distant future though. China is slowly leapfrogging the US on several key technologies - e.g. robotics and drones.

The idea that the US's conscience might prevent it from engaging in state directed industrial espionage is comical.

Re: The state of open source AI

#274

Post by andymatuschak »

4k0hz wrote: post #250
andymatuschak wrote: post #241

The prose is, of course, LLM-generated. https://www.pangram.com/history/29a71663-e6b2-4db6-87bd-b943... I'd be curious to learn more about how/why executives come to sign their names to this kind of writing. Maybe it feels like a natural iteration of the pre-existing experience of signing one's name to an assistant's manuscript, or a press release from staff in Comms? I don't know execs who do this kind of thing, so…

I agree that it would help the site a lot but Pangram is notoriously inaccurate.

?? Depending on the study, false positive rates range from “undetectable” to 2:10000. Or are you worried about false negatives?

Re: The state of open source AI

#275

Post by jenova-marie »

babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…

[dead]

Re: The state of open source AI

#276

Post by timmytokyo »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #267
pocketarc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re running 48GB now but imagine a future where everyone has 512GB RAM or 1TB RAM in their computers (it might sound like a lot but also 20 years ago we had 512MB PCs). It’s not hard to imagine what 5-10 years of pressure to increase RAM will do to specs, on top of the normal tech improvements. That’s worth bearing in mind when thinking about local models. Plus, local models keep getting better and better; 2 years…

I seriously doubt that we'll be running 1TB ram setups any time soon. I was hearing about people running 64GB back in 2014 or so

Moore's law also applies to memory. With personal computers, we've gone from ~16KB in the late 1970s to ~640KB in the mid-80s to ~512 MB in the late-90s, to ~1GB in the early 2000s, to ~64GB today. If you look at the memory per dollar graph, it's even more obvious. This is exponential growth.

I see no reason to think the trend won't continue for the next couple of decades.

Re: The state of open source AI

#277

Post by georgeburdell »

dmarcos wrote: post #154
babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…

The outcome is plausible. Open weights models though look like a tactical more than a principled play by Chinese companies to overcome the disadvantage and difficulties to access western markets. Two issues: 1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did. 2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable? edit: typo

The Chinese are not employing some grand tactic, it’s just an extension of their cultural tendency of involution

Re: The state of open source AI

#278

Post by georgeburdell »

vitally3643 wrote: post #178
dmarcos wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcome is plausible. Open weights models though look like a tactical more than a principled play by Chinese companies to overcome the disadvantage and difficulties to access western markets. Two issues: 1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did. 2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable? edit: typo

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

One day in early June you’re going to need to parse an error log, and when you ask a Chinese LLM “What happened on June 4?” it will respond “absolutely nothing”

Re: The state of open source AI

#279

Post by reinitctxoffset »

dmarcos wrote: post #154
babblingfish wrote: post #6

Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device. The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have…

The outcome is plausible. Open weights models though look like a tactical more than a principled play by Chinese companies to overcome the disadvantage and difficulties to access western markets. Two issues: 1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did. 2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable? edit: typo

Publishing science makes progress in a field faster, almost always.

I'll stop short of saying that this is totally consensus, but it's at least a widely held opinion that the Industrial Revolution was centered on Great Britain to the degree that it was not for want of skilled machinists on the Continent, but because the crown's patent system caused the science to be published.

I think the economical explanation is that some combination of the state, the cultural norms, and the sincerity (!!) of the executives involved has landed on "go faster via publishing science".

The weird situation that defies precedent and is very hard to justify as being socially useful is the situation that obtains here.

Re: The state of open source AI

#280

Post by aeve890 »

ericd wrote: post #236
vitally3643 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does. And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happe…

>One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does.

From Wikipedia

> British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager said in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes. Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

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