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

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

#121

Post by NitpickLawyer »

thoughtpeddler wrote: post #120
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI data center buildout was premature Ask Amodei how he feels about going to spaceman bad for compute that he couldn't find anywhere else in the market.

Yes, there's a present shortage of usable frontier compute, but that doesn't establish that every proposed data center will earn a decent return, or that today’s hardware + model architecture will remain economically competitive, or more to Siegel's point, that algorithmic efficiency could not dramatically reduce compute requirements. To borrow a real example from a prior boom, railroads were congested during the ini…

I'm not sure comparing this one to the "real life" previous ones is worth doing. Digital has a way of scaling that IRL doesn't. You don't get exponetials with humans, but you do with models. Scale has shown time and time again that it works. Despite everything you've read in '25 about walls, lack of x, and so on it still does. And the more you have you find ways of using it even more. RL can use ~ 7:1 ratio of inference : training. That is, you run 7 nodes of inference for every node of training. And it keeps improving. Every algorithmic find on inference (and there've been plenty) translates in improvements. And we're not seeing any signs of this not continuing. And then there's the "zero" method, that hasn't been tried at true scale yet. Bitter lesson and all that.

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

#122

Post by thoughtpeddler »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #121
thoughtpeddler wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there's a present shortage of usable frontier compute, but that doesn't establish that every proposed data center will earn a decent return, or that today’s hardware + model architecture will remain economically competitive, or more to Siegel's point, that algorithmic efficiency could not dramatically reduce compute requirements. To borrow a real example from a prior boom, railroads were congested during the ini…

I'm not sure comparing this one to the "real life" previous ones is worth doing. Digital has a way of scaling that IRL doesn't. You don't get exponetials with humans, but you do with models. Scale has shown time and time again that it works. Despite everything you've read in '25 about walls, lack of x, and so on it still does. And the more you have you find ways of using it even more. RL can use ~ 7:1 ratio of infere…

I'll grant that the scaling laws have held so far, and that the bitter lesson is yet to be proven wrong. However, that doesn't exclude the possibility that the current architecture's S-curve will flatten, and a new one will replace it, which was Siegel's point. At greater layers of abstraction, what is observed is a raw capabilities/intelligence increase, but what form it takes is subject to change. We'll see where it all goes, the only way out is through.

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

#123

Post by rangestransform »

pjc50 wrote: post #84
sigmoid10 wrote: post #82

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…

The only reason AI research is in conflict with limiting global warming is the unholy alliance of NIMBYs and Sierra Club environmentalists preventing the building of anything, anywhere. Clean energy has beaten out fossil energy on cost for years now, and only regulatory burdens force datacentres to use portable gas turbines instead of standing up transmission lines to the closest solar or wind farm.

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

#125

Post by rao-v »

BrtByte wrote: post #67
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Korean government did have a competition like this, I remember last year we got a bunch of models released at the same time to make the cut for the next stage. The models weren't anything to write home about, IMO. Having it with clear hw requirements tiers is a nice differentiator. The only issue is that the benchmarks would 100% need to be closed, no other way around it. And then you have the issue of cr…

Yeah, I suspect the $200K check would be the cheapest line item in the whole thing

Pretty sure the labs subsidized the well known benchmarks w free tokens for evals

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

#126

Post by t0mpr1c3 »

Diogenesian wrote: post #114
WarmWash wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

"Reap what you sow" It is kind of incredible that you're not focused at all on the copyright holders, instead focusing on random tech people you had online disagreements with. Artists and writers got screwed first by piracy, then by generative AI. They didn't sow anything. They just got reaped. And the only thing the copyright hypocrites are "reaping" is a feeling of hypocrisy. Congrats for pointing that out. Your co…

> Artists and writers got screwed first by piracy, then by generative AI.

That's too glib. Artists don't have a right to money that people won't spend.

It's not all down to bad actors. Although it's true that musicians got screwed when their distributors switched to a subscription model. Writers got screwed by the Amazon monopsony that crammed down publisher's margins.

Mostly what happened is that media technologies changed, professional creators had less control over production, and the money flowed upstream leaving them with a smaller niche.

All of their output used to be gatekept by media companies who had a lock on publishing. The internet reduced distribution costs to zero. Suddenly anybody could reach an audience.

Now generative AI has dropped the cost of content creation to the basement. It's so much easier to write a blog post or make an illustration.

That isn't cannibalizing content. It's a new way of making. It takes a lot of the value out of creating those kinds of things. The customer experiences this as a reduction in cost.

These changes happen with every new gadget. Photographers have to compete against everybody with a phone in their pocket. Now they just do weddings.

My grandfather was a portrait painter in the 1940s, a profession that was already moribund from the proliferation of photography studios. He gave up and became an insurance salesman.

Maybe he got screwed. The photography studios are all gone too. Because anybody can make a portrait using the phone in their pocket. At zero cost.

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

#127

Post by DrScientist »

jefftk wrote: post #104
theplumber wrote: post #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.

> release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present For some kinds of risk (ex: walking people through on how to make infectious bioweapons) an open-weights approach would increase risk.

Don't buy the idea that the only thing that's standing in the way of people making bioweapons is the censoring of LLMs.

If you are motivated enough to assemble all the kit you'd need, and actually do it, then you should be motivated enough to find the knowledge to do it without chatgpt etc.

I'd imagine the main thing that's stopping people is biological weapons are a terrible tool to do what most people want to do - which is target specific enemies.

So while the materials you'd need to build such a thing are much more accessible than say nuclear material, it's much less attractive - but if already had somebody mad enough to try - it's already possible.

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

#128

Post by DrScientist »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #99
pjc50 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eve…

What you are potentially missing is the public sector wouldn't necessarily be in the same race as the commercial companies.

It doesn't matter if a public effort is a year or two behind the curve ( and hence has dramatically lower costs due to Moores law and the ability to piggy back on research ) - especially as we approach the asymptotic phase of development.

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

#129

Post by jefftk »

DrScientist wrote: post #127
jefftk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> release the models as open weights with a license (I.e no commercial use) due the high risk they present For some kinds of risk (ex: walking people through on how to make infectious bioweapons) an open-weights approach would increase risk.

Don't buy the idea that the only thing that's standing in the way of people making bioweapons is the censoring of LLMs. If you are motivated enough to assemble all the kit you'd need, and actually do it, then you should be motivated enough to find the knowledge to do it without chatgpt etc. I'd imagine the main thing that's stopping people is biological weapons are a terrible tool to do what most people want to do -…

> Don't buy the idea that the only thing that's standing in the way of people making bioweapons is the censoring of LLMs.

It's not a matter of a one thing standing in the way of people making bioweapons: there's a long chain of actions one would need to complete, and many places for the chain to fail. Access to expertise can reduce the chance of failure at many of these steps, and AIs can increasingly substitute for human expertise: https://securebio.org/benchmarks/

> If you are motivated enough to assemble all the kit you'd need, and actually do it, then you should be motivated enough to find the knowledge to do it without chatgpt etc.

If someone was motivated enough to assemble the kit you need for anthrax and actually distribute it then you might expect them to also be motivated enough to find the knowledge to identify an appropriate strain, but in fact this is where Aum Shinrikyo failed in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo#Incidents_before...

Lack of knowledge is one of many factors that can lead to failure, and LLMs make it less of a barrier.

> biological weapons are a terrible tool to do what most people want to do - which is target specific enemies

Except:

1. There are also people out there who want to kill everyone. They're sufficiently rare that no one with the motive has also had the means, but as technological progress keeps lowering the bar the risk of motive and means intersecting increases.

2. This didn't stop the Soviets. They did an enormous amount of very dangerous research with minimal logical application.

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

#130

Post by Apocryphon »

rayiner wrote: post #45
Apocryphon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better one bureaucracy than many. The U.S. health system requires constant patient management of multiple moving parties, it's maddening.

[flagged]

Do those school bureaucracies require parents of students to attend customer service calls that require multiple transfers over the better part of an hour?
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