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The arguments against open source AI are bad

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Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#131

Post by winstonwinston »

ekidd wrote: post #108
munk-a wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have just recently established that: Especially for point #1 I don't think we've established that - we've been given information by a private company that makes their tooling look extremely valuable which may be true and genuine or may just be yet another doomday statement to bolster their valuation. "AI is going to end the world" has been an extremely effective vector for AI shops to sell their companies to inv…

> Especially for point #1 I don't think we've established that - we've been given information by a private company that makes their tooling look extremely valuable which may be true and genuine or may just be yet another doomday statement to bolster their valuation. Many of the details of the attack on Huggingface were reported by them before they knew who was attacking. So no, OpenAI is not the only source here. It…

> "Our model is powerful enough to commit multiple felonies (and we can't stop it)" is "marketing," I suppose.

Well this bad publicity (if that’s how you want to frame it) certainly captured everyone’s attention. Imo it is a successful demonstration of a technical achievement.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#133

Post by georgemcbay »

petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

> This is not "open source" AI.

I both know what you mean and I agree with you, but attempts like this to maintain some sort of linguistic purity of meaning never work once the discussion escapes small communities into the larger mainstream.

So you should probably get used to the idea of people saying "open source LLM" when they mean "open weights LLM".

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#134

Post by wizzwizz4 »

drdeca wrote: post #124
mrguyorama wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have shot up electrical substations, a fairly trivial way to causing widespread harm that was popularized in the news just a few years ago. But it's only happened a couple times. Because most people just can't be assed to harm a hundred thousand others.

Most people don’t want to hurt lots of other people in an untargeted way, yes. But there are a lot of people, and, apparently a few of them shot up some electrical substations? If you hold constant the (very small) fraction of people who want to cause mass harm, and increase the average ease with which a randomly selected person could cause mass harm , you would expect the amount of deliberate mass harm to increase,…

The kind of person who wants to cause mass harm is the kind of person who's thought about it for more than 15 minutes. If you think about it for more than 15 minutes, I'm sure you can come up with plenty of ways. (Even 5 minutes is probably long enough to produce 3 or 4 workable suggestions.)

If AI causes people to kill who otherwise wouldn't have, I expect it to be by causing and exacerbating mental health problems, not by providing knowledge. (See e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67012224, where a roleplay escalated into a concrete plan to kill Queen Elizabeth II over the course of two weeks. The plan wasn't, however, a very good one.)

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#135

Post by georgemcbay »

nater5000 wrote: post #15

>Much of the angst around China's models centers on "losing the AI race". But what's the goal of this race? Is it to develop the best model? To sell the most tokens? To destroy humanity first? Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI developm…

> there is some sort of "goal" in AI development that, if realized, would effectively make it a superweapon.

None of the AI labs have been shown to have any sort of significant research lead over any of the others.

So if progress does eventually lead to a singularity event and an ASI super-weapon, there's no reason to believe that once the first lab hits that threshold, every other lab won't also hit that threshold independently within weeks/months of each other.

...unless the first group to make it there literally intends to murder everyone else working in the space as soon as they hit the (otherwise not-so-singular) singularity.

And if that's the plan, well that's not very nice.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#136

Post by [deleted] »

nater5000 wrote: post #15

>Much of the angst around China's models centers on "losing the AI race". But what's the goal of this race? Is it to develop the best model? To sell the most tokens? To destroy humanity first? Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI developm…

[deleted]

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#137

Post by [deleted] »

petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

[deleted]

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#138

Post by zem »

georgemcbay wrote: post #133
petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

> This is not "open source" AI. I both know what you mean and I agree with you, but attempts like this to maintain some sort of linguistic purity of meaning never work once the discussion escapes small communities into the larger mainstream. So you should probably get used to the idea of people saying "open source LLM" when they mean "open weights LLM".

the distinction is important though, because the OP throws in the point about how "if you think the Chinese models have political propaganda baked in, go ahead and remove it, it's open source!". it is not at all obvious to me that having the model weights available will make this sort of retraining easy or even possible, but framing them as "open source" makes the analogy with open source software an easy one to get misled by.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#139

Post by prometheus1992 »

petcat wrote: post #69

This is not "open source" AI. Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source Photoshop binary = open weight Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc. There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API. If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3 https://a…

>>There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question.

hard disagree here. openness can have a scale and on that scale Open AI is less open than zai. olmo will be very very open on that same scale.

Re: The arguments against open source AI are bad

#140

Post by georgemcbay »

zem wrote: post #138
georgemcbay wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not "open source" AI. I both know what you mean and I agree with you, but attempts like this to maintain some sort of linguistic purity of meaning never work once the discussion escapes small communities into the larger mainstream. So you should probably get used to the idea of people saying "open source LLM" when they mean "open weights LLM".

the distinction is important though, because the OP throws in the point about how "if you think the Chinese models have political propaganda baked in, go ahead and remove it, it's open source!". it is not at all obvious to me that having the model weights available will make this sort of retraining easy or even possible, but framing them as "open source" makes the analogy with open source software an easy one to get…

> the distinction is important though

Only to nerds. Of which I am one, so I'm not trying to be personally dismissive here.

But I'd argue the average person only really cares about the legal aspects of duplication (and not their ability to modify things) both when it comes to open source software and open weight LLMs.

> it is not at all obvious to me that having the model weights available will make this sort of retraining easy or even possible

people already both fine-tune and distill from existing models all the time without the original training data or source and having the weights be openly downloadable makes that a much easier process.

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