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Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

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Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#21

Post by dang »

AustinDev wrote: post #20
dang wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't cross into personal attack or post flamebait or take HN threads on generic tangents. We're trying for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Criticizing EA is not a personal attack it's an observation of the outcomes associated with the ideology. I'm sorry if it was flamebait.

The person in your comment was not EA.

There's always a way to make your substantive points thoughtfully, though of course this takes more time and energy - sometimes a lot more - but if you'd please invest the effort to do that when commenting here, we'd appreciate it. Or, of course, it's always an option not to post.

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#22

Post by AustinDev »

dang wrote: post #21
AustinDev wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criticizing EA is not a personal attack it's an observation of the outcomes associated with the ideology. I'm sorry if it was flamebait.

The person in your comment was not EA. There's always a way to make your substantive points thoughtfully, though of course this takes more time and energy - sometimes a lot more - but if you'd please invest the effort to do that when commenting here, we'd appreciate it. Or, of course, it's always an option not to post.

Claiming he's not an Effective Altruist is a stretch. He's been tightly coupled with that movement for nearly a decade.

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#23

Post by gonight »

erwald wrote: post #9

> Anthropic already possesses the compliance, legal, and evaluation infrastructure needed to satisfy such a regime. A university lab, startup, or community does not, even if they somehow manage to train a sufficiently capable model. All the actual proposals that Dario Amodei has endorsed with regard to safety testing and so on have exempted smaller models. I don't think university labs or startups would ever be hit b…

Have exempted smaller models so far. Seems like they're trying to soft-launch then tighten the ratchet, and I'd be willing to accept that this is a cynical view if this hasn't been the modus operandi for a while now. See EA/Sony/etc. continually trying to find a way to get their foot in the "always online, you're just renting the game" door.

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#24

Post by Chance-Device »

argee wrote: post #15
Chance-Device wrote: post #8

I think he probably didn’t go far enough to be honest, though I acknowledge that’s difficult to do in his position and with the amount of attacks being thrown at Anthropic at the moment. At some point open weight models will need to be restricted in some manner, likely multiple manners. We have rules about everything, you need a license to drive a car, your car must be roadworthy, your car can’t have certain modifica…

The only widely publicized AI orchestrated cyberattack in recent memory came from a closed-weight model, and the only widely publicized defense from said attack came from an open-weight Chinese model. What do you make of that? > I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either Monopolies have always been allowed to exist, even welcomed. People have gotten confused, but there is a big dif…

> What do you make of that?

I don’t make anything of it. That’s only been reported because it came from OpenAI and was a frontier model, incidents involving open models are probably happening but are not being widely reported, and those are happening with less capable models, so they aren’t successful enough yet to make headlines. I draw that inference from the amount of AI bot traffic which is now saturating the internet, AI driven attacks almost certainly have increased in like manner.

> Monopolies have always been allowed to exist

Antitrust law also exists, but is weaker than it should be. The customer doesn’t win from the existence of monopolies, they go against one of the basic premises of capitalism. Assuming you believe capitalism is a good thing which is its own conversation.

> I don’t think I want to live in a world where police decides what brand of chips I can eat on the sole basis of the chips having gotten too popular.

I really don’t know how you ended up with this as an example, did anyone say this, or anything close to it?

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#25

Post by Chance-Device »

unclad5968 wrote: post #12
Chance-Device wrote: post #8

I think he probably didn’t go far enough to be honest, though I acknowledge that’s difficult to do in his position and with the amount of attacks being thrown at Anthropic at the moment. At some point open weight models will need to be restricted in some manner, likely multiple manners. We have rules about everything, you need a license to drive a car, your car must be roadworthy, your car can’t have certain modifica…

I'm mostly ignorant to anything regarding the safety of LLMs. What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous?

As the sibling comment says, user actions are the main driver, but also the fact that the weights can be modified. If a model is released with safeguards, they can be ablated out or the model can be fine tuned for nefarious purposes, and nobody can really stop that from happening.

That’s not to say that the majority of open weight models are being used in nefarious ways or are dangerous, but unfortunately despite (hopefully) most people being responsible, we have to guard against the small number of bad actors. Like with everything, a small number of people ruin it for everyone.

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#26

Post by Chance-Device »

watwut wrote: post #13
Chance-Device wrote: post #8

I think he probably didn’t go far enough to be honest, though I acknowledge that’s difficult to do in his position and with the amount of attacks being thrown at Anthropic at the moment. At some point open weight models will need to be restricted in some manner, likely multiple manners. We have rules about everything, you need a license to drive a car, your car must be roadworthy, your car can’t have certain modifica…

The first thing to restrict, long before open models, are large closed corporate LLMs. After all, open models are not nearly as dangerous as rich companies.

I tend to agree with this also. The idea that the impact of AI is being decided by private companies with no control either by governments or the public doesn’t sit well with me. You need the most regulation where most of the danger is, and most of the danger as you say is with the big AI companies.

But there are some moves towards regulating them now.

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#27

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

tristanj wrote: post #17
erwald wrote: post #11

> Furthermore, export controls, for which Dario Amodei openly advocates, are already prompting China to build its own chips. China is, of course, behind the West, but not as much as you may think. Instead of adopting a Western technology stack and relying on our technology to build its AI models, China will increasingly rely on its own chips, reducing Western leverage. China has been working hard to indigenize AI chi…

I used to think that export controls didn't work, until I realized that China has leapfrogged the West on every technology that wasn't subject to export controls.

To be brutally frank, this was always going to happen when Western countries outsourced their manufacturing.

And all of the rationales were self serving garbage, it was about juicing the next quarters numbers.

Fundamentally though, it's the removal of capital controls that has driven a lot of this behaviour, and it's amusing to me that reintroducing them is so far beyond the Overton window that it never even comes up.

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#28

Post by anon373839 »

blooalien wrote: post #16
unclad5968 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly ignorant to anything regarding the safety of LLMs. What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous?

> What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous? Same thing that makes any LLM dangerous. The intent and actions of the person using the LLM to do bad things. Any tool can be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person...

Computer keyboards are incredibly dangerous. You can even use them to type out the same text a dangerously capable LLM might write!

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#29

Post by anon373839 »

unclad5968 wrote: post #12
Chance-Device wrote: post #8

I think he probably didn’t go far enough to be honest, though I acknowledge that’s difficult to do in his position and with the amount of attacks being thrown at Anthropic at the moment. At some point open weight models will need to be restricted in some manner, likely multiple manners. We have rules about everything, you need a license to drive a car, your car must be roadworthy, your car can’t have certain modifica…

I'm mostly ignorant to anything regarding the safety of LLMs. What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous?

Nothing makes an LLM dangerous. An LLM remixes existing knowledge and outputs text. Any danger comes from what one subsequently does with the text.

For example, when a lab like OpenAI negligently wires up a harness to an LLM and executes arbitrary code in YOLO mode without common-sense isolation measures, the executed code can do bad things.

Re: Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

#30

Post by [deleted] »

Chance-Device wrote: post #24
argee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only widely publicized AI orchestrated cyberattack in recent memory came from a closed-weight model, and the only widely publicized defense from said attack came from an open-weight Chinese model. What do you make of that? > I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either Monopolies have always been allowed to exist, even welcomed. People have gotten confused, but there is a big dif…

> What do you make of that? I don’t make anything of it. That’s only been reported because it came from OpenAI and was a frontier model, incidents involving open models are probably happening but are not being widely reported, and those are happening with less capable models, so they aren’t successful enough yet to make headlines. I draw that inference from the amount of AI bot traffic which is now saturating the int…

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