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Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#181

Post by chrsw »

mcmcmc wrote: post #137
cataphract wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.

The alternative is ceding the leading edge to China and being dependent on them to continue releasing advances

We did this with manufacturing and industrial build outs over the last 4 decades or so. It worked out very well for capital, not well for labor.

One could make the argument we can do the same for AI. Let China build the models and we capture the value somewhere in the layers above.

I think that’s a terrible idea but financially it makes just as much sense as offshoring labor and manufacturing, if not more.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#182

Post by makingstuffs »

mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #161
cataphract wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.

If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute? I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment. If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or o…

Out of curiosity why do you want AGI to ‘happen FASTER’?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#183

Post by danielrhodes »

kylecazar wrote: post #25
ViktorRay wrote: post #20

Comments here are surprising to me. I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either. But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think. Unless I’m missing something and am getting this who…

Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle. I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.

Open models are a good thing. OpenAI was open until it became obvious that being open was not going to pay for training costs and wouldn't help them get a competitive edge. I'd bet that if Meta gets to a place where their model is in a similar position, they will also become more closed. But right now, Meta is open because that is what weakens and creates the most contrast with the other AI labs.

It's the same with any open source project: it starts open, then it becomes clear that maintaining it is not cheap and takes up a lot of time. The developers create a hosted/paid version to pay for their time, and to create an incentive to use the hosted/paid version they start releasing closed source enhancements. After that the open source version becomes marketing where new projects use the OSS version and then upgrade once their needs become more sophisticated.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#184

Post by failbuffer »

mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #161
cataphract wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.

If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute? I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment. If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or o…

Why do you think your life will be better with AGI?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#185

Post by [deleted] »

ViktorRay wrote: post #20

Comments here are surprising to me. I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either. But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think. Unless I’m missing something and am getting this who…

[deleted]

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#186

Post by numpad0 »

waffletower wrote: post #101
kylecazar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle. I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.

While Zuck's contributions are probably overwhelmingly more negative than positive, Meta initiated both pytorch and llama which have had profoundly positive effects on AI research. And I really am not a fan of python :D

Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak, and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it? He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#187

Post by twright »

This paragraph is wild.

> As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court -- even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.

This would only be true in a vacuum. Ignoring several leaps of progress where it would suddenly be allowed for an AI to represent one in court (imagine the size of the context window) and you could also call it from prison. That is not what is imbalanced about the US court system. Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.

It's also funny how the interest of "AI for everyone" only extends to the national interest but I guess he's got to make sure he stays in good graces with the current administration.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#188

Post by esafak »

aeve890 wrote: post #139
reducesuffering wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right? We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons? This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY

>We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero gu…

You can tell one to rewrite complex applications in a different language, solve open research problems, or develop novel viruses. This is nothing like pressing the gas pedal.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#189

Post by munk-a »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #144
baron816 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I always hope that people who write things like this are considerably younger than I, because as someone who experienced "legacy media" for decades before the Internet was widely available, the idea that "they’re not doing anything more evil than what was already the norm" is complete, total, 100% bullshit. Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-Ame…

There were some brief excellent years in the nascent days of the blogosphere where stories that CNN would miss (especially stories about marginalized groups) managed to get widespread attention and the compensation to journalists held up. But where we are today in terms of news compared to the 00s or 90s (even with all the retrospective knowledge about journalism catastrophes like NYT's coverage of the Iraq War) is so much fundamentally worse.

Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. That could have happened with the WaPo but now it appears to be more convenient to have a mouthpiece even if it's obvious to everyone.

Organizations like NPR and the CBC that get government funding can survive a while, but inevitably an administration will come into power that will threaten them or outright deny their funding to the point of impotency. Still, given how cheap they are to us in terms of a national budget it feel like just diverting 5% of the DOD's unmarked funding to just throwing money at journalists with no strings attached would probably result in immense transparency and quality.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#190

Post by jayd16 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #180
ViktorRay wrote: post #20

Comments here are surprising to me. I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either. But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think. Unless I’m missing something and am getting this who…

The thing that makes ist questionable is the dishonesty. It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems. If this was something that was dear to them on principle, there are plenty of things that they could have done differently with FB, Insta or WA (to this day). So why the change of heart? Well, it's not. They are simply not able to compete anywhere on the Pareto frontier. So they give their re…

> It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems.

Is this actually true? They have their closed social graph or whatever but come to think of it they're built on a lot of open tech, the web, Android, etc. Maybe they don't contribute back to a lot of these things?

I'm fully ready to believe it but it would be interesting to dive into this conjecture.

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