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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

#411

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is pure…

>> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE

Thiel might belong there, and Altman

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

#412
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source != open weight. Big difference and it bugs me that nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.

If the weight, training and inference code, and training data are all released under of Open Source (OSI definition) license, the it is unmistakably “open source”. As you drift from that it becomes less clearly so, and when you get to no training data, and the model weights license having extensive limitations on allowed uses, the use of even “open weights” becomes deceptive.

Is there any relevant model that meets that "open source" definition?

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

#413

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is pure…

Applying value judgements to corporate bodies or institutions as if they have individual agency is a fallacy anyways. We should always look at these things materially. "Meta" can't be good or evil, because an idea can't have a morality. It's comprised of the individuals who make the decisions, sure, but those individuals are always going to be motivated by a plethora of reasons which are often contradictory, most notably their material interests.

When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.

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

#415
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to know in retrospect what was strategy and what was dumb luck. This was in the midst of hysterical calls to limit access by “AI researchers” and safety/ethics types, when very facile takes still has a lot of sway (I think we’ll feel the same in three years about the current Fable stuff). It may have been hard for Meta to just release it outright. What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed b…

I don’t understand how you can look at what’s happening right now and call people simply calling for caution “hysterical”

Did you know that if trains or cars go over 30 mph, it's disastrous for public health? Not from accidents. Just trauma from (ahem) acceleration:

https://illuminatingfacts.com/the-train-speed-panic-why-peop...

Reason that hysteria remains apropos now is that then, and now, we're figuring out how to deal with something beyond merely incremental change.

Irony is roads and sidewalks should have changed much more. We never did get around to good controls leading to zero deaths*, we decided a 100 people dead per day is a reasonable cost of convenience.

How much do our cyber traffic and cyber pedestrian controls need to change for everyman to get to drive AI? Car seats? Seatbelts? Air bags? Speed limiters? Pedestrian only living spaces? Driverless cars?

Many practical responses, likely a mix of things we haven't thought of yet, just as horses and horse drawn carriages didn't require most of them to coexist. Controls develop like scar tissue more naturally than they appear in advance.**

And if the better analogy for LLMs turns out to have been less like cars, more like flammable gas blimps, we'll figure that out too and tell cautionary stories for generations... but long before the stories are forgotten we'll have already come up with something more practical, faster, and – oh well – perhaps even deadlier per mile.

---

* Still working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

** Not saying that's as it should be.

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

#416
post #137

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

So, if they got ahead of us by whatever arbitrary measure someone pretends is objective, then suddenly our stuff… what… stops working? Does it say somewhere in the big book of AI rules that the first entity to beat the US AI companies would be in charge now, and we’d have to stop doing our own research and development and start using their shit exclusively? I don’t get the argument.

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

#417
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reliable evidence they won’t. Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone. The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level. Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.

OK well then let's check back here in a few years to see if any of them managed to build an AGI. Until then it's just idle speculation. Anything could happen ... or not.

And I’ll bet someone made a comment exactly like yours here, a couple of years ago… and guess what definitely didn’t happen?

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of Kimi K3 is 'monopolistically' determined by contract with Moonshot. The weights are nominally on Hugging Face but can only be provided under contract with Moonshot, which specifies what the price can be. So it will be with the next Alibaba behemoth and, I would think, all others forever. Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model…

> The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract. Have you looked at the contract? There are zero conditions unless you've broken $20M in revenue with their model. It doesn't even forbid distillation, lol > Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes…

Yes releasing a big open weight model to the Sinaloa cartel is bad. One could say the same about releasing it to the US military, according to political taste.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the weight, training and inference code, and training data are all released under of Open Source (OSI definition) license, the it is unmistakably “open source”. As you drift from that it becomes less clearly so, and when you get to no training data, and the model weights license having extensive limitations on allowed uses, the use of even “open weights” becomes deceptive.

Is there any relevant model that meets that "open source" definition?

It depends on if you count https://allenai.org/ as relevant?

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of Kimi K3 is 'monopolistically' determined by contract with Moonshot. The weights are nominally on Hugging Face but can only be provided under contract with Moonshot, which specifies what the price can be. So it will be with the next Alibaba behemoth and, I would think, all others forever. Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model…

> The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract. No they are not. You can just ignore the contract. Unless you are a multi-billion dollar company, nobody will notice and you will get away with it.

You cannot ignore the contract unless you /are/ a multibillion dollar company and can run the model entirely internally. Or do you propose to run an instance of Kimi K3 on your laptop?

Fireworks, Together, etc - who are providing inference precisely /for/ Moonshot as underlaborers - arranged contracts of their own in the weeks before the release. The press and social media offensive ignored that the release of open weights was merely a starting pistol for a pre-arranged use of foreign providers no different from US models' use of AWS

It should be enought to dispel the strange illusion that providers are somehow independent free agents freely doing what they please with the free beer of Kimi K3 open weights that the prices on open router are within a couple pennies

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