51–60 of 111 posts
I'm surprised that the Author has missed a very important corollary to the diffusion of "genius theft" that they are bringing up. And that is the diffusion of the beneficiaries. Maybe they think that OpenAI and Anthropic are actually worth, like a trillion dollars each and can therefore have value extracted from them. I'm not so convinced. What if there aren't frontier labs spending billions on training a model. What…
The troubles over copyright infringement in AI training data remind me a bit of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. There he suffered massive patent infringement, that basically stopped being enforced due to the sheer economic importance of the cotton gin. In a similar manner, I think there is a reasonably strong argument that it was wrong to use copyrighted material for AI training without paying royalties nor even aski…
i think you're spot on this is one of the key arguments made beneath the surface. what i find so strikingly frustrating about it is, so many of the ai cultists [0] will imply and sometimes even outright say that writers, artists, musicians are silly useless and overvalued and the work artists do is entirely frivolous. then next breath explain why those artist's work is one of the most important things for a model to be trained on. suddenly art is very important. we absolutely must have access to their work. but also we shouldnt pay them because their work is silly and unimportant.
if an artists (musician, writer, journalist, painter, etc...) work is useless, then obviously you dont need it for training. if their work is imperative and you absolutely must use it, then pay for it.
ive noticed this with ai companies a lot. over and over again they contradict themselves to the core.
1) art is silly and not important enough to pay for but its absolutely foundational and we must be given unfettered access or our models will suck.
2) "our models are the smartest thing in the entire world. also, you're a dipshit if you trust them at all."
ill say it again, if removing art and culture from the training sets would render your model useless, then obviously pay for it.
[0] when i say cultists, im not talking about normal people who use ai. im talking about an entirely different group, we all know the types im talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose countries like KSA and DPRK would ask the same question about us.
Fortunately we don't have to care much about questions asked by shithole countries today because the UN is virtually powerless. Let's keep it that way.
The troubles over copyright infringement in AI training data remind me a bit of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. There he suffered massive patent infringement, that basically stopped being enforced due to the sheer economic importance of the cotton gin. In a similar manner, I think there is a reasonably strong argument that it was wrong to use copyrighted material for AI training without paying royalties nor even aski…
This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…
[flagged]
This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…
> This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " There could be so many other ways to set this up. Enforce a higher tax on any business selling AI models that have capabilities greater than some threshold, and use it to fund development and infrastructure project like roads, hospitals, schools, etc. Or you could even do a negative income tax[1]. [1] https://en.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do think it's easy, in this technology discussion bubble in which we dwell, to overestimate the centrality of LLMs to the arc of developments in our time. They'll be important, but I don't think they'll be _that_ important, because the rest of society and the economy don't move at the speed of SV. Instead, they'll be overtaken by other, more traditional categories of events, ruptures and dislocations. Moreover, fol…
Functionally speaking, current models are intelligent by any reasonable definition of the term. You can test them on their understanding of complex domains such as software systems, and within that domain as an example, you can judge them on their ability to diagnose bugs, fix bugs, explain code to humans, design systems given vague specifications, and implement new systems. On all these tasks, current models are mea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Functionally speaking, current models are intelligent by any reasonable definition of the term. You can test them on their understanding of complex domains such as software systems, and within that domain as an example, you can judge them on their ability to diagnose bugs, fix bugs, explain code to humans, design systems given vague specifications, and implement new systems. On all these tasks, current models are mea…
I don’t agree. I think they clearly lack general intelligence, which is why all the AI companies can think of is sourcing more and more niche domain data to plug more and more holes. When you get enough of that stuff, you can get a convincing illusion of general intelligence, but there is always another car wash test coming that shows it isn’t real.
“Isn’t real” is a tell for that. It’s the same as saying it’s not a “true” intelligence.
Define what you mean by “true”, then. But for me, what I’m interested in is functional capability, not some mysterious ineffable quality that only humans can have. And in terms of functional capability, current models are certainly better at software development than you are. You’re just in denial.
We cannot always want to capture only the (temporary) winners whenever we see a lucrative business and expect to share a free ride. I'd also assume that most of the revenue these AI labs are making is turned into depreciating fixed capital (hardware) and OPEX at this point. Why don't we capture Meta and Google as they allegedly take advantage of more publicly available information for profit? Let alone the truly valu…