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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#51

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

pu_pe wrote: post #12

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plu…

The very definition of (applied) technology is power amplification. Use a lever, move more weight than you could before, 1 person with the tool now wields the power of 3 without.

Making "tech" a career and a societal goal onto itself, without the adjoining understanding of and deep commitment to ethics and the responsible use of power, is why we're sliding into authoritarian rule by a small circle of techno-oligarchs.

We need less "move fast and break things" and more "plant trees you will not live to see bear fruit."

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#52

Post by glimshe »

nacozarina wrote: post #39
glimshe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with you, but adding to my argument. Despite the human handholding, I feel that 3 years would have been enough for 18 months of thinking about the product plus 18 months where a team could get 3-5 years worth of coding/development done. Yet, we haven't seen anything big yet, like a new Youtube/Instragram, an amazing videogame, a major cure etc. Maybe they are coming, but every day that passes is an in…

perhaps being 30-50% ‘busier’ is something quite different from being 30-50% more ‘productive’ and ppl are just bad at detecting the difference

Maybe so, but least for me in my personal coding projects, I'm going through my own task list noticeably faster. I had created this list before getting a ChatGPT Pro subscription and the number of bugs found in AI reviews and rate of closing tasks has certainly increased. I'm not saying my anecdote scales to teams or even other people, but I have no doubt about my personal productivity change. I wouldn't be paying for it otherwise.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#53

Post by discreteevent »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #46
kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

This is actually crazy, because biochemistry is where LLMs are weakest. It's one of science's most fuzzy and unpredictable domains, in general, and a lot of published works which an LLM might take at face value might be unreplicable or subtly flawed. (See e.g. the entire history of Alzheimer's.) It is also where real-world lab and clinical trial work is most important. So Anthropic are going to spin up a medicinal ch…

See also this article by a genomics PhD about how intelligence is not the bottleneck in medical research.

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the...

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#54

Post by rimliu »

Depurator wrote: post #22

It will be interesting to see what kind of progress in biology and medicine they will preview during the fall. He does make a good point that most of the progress so far have not been material in the sense of providing real positive outcomes for ordinary people. Or even for the HN crowd, when will we see e.g. "Mythos aided research discovers 10 new viable battery technologies"

None?

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#55

Post by spwa4 »

amarcheschi wrote: post #38
kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

rapture but for tech people

[flagged]

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#56

Post by woadwarrior01 »

onion2k wrote: post #50
woadwarrior01 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models. Does it have to be? There are plenty of coding tasks, where it's good enough.

Practically, no, the distill is great. It's fine to use it. However, if you're having a discussion about access to frontier models, and using Qwen 3.8 as an example of how open weights is a solution, then you should be honest and accurate about what you're talking about. Making an argument like "People can run Qwen 3.8 at home. That shows open weights are great." is a bit disingenuous if you're not also making it cle…

I agree 100%. IMO, it all started with ollama misrepresenting the Deepseek R1 distills as Deepseek R1, all for hype and marketing. I've had so many ostensibly technical people telling me: "I tried DeepSeek R1 and it was terrible", and every time when I probe further they'd tried the tiny 1.5B Qwen2.5 distill model that was further brain damaged by ollama's naive RTN quantization[1]. DeepSeek themselves were very forthright about it by naming it DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B[2].

I suppose the road to technical hell is paved with marketers and grifters. :)

[1]: https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1:1.5b [2]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-...

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#57

Post by spwa4 »

pas wrote: post #36
pu_pe wrote: post #12

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plu…

Arguably the question is whether it's economically feasible to self-host something similar. Are you self-hosting Google or Bing? No, but we have quite a huge ecosystem of full-text search tools with PageRank, with options to scale to almost Google scale (if you have the money). After all LLM training starts with the same crawl mechanism. As long as barriers to entry is not too high (ie. it makes sense to take the ris…

You're missing the point, what will happen is this:

1) in things like tax law, registering with city hall, dealings with the DMV, your phone subscription, insurance contract, ... you will find that one of the new fine prints in the contract will be that you're not allowed to use AI to communicate with them.

2) because of how SynthID works (you need the SynthID keys to verify, which are secret. So the only way to find if text is ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic watermarked is to ask ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic), government and large companies can enforce this against you. That is what the watermark is for. To end any insurance claim written by AI with "you're not allowed to submit AI written insurance claims" and refuse it outright there and then.

"Sorry your request was AI watermarked and pursuant to law 234 of 2025/03/11 chapter 3258 paragraph 33 decile 1299 we hereby close it without response"

3) when they reply, however, they use a custom model that also has custom SynthID keys. You will not even be able to tell their responses are AI written, or at least, you won't be able to prove it. You won't be able to enforce any AI-related rights (ie. the right to talk to a human) you have under the law against large companies.

In other words: this is to make sure that all the advantages AI provides are available to deny your unemployment claim, and to Verizon to charge you more, but completely inaccessible TO YOU when you want to change to a cheaper subscription. They can inundate YOU with AI-written requests BUT YOU CAN'T.

Self-hosting helps because it prevents them from verifying if your responses are AI written, because you can generate non-watermarked AI text and so there is a level playing field.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#59

Post by well_ackshually »

blfr wrote: post #41
dandellion wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember people moving the goalposts like that since, let me check... when did AI Dungeon go viral? Wow, 2019.

What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Fable can do. I push its code straight to prod. But I am just as amazed with how little real life consequence it seems to have! Even software houses were hit more by interest rates than by this magical revolution. If I couldn't directly observe Fable in action, I wouldn't believe in AI.

> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Fable can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 4.8 can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 4.6 can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what GPT5 can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>>>>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 3.5 can do. I push its code straight to prod.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#60

Post by pj_mukh »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.

I think typical bubble behavior the leaders have set up the whole promise to fail. Everyone is expecting some faux super intelligence to come and find a cancer solution everyone else missed. However, it is just as likely that vanilla current LLM's will create enough of a productivity boost for back office automations in research heavy hospitals to create the space for regular humans to create these breakthroughs, but LLM's won't be able to claim that for themselves and inevitably “fail”.

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