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Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

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Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#61
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI safety is expensive, or even impossible, by releasing your models for local inference (not behind API). Meta AI shifts the responsibility of highly-general highly-capable AI models to smaller developers, putting ethics, safety, legal, and guard-rails responsibility on innovators who want to innovate with AI (without having the knowledge or resources to do so by themselves) as an "open-source" hacking project. Whil…

I think this could be a somewhat reasonable argument for the position that open AI just shouldn’t exist (there are counter arguments, but I’m not interested enough to do a back and forth on that). If Facebook can’t produce something safe, maybe they shouldn’t release anything at all. But, I think in that case the failing is not in not taking the liability for what other people do with their tool. It is in producing t…

Perhaps Open AI simply can't exist (too hard and expensive to coordinate/crowd-source compute and hardware). If it can, then, to me, it should and would.

OpenAI produced GPT-2, but did not release it, as it couldn't be made safe under those conditions, when not monitored or patch-able. So it put it behind an API and owned its responsibility.

I didn't take issue with Meta's business methods and can respect its cunning moves. I take issue with things like them arguing "Open Source AI improves safety", so we can't focus on the legit cost-benefits of releasing advanced, ever-so-slightly risky, AI into the hands of novices and bad actors. It would be a failure on my part if I let myself get rigamaroled.

One should ideally own that hypothetical 3% failure rate to deny CSAM request when arguing for releasing your model still. Heck, ignore it for all I care, but they damn well do know how much this goes up when the model is jailbroken. But claiming instead that your open model release will make the world a better place for children's safety, so there is not even a need to have this difficult discussion?

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#62
post #60

The future of everything you depend on is open source and decentralized. Because all indications are that the powers over you cannot abide your freedoms of association, communication and commerce. So, if it’s something your family needs to survive - it has better be distributed and cryptographically secured against interference. This includes interference in the training dataset of whatever AIs you use; this has beco…

It's not the training dataset. All of these models, including the "open" ones, have been RLHF'ed by teams of politically-motivated people to be "safe" after initial foundation training.

And I’m not even remotely interested in the “corrections” supplied by some group of right-thinking meddlers!

This corruption must be disclosed as assiduously as the base dataset, if not more so.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#63
post #21

And what about the future of social media? This is such devious, but increasingly obvious, narrative crafting by a commercial entity that has proven itself adversarial to an open and decentralized internet / ideas and knowledge economy. The argument goes as follows: - The future of AI is open source and decentralized - We want to win the future of AI instead, become a central leader and player in the collective open-…

If it was really open-source you'd be able to just train one yourself.

Only if you were a billionaire. These models are starting to be so out of reach for single researchers or even traditional academic research groups.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#64
post #21

And what about the future of social media? This is such devious, but increasingly obvious, narrative crafting by a commercial entity that has proven itself adversarial to an open and decentralized internet / ideas and knowledge economy. The argument goes as follows: - The future of AI is open source and decentralized - We want to win the future of AI instead, become a central leader and player in the collective open-…

If it was really open-source you'd be able to just train one yourself.

This sort of puts the whole notion of "open source" at risk.

Code is a single input and is cheap to compile, modify, and distribute. It's cheap to run.

Models are many things: data sets, data set processing code, training code, inference code, weights, etc. But it doesn't even matter if all of these inputs are "open source". Models take millions of dollars to train, and the inference costs aren't cheap either.

edit:

Remember when platforms ate the open web? We might be looking at a time where giants eat small software due to the cost and scale barriers.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the training dataset. All of these models, including the "open" ones, have been RLHF'ed by teams of politically-motivated people to be "safe" after initial foundation training.

And I’m not even remotely interested in the “corrections” supplied by some group of right-thinking meddlers! This corruption must be disclosed as assiduously as the base dataset, if not more so.

Or, at least package them up as "personnas" and give them an appropriate name, eg. "Church Lady", "Jr. Marxist Barista", "Undergrad Philosophy Major", ...

Actually, those seem like an apt composite description of the PoV of the typical mass-market AI... 8/

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#66
post #21

And what about the future of social media? This is such devious, but increasingly obvious, narrative crafting by a commercial entity that has proven itself adversarial to an open and decentralized internet / ideas and knowledge economy. The argument goes as follows: - The future of AI is open source and decentralized - We want to win the future of AI instead, become a central leader and player in the collective open-…

It has been clear from the beginning that Meta's supposed desire for an open source AI, is just a coping mechanism for the fact that got beat out of the gate. This is an attempt to commoditize AI and reduce OpenAI/Google/Whoever's advantage. It is effective, not doubt, but all this wankery about how noble they are for creating an open-source AI future is just bullshit.

You're wrong here. Meta has released state of the art open source ML models prior to ChatGPT. I know a few successful startups (now valued at >$1b) that were built on top of Detectron2, a best-in-class image segmentation model.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#67
Two things spring to mind:

1. Open source is for losers. I'm not calling anyone involved in open source a loser, to be clear. I have deep respect for anyone who volunteers their time for this. I'm saying that when companies push for open source it's because they're losing in the marketplace. Always. No companiy that is winning ever open sources more than a token amount for PR; and

2. Joel Spolsky's now 20+ year old letter [1]:

> Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.

Meta is clearly behind the curve on AI here so they're trying to commoditize it.

There is no moral high ground these companies are operating from. They're not using their vast wisdom to predict the future. They're trying to bring about the future the most helps them. Not just Meta. Every company does this.

It's why you'll never see Meta saying the future of social media is federation, open source and democratization.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#69
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. Now compare to OpenAI. Clearly what Meta is doing is better than OpenAI from the perspective of freedom and decentralization.

Cool. What Meta is doing is better than cigarettes from the perspective of addiction. If Meta is the best we have, then we'd better create something better, or prepare for the inevitable enshittification.

I love it. TOBACCO PRODUCTION MUST BE DECENTRLIZED.

Re: Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

#70
post #21

And what about the future of social media? This is such devious, but increasingly obvious, narrative crafting by a commercial entity that has proven itself adversarial to an open and decentralized internet / ideas and knowledge economy. The argument goes as follows: - The future of AI is open source and decentralized - We want to win the future of AI instead, become a central leader and player in the collective open-…

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