Our position on open-weights models
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Our position on open-weights models
#702Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!) The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be…
> compared to his own closed and overpriced ones I don't understand how Anthropic or OpenAI can have overpriced models, yet losing money like there is no tomorrow. Taking their own numbers at face value, they claim a revenue of 24 billion (ARR, a dubious tool), spending 21 billion in operating losses and another 11 billion as "R&D" funneled straight to Microsoft pockets. That before all investments they are committin…
I'd guess Anthropic and OpenAI's models are expensive relative to the cost of running the models but that the revenue still doesn't pay for building the next and next models. The challenge is how these next generation models are going to pay for themselves. Will everyone on earth find it useful to $200/month to talk to a thing more intelligent than themselves? The alternative is naturally that these are going to replace workers and employers will be the one paying.
Re: Our position on open-weights models
#703Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!) The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be…
> compared to his own closed and overpriced ones I don't understand how Anthropic or OpenAI can have overpriced models, yet losing money like there is no tomorrow. Taking their own numbers at face value, they claim a revenue of 24 billion (ARR, a dubious tool), spending 21 billion in operating losses and another 11 billion as "R&D" funneled straight to Microsoft pockets. That before all investments they are committin…
Re: Our position on open-weights models
#704To everyone here pushing for total proliferation of open models -- what should be done about open weight bioweapon and cyber-offense capabilities? Is it simply the cost of freedom that we should allow attackers to access these tools? The OpenAI / Hugging Face incident shows what a GPT 5.6 level model can do off the leash; within ~6 months, open weight models will match this and every bad actor under the sun will be a…
> To everyone here pushing for total proliferation of open models -- what should be done about open weight bioweapon and cyber-offense capabilities? Nothing should be done. These things are trained on public knowledge. The dangerous information is already out there. If someone wants to do something horrible, making it slightly inconvenient isn't going to do much. Hackers and terrorists existed before AI. Just as an e…
Almost everything was possible given you put in the effort, but few people possess the will to put in the effort AND pursue a malicious goal.
I think an obvious example is all the fake ai content flooding the internet made to trick people in exchange for money (ad revenue, scams, likes, etc). This existed before ai, but I think it's fair to say pumping out content now requires less effort than it did before.
Most physical locks are an example of security through obscurity/effort. You can after all just pick a lock if you go through the effort to learn the skill. But once a universal lock picker is made available to everyone, you will simply see more locks getting picked.
Re: Our position on open-weights models
#705Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!) The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be…
To be fair, I found that part consistent. There is limited cooperation between enemy states all the time, e.g. see the grain deal between Ukraine and Russia before it collapsed or the "red phones" between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war.
In the case with China, the "cooperation" is much more extensive still, due to all the economic ties that both countries are currently unable to sever - which I think is also a reason that China is still seen as a "competitor" and not a full-blown "enemy state" in the US.
It's restricted to areas where there is a genuine common interest of course. In this situation, I guess the "other actors" would be terror groups, criminals or just reckless corporations - that aren't aligned with either state.
Obviously, such a cooperation wouldn't keep China or the US from developing models with those capabilities for their own armies.
--
There are lots of other takes with questionable logic in the essay though, such as that China is unable to train frontier models by themselves due to lack of hardware - unless they obtain the training data directly from American frontier models via distillation.
Or the assumption that open weights models will be completely opaque and immutable after their release, so a model that passed all the "safety" tests can never be turned back into an "unsafe" model. This seems pretty ridiculous when people are already finetuning open-weight models every day to add new abilities or remove restrictions.
And of course that China must not have those abilities because it's an Authoritarian Regime, but Trump USA is totally fine...
Re: Our position on open-weights models
#706> We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.
So Open-weight models are perfectly fine, but we don't want anyone to be able to make them.
Re: Our position on open-weights models
#707Re: Our position on open-weights models
#708Re: Our position on open-weights models
#709Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!) The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be…