81–90 of 111 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
at this point I'm just confused whether you are talking about north korea or the us
Anybody know where that gordon moore quote comes from? A little searching didn't produce sources for me.
Author here! It's from a workshop in 2001 for the National Research Council's Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy. He gave a talk. You can ctrl+f for it at this link https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208682/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that would be an issue because it allows the regime to divert more resources to weapons. In general major famines are always caused by corrupt or incompetent political leaders rather than lack of food.
Famine could be caused by drought or flood or other numerous things. When the country can't produce enough food, its people would need to rely on food from outside.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine that AI lives up to its promise, gets captured by a handful of corporations, and ushers in a world of untouchable über-oligarchs that de facto rule the world. Would it have been worth it then? Can this problem even be solved?
I mean, yes, that's one possible outcome. I personally believe that it's more likely that the current batch of massively overleveraged AI companies go broke in the next year or so as the AI bubble bursts. Hopefully the USA manages to get its democratic shit together enough to not bail them out (as happened in 2008), and they just... stop. The OSS models are almost at the same level, and are progressing fine. The tech…
I think those open weight models exist because openai, anthropic, and google rule the roost. And I don't think things would continue as-is if those guys implode.
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'd be fine with the nuclear compromise: if AI training is allowed to infringe copyright, then there is no legal protection for the models themselves and their weights. Distillation should be explicitly legal. There will of course be a huge cat and mouse game about it, but let's have competition drive prices down on the stolen IP.
I'll say it again:
You can produce copyrighted material all day long and it's not copyright infringement.
If I draw The Simpsons on a piece of paper - whether or not I used AI to create it - it's not copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is if I tried to sell that Simpsons work as my own, putting up for consumption and reaping the monetary benefits.
It has never been illegal to produce copyrighted work. You people are in for a surprise dystopia if you keep pushing to make that a reality.
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…
Author here. Thanks for reading! I have additional essays coming out that will address this exact issue and other issues I know that people will raise. I’m building the essays series around arguing for practical policy I believe can get implemented and am sequencing it as thoughtfully as I can. I just can’t fit every argument into every essay.
This is not going to happen: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
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…
Author here - thanks for reading and thoughtfully replying I’d personally love a world where open weights compete with proprietary ones, but I don’t believe it solves the core concentration issue. In that scenario most value still flows to capital holders, it’s just hardware holders not model weight holders. I emphatically do not want to put the genie back in the bottle nor do I believe it’s possible. Technology has…
In 20 years, thinking about llm's contribution to new technologies, to improved accessibility of valuable knowledge, to solving problems.
How would you tell that story?
This seems like handwaving to me. Even the actual frontier science that is using ML (e.g. AlphaFold) isn't based on "token spend" or "agentic loops". I personally cannot think of a single example of frontier science that is rooted in LLMs. I am sure there are a few examples, but the idea that frontier science has somehow completely shifted its trajectory and methods based on LLMs feels like quite a stretch to me.
Got any counterexamples to show me I'm wrong?