I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.
I don't care if this helps Zuckerberg because it helps everyone.
TBF, I think the same can be said for something like Apple's "commitment" to privacy, in that their own ads business never took off so they leaned into their edge over Google.
Is that intellectually dishonest?
That is a weird definition of intellectual honesty. If you hold both of those opinions, what's wrong with stating them both?
If the answer has to do with the rhetorical effect, that seems a lot harder to justify as intellectual dishonesty, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
One could make the argument we can do the same for AI. Let China build the models and we capture the value somewhere in the layers above.
I think that’s a terrible idea but financially it makes just as much sense as offshoring labor and manufacturing, if not more.
(That was irony, by the way.)
Sarcasm or irony?
I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment.
If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?
It's hype - when the hype dies the great push will slow.
My hypothesis is that we'll end up with something like Seti@Home where continued model training gets outsourced to a benevolent appearing product (something like what OpenAI started out as). If I were to bet - Europe and Canada seem best poised (especially the latter) to produce an AGI initiative with a strong ethical focus.
Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone.
The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level.
Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.
I'd be willing to wager that you can't.
I think you'll find very few people here sympathetic to misanthropic (ba dum tss) goals like yours. It's evident at this point that AGI will destroy economies, democracy, and upward mobility. There is no Star Trek future. There is only an Elysium future with AGI.
It's the same with any open source project: it starts open, then it becomes clear that maintaining it is not cheap and takes up a lot of time. The developers create a hosted/paid version to pay for their time, and to create an incentive to use the hosted/paid version they start releasing closed source enhancements. After that the open source version becomes marketing where new projects use the OSS version and then upgrade once their needs become more sophisticated.
To be fair Meta/Facebook does have quite a strong open source history; React (Native), PyTorch, Btrfs, zstd, etc. It didn't just start here with AI models.
Meta doesn't really offer any profit-making AI product, so I don't understand what commoditizing it buys them in this narrative. You could argue they rely on AI and so want it to be a cheap commodity - but that is not harming their rivals, that is just a different way of stating that Meta is engaging in something that enables people to collectively work for mutual benefit, which is not a nefarious plot against rivals, it is laudable cooperative behavior.
It is a business decision to open source his models, because he has been behind the curve from the start. Do you believe if he had chatGPT, he would open source/weight it? I don't think so, he would treat it like Instagram.
The point is, AI/LLMs are seen as the next frontier. If one of the closed ones becomes dominant, then that company can use its user base to attack Zuckerberg's platforms. That google failed with google+, does not mean the next competitor will.
A telling sign is how he integrated his AI into whatsapp. It seems out of place to me to have an LLM integrated into whatsapp, but he desperately wants a part of the AI cake.
Python just allows you to use it like "normal code", whereas if you program it in C++ you really get exposed to what's under the hood and can't write "normal code"
No
> and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it
and no. Meta legal was issuing DMCA notices within days (so, plenty of time for execs, including Zuckerberg, to sign off on, or even propose, that strategy).
> He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths.
Does he? I can't seem to recall any particular crucial moments that revealed any underlying character there.
No. GPT-2, I think, was the first, four(ish) years before Llama, and there were a bunch in between GPT-2 and the Llama leak and later open release. The Llama leak was a substantial leap forward in capacity for local LLMs, but not the first, and it wasn’t open.
The open licensed release was Llama 2 several months after the Llama leak.
> it's not out of principle.
I'd certainly rather things be done out of principle, but depending on what question you're concerned with that might not matter. There's also a clear hierarchy, but motivations are distinct from effect. The inverse of this is that lots of harm has happened from people with the best of motivations. I'd wager most evil in the world is created by men who would see themselves as good.
With Zuckerberg I think it isn't too hard. Clearly this is a business move, not a moral one. The motivation is wrong, BUT the effect is good. I think more open source models is better for the world. Closed source is also a business move and limits innovation as well as prevents people from interrogating safety. But there's valid arguments on either end.
My point more is that we can be nuanced. We should be nuanced. The world isn't black and white. The people making these decisions are neither demons nor gods and shouldn't be treated as such. My biggest fear is that if we resort to criticizing no matter what then those in power will just learn to ignore us. If they can do no good and only do wrong then there's no reason for them to do good (besides morals, but let's not pretend that's enough, even if it should be)
I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's like a lot of other things on the internet, with a bimodal distribution between people who get helped a lot ('Sir Hype surprises homeless former billionaire with a MILLION DOLLARS!') with many other similarly deserving people getting nothing. I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.
Besides the fact that these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor (and the near certainty that some of these professional philanthropists will later turn out to devils LARPing as angels), it also makes the determination of moral worthiness turn on the public's fickle opinion about whether the recipient is sufficiently beautiful/ ugly/ unlucky/ desperate/ degraded enough to qualify. Charitable undertakings involving cameras are always a bit suspect.
> I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.
Scenario:
There are 100 people starving
Rankings of preferred situations:
1) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone AND everyone gets fed
2) Morals aside, everyone gets fed
3) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone AND __N__ people get fed (N<100)
4) Morals aside, N people get fed (N<100)
5) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone BUT nobody gets fed
6) Fuck the poor
We can rank these, right? We can even get more nuanced about the ranking (we can define N!) and argue about the weight of intent vs outcome, but I'm just proposing one ranking for the sake of making my point clear, not proposing one ranking as if it is the absolute objective ranking system and everyone that disagrees is dumb. The rankings are clearly subjective. But what's not subjective is that nuance exists. What is subjective is how we handle that nuance.
> these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor
So I'm quite confused by your comment because it doesn't seem we disagree. Unless if you're saying that #2 in my list is equivalent to #6 (or anything that isn't #1 is equivalent). But I don't think that's what you're saying.
This has already been the case for at least my whole lifetime. So no, I don't feel like praising them when they do one seemingly "good" thing, while simultaneously doing 99 "bad" things.
> This has already been the case for at least my whole lifetime.
We're on the subject of Zuckerberg: facebook is the poster child for enshittification. Do you think the idea to stop showing you your friends pictures and replace them with ads and ragebaiting short form videos came from the users?
> people have acted the way I'm criticizing.
You are ignoring the myriad of billionaire fanboys and enablers for whom the only metric of success is a persons net worth.
Looking at the state of things I don't think these people are deserving of nuance, in fact they've had it way too easy.
> You are ignoring
But if you're unwilling to have a nuanced take then there's no discussion to be had. You're just going to be yelling at me, someone who hates Zuckerberg. You're yelling at the wrong person
Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.
We know that the Murdoch empire knows they are losing ground as well - which is why they need to acquire a platform like Roku [0]. But honestly the legacy of Murdoch may end up closer aligned to Succession than the empire that Zuck has under his finger. Also Zuckerberg has global influence that's unrivaled, Murdoch has contributed all of his efforts to erosion within, mostly, NAM.
TL;DR - Zuck is worth 9-10x more than Murdoch ($211B vs $21B) and reaches 20-30x more people (3.6B vs 3M) on the daily. A 20% drawdown of Meta swallows TWO Murdoch empires with a hell of a lot of spare change.
[0] https://theankler.com/lachlan-murdochs-fox-roku-surprise-and...
> Ms Wynn-Williams was told she must refrain from engaging in or "amplifying any further disparaging, crucial or otherwise detrimental comments".
> All previous disparaging comments "to the extent within her control" must also be retracted, the ruling also said
She apparently isn't even allowed to criticise Meta in private. They're a horrible company but so many of that book read like poor fiction
A lawsuit might get the relevant passage yanked from the book, I suppose.
No, they don’t do the same thing.
Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.
I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.
Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.
Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. That could have happened with the WaPo but now it appears to be more convenient to have a mouthpiece even if it's obvious to everyone.
Organizations like NPR and the CBC that get government funding can survive a while, but inevitably an administration will come into power that will threaten them or outright deny their funding to the point of impotency. Still, given how cheap they are to us in terms of a national budget it feel like just diverting 5% of the DOD's unmarked funding to just throwing money at journalists with no strings attached would probably result in immense transparency and quality.
I agree with the first part of that, but not necessarily the second. For a very long time in America good journalism was essentially paid for by classified ads. They were really two separate (but obviously related) businesses. Journalism could be more "walled off" from the money making side of things since classified ads were bringing in money hand over fist.
The Internet decimated the classified ads business, so now you see more sensational stories that try to make money in their own right. Even on the CNN website, there are ads at the bottom that are confusingly meant to look like stories. They're often embarrassingly dumb (literal "the one trick doctors don't want you to know" type of stuff), but I think that's what it's come to for news businesses to survive.
This comparison is absurd.
"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...
So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.
...compared to Elon for example.
That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one. I think if he could snap his fingers and not have teenagers lose their sanity on the site he'd do it if only for PR reasons and to avoid congressional hearings.
I don't like him as a person but most of what happened on those sites we did to ourselves. I don't see him anywhere close to his techno-feudal peers who explicitly seem to seek out to destroy most institutions.
In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
I don't know how you define open/closed society but as we've seen and we keep on seeing that this kind of manipulation only got worse AND is profitable. So how is your argument supposed to work?
I mean we're talking about a person who got where he is because he build a page where him and his co-students could rate other students on their looks.
I doubt he really cares...at all. Those hearings needed to be there so he can feel that there are still borders but it doesn't mean that he won't find other ways in the future and use it for his evil purposes just like the times before.
I mean is there anything that could show as that he became a new human being? With higher levels of morality? The person who abolished all the safeguards on his platforms as soon as Trump was elected?
Why should anyone ever trust this man again?
> In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
Having feelings, wanting to be seen or heard, reacting to attractive people in a different way, and so on are not "problems". This is what makes us human.
This is also what people like Zuck are misusing for their own greed. Sure he can't end democracy by himself. He can help it with large sums of money and tools, though. And this is what he's doing.
Shifting the blame and responsibility onto the whole population is, very mildly said: misleading.
My argument's pretty straight forward. Manipulation on the platform isn't profitable for Mark Zuckerberg. What's profitable is selling ads. Making teenagers anorexic doesn't increase his revenue, it just creates problems for him.
Sure he doesn't care either as long as it doesn't, I agree but also he shouldn't because he's not the nation's parent. I think Zuckerberg's due diligence is done when he doesn't interfere or steer politics, he has not, and should not have responsibility for how people use his apps.
It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people. What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses. In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.
I'm not shifting blame, in a democracy people get the institutions, companies and leaders they deserve, by definition.
Nobody said that's the goal. Ads are the last step. Attention is the product, and the ranking system is tuned to maximise it. Harm is what falls out of that optimisation. If engagement weren't the business, there'd be no feed algorithm at all.
> It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people.
Partly true and beside the point. People produce the content. Zucks enterprises decide whose content reaches whom, how often, and at what age. That's not a users' choice, it's a design choice. The LA jury in March didn't rule on content either. It ruled that the product was built to addict.
> What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses.
If we could all manage those impulses, there would be no advertisement industry. We already agreed as a society that it doesn't work on children, which is why you can't advertise alcohol, tobacco or gambling to them. You're arguing against a norm that's been law for decades.
> In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.
You picked the one example that proves my point. Liquor stores need a licence, check ID, can't advertise to minors, and get sued for serving someone visibly drunk. Apply that to Meta and I'll take the analogy.
> in a democracy people get the institutions they deserve, by definition
"By definition" means it can never be wrong, which means it isn't an argument. And Zuckerberg has steered politics: he scrapped US fact-checking and rewrote the hate speech rules on 7 January 2025, two weeks before the inauguration. Trump said it was probably because of the threats he'd made.
You have to fight for democracy. Against people who want to harm or misuse it. Like Zuck. This is what the counter-weight is on this freedom machine.
So now, this ideology which you displayed here is quite toxic and anti-social. I know it because it became quite common in bubbles which cross here. I would like to know how you got there. Can you elaborate? I am really interested.
Just like closed AI vs open AI, his views on the covid situation might be fine in a bubble (though even with AI they have apparently lied about Llama's benchmarks) but it's one of these, "that's the hill you choose to die on?" - not Free Basics - not dubious privacy settings - not 'dumb fucks' and ConnectU - not... I don't know. It's like robbing a bank while telling anyone in earshot it's offensive how long the hold times are on the phone for the bank
He's seen with suspicion and rightly so
Edit: and the fact his site doesn't work. Posts don't work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 and messages don't work (forced encryption with Messenger, and, although this is an old link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)
Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.
Well, if it were the only thing he is doing now, but FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for.
But I can and do still welcome this move here.
As opposed to literally any social network out there, right?
Except well, various messenger to be in contact with the groups and people I choose with no engagement algorithm deciding what posts I see, simple chronological order.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
I think Facebook would need to do a lot more to balance the scales.
Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.
Have you looked at the contract? There are zero conditions unless you've broken $20M in revenue with their model. It doesn't even forbid distillation, lol
> Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
Releasing a big open-weights model is... le bad? Am I understanding you correctly?
There are small models out there if you want them, you know.
No they are not. You can just ignore the contract. Unless you are a multi-billion dollar company, nobody will notice and you will get away with it.
Fireworks, Together, etc - who are providing inference precisely /for/ Moonshot as underlaborers - arranged contracts of their own in the weeks before the release. The press and social media offensive ignored that the release of open weights was merely a starting pistol for a pre-arranged use of foreign providers no different from US models' use of AWS
It should be enought to dispel the strange illusion that providers are somehow independent free agents freely doing what they please with the free beer of Kimi K3 open weights that the prices on open router are within a couple pennies
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Are you actually the Big Bad Wolf? That sounds like something the Big Bad Wolf would say.
The idea that we can possibly ignore the fact that this push for opening AI models is being pushed by one of the richest people on the planet, who made his wealth by providing free services in exchange for attention and depression, is insane
http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...
That said, he is also a powerful enemy of our enemies, so I do not mind taking the win. Anthropic and OpenAIs closed approach to AI is likely to cause way more harm to the world than Zuck ever did.
Open weight is not enough though. We need actually open training models with published searchable training data like AI2 does.
Either we all get access to private, transparent, and accountable superintelligence, or no one should.
If they were able to make a leading closed model would they be doing it though? It seems like they read the room and saw that this is the only way they can have relevance within LLMs
Maybe Zuck has, but I haven't seen a pledge that he'll keep models open. And even then, he might not stick to his word, citing dangers or some other excuse.
But yeah, open models is a great concept.
Just take the opening of this post:
> We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life.
> The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?
> We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.
I mean, this is a company that is facing a flood of lawsuits related to child safety and platform addiction. It has already lost a number of lawsuits and been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, which is potentially just the tip of a massive iceberg that some legal observers have suggested could be similar in nature to the lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
There is an abundance of evidence that Zuckerberg and Meta knew of the dangers its platform exposed young people to and failed to respond adequately to them, and that it even designed features to be more addictive.
So why is that when such a company proclaims it's doing something in the name of "individual empowerment", alarms aren't going off in your head?
Can you explain how I'd train my own version of this, reproducing the final deliverable that runs on the gpu?
I don't understand what gripe people have with open weight models and wanting it to be purely open source. the training dataset is only going to be a copyrighted set of contents you don't want to touch with a 10 feet pole. let alone have a publicly traded company host it for you, even if they internally are training on it.
Sure, there might be currently contraints, but I think it is quite possible training will get optimized over time or crowsourced training can be organized.
Without fully end-to-end open source models you are still at the mercy of the model provider to keep providing updates, you have no idea what garbage they trained the model on & can't fix that, not to mention might end up getting sued for using the open weigth model once all those "AI stole my data" lawsuits are finally decided.
You will not have that control. Even if everything were open source. This is because you don't have 100 million dollars of compute.
There, the difference for almost everyone is negligible.
> Without fully end-to-end open source models you are still at the mercy of the model provider to keep providing updates
No. Because you can post train it. And even if you could train the whole thing again, but with slight changes, once again, you aren't spending the hundred mil in compute to change it only a little bit.
Instead, you'll do post training like everyone else does.
I love that Apple made OSX open source.
The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right?open weight models are better than open-assembly binaries (as you put it) because models are grown like plants, you can shape the open-weight model in a direction you want by feeding it more data and compute (aka finetuning).
which is something that is impossible in a binary.
embrace the new paradigm and it's tradeoffs. without scoffing at semantics and criticising from an armchair.
In comparison to cloud services, having access to the assembly code can still be quite useful.
This is especially true in the modern era, where you can use AI to much more easily decompile the assemble and reconstruct the source code even.
"Open-assembly" code may be more useful than you might previously have thought, given the ease of recreating the source code or making changes with AI these days.
Almost certainly this is part of some grandiose bet which could have a chance to pay off massively in the future (AGI or similar), or a way to prevent an expensive dependency.
I can run lots of binaries on my computer that don't have source available, they are not open source. These words matter.
So why the change of heart? Well, it's not. They are simply not able to compete anywhere on the Pareto frontier. So they give their relatively bad stuff away and play the high and mighty game, because that's all they can do to get returns.
Not a great look – and I would expect that to last about as long as they can't actually monetize their stuff more effectively.
Is this actually true? They have their closed social graph or whatever but come to think of it they're built on a lot of open tech, the web, Android, etc. Maybe they don't contribute back to a lot of these things?
I'm fully ready to believe it but it would be interesting to dive into this conjecture.
React was already quite prominent in web technologies, but that license pointed a loaded gun at any business smaller than Facebook who wanted to use React. They opened it up to its current license, MIT, as the backlash built.
I say no to both. Of the things we've made on purpose, but excluding where we were actually trying to make them opaque like e.g. cryptography, a trained artificial neural network is the most difficult thing to understand the inner workings of. This makes it a complete pain to even evaluate if one model is better or worse than another for your needs, so we have to mostly outsource these to other people's rankings and hope the score on ARC-AGI-3 or τ-bench or DeepSWE v1.1 or BioMysteryBench or whatever, actually corresponds to something we care about. Which it might do kinda but on the other hand a high score may turn out to be the curse of Goodhart.
Also, as with the Chinese models and the social media feed algorithms, the only way to tell if there's some systemic flaw in it is by analysing the aggregate outcomes. It is claimed (I can't read the laws myself*) that the Chinese government requires models to support the government's worldview about e.g. Tiananmen Square; and we have seen examples of Grok glazing Musk in amusingly stupid ways; so I fully expect something similar from Zuckerberg, e.g. requiring the model to glaze Meta products or propagandise for things Zuckerberg wants as a billionaire.
* every time I try to illustrate how mediocre Google Translate is from English to Chinese, the result is so bad that one of the replies is someone telling me the Chinese example I give is borderline gibberish.
Also, even if I could actually read it, I'm not a lawyer.
"Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less."
Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!
I have zero faith that Zuckerberg went anywhere near these words. It's possible he may not even have set their general direction, beyond "We need a distraction from our court cases. Something that will harm OpenAI and Anthropic would be great."
[1] 82 TB of books https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
[2] Here's a simple 12-step manusl process to opt-out on Facebook https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html
And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...
Now some of these tech companies open source various libraries but none of it is core to their business. It's marketing, essentially. Or they're trying to get free labor from the community. Google had protocol buffers and Stubby, for example. Facebook had no open source equivalent and didn't have Google's resources so they created Thrift and open sourced it.
Given this, many people, myself included, take Meta releasing open weight models as conceding defeat. They're unable to compete with Google, Anthropic or OpenAI. Their failures in attracting and retaining top AI talent backs this up.
So what you're seeing is people just piling onto Zuckerberg because he seems to have no idea of what to do with Meta. The Metaverse was a $70B+ disaster.
Note that Chinese labs don't fit this model because the Chinese government wants to commodify models as a national security interest.
In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?
Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
Maybe Meta, Google, and others can start to compete on open models instead of just closed.
Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
Don't let the Big Ai/tech swoon you with a single open model, even if it turns out to be good. Zuck broke the trust and I'm not sure if he can ever earn it back
We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?
This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero guard rails it's only natural to use some adversarial actions to achieve the desired result defined by the operator.
It's like saying a car went rogue and attacked other cars because the driver hit the gas. It's just a machine doing what's instructed.
At best someone could argue that an agent attacks like a bacteria does, just following automated chemical and genetic programming. But you wouldn't call that an attack or attribute moral values to their actions, because they don't have moral agency. They can't "go rogue", they can't disobey.
Just like llms, their automated actions are direct product of programming. Yes they can do amazingly complex shit, exactly like a car does when you press the gas pedal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
Lol. Not gonna lie, it feels like bullshit. OpenAI and Anthropic have been begging for regulatory capture for years, feels like a stunt to try forcing the government's hand.
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
Google, MS, IBM are all government contractors. Meta seems close to the Trump admin too. Yet it's only the VC-funded labs raising the alarm.
For example, hiring more people to moderate content on Facebook and stop ads featuring CSAM from being displayed.
Billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by being altruistic. If they say something they’re doing is good for the world, you should be looking at how it will be good for them, because that’s why they’re really doing it.
Will it incidentally do some good for others? Perhaps. Is it a net positive? We’ll see because there’s precious little we can do to stop them from doing whatever they want.
If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.
A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
(Nuclear waste isn't an actual problem either. For civilian powerplants the highly radioactive waste can generally be stored indefinitely at the reactor site.)
Your comment on nuclear waste is so ill considered and poorly informed it's not worth responding to.
what if we dont use centralized identity at all?
web of trust failed in the 90s because exchanging keys is hard when all you have is desktop computers, wired connections and old school hackers who dont care about ux. today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm, everything gets auto downloaded and shared with your whole network.
now this doesnt work directly for a random online business where none of your contact personally know anyone, but governments can act as an authority that cross signs their citizens keys. that means if you want to stop bots from creating accounts all you have to do is make new users show a certificate from one of the authorities you trust.
its cheap to verify, decentralized and not hard to integrate with existing PKI. the biggest technical problem is key management as always, but that can be solved with something like ethereum style social recovery setups or a did:plc type multi key scheme.
that gives you a robust identity scheme. browsers and social media can integrate it to show a trust rating for content based on who signed it. messaging apps can show a warning or refuse calls from unknown users. fraud is only possible against a person who somehow has no irl contacts, never used a government service in their life and trusts random strangers online. at that point they deserve it.
the one massive, unpredictable question is if anybody is willing to go ahead and adopt it on a scale big enough to create network effects. it would take a state level force and carefully designed OS integrations so its more convenient than email/password signup.
but even if all of this fails i still think a world of scams is better than a world controlled by a couple big countries (America, China, maybe EU) or for-profit corporations. open source ai might lead to anarchy but closed ai will definitely get us to tyranny. i dont know about you but i would take the first option.
This was actually possible in 2011 or so, and a friend and I implemented it for a school project. How well the ux works depends on whether you want to use a key exchange protocol for the in person communication.
These problems will exist regardless of whether or not we get open model access. I'd personally rather that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't profiting off these scammers, creating a perverse incentive that open model providers don't have.