It depends on if you can say things like "it is good they are supporting this" or "I'm glad they're doing this" or "good for them" without having to couch it in a bunch of stuff about how terrible they are.

We did this with manufacturing and industrial build outs over the last 4 decades or so. It worked out very well for capital, not well for labor.

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.

So, if they got ahead of us by whatever arbitrary measure someone pretends is objective, then suddenly our stuff… what… stops working? Does it say somewhere in the big book of AI rules that the first entity to beat the US AI companies would be in charge now, and we’d have to stop doing our own research and development and start using their shit exclusively? I don’t get the argument.

Isn't this meta release kind of a counterexample to that?

What I think is that something the "exponential scaling to AGI" thesis pays too little attention to is resource constraints, and that this is the answer to your question. What will happen if it becomes difficult to sustain the investment of resources necessary to continuously train newer and better models is that the s-curve will start to inflect toward plateau, just like any other technology.

> 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.

That's a non sequitur. While the frontier LLMs are quite useful for many tasks there's no reliable evidence that scaling them up will ever produce a true AGI. More likely some other fundamental research breakthroughs will be needed, and those breakthroughs won't necessarily come from the current leading companies. I doubt that more money would be necessary or even helpful in that.

Out of curiosity why do you want AGI to ‘happen FASTER’?

Why do you think your life will be better with AGI?

> as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER

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.

> Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak

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.

> Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak

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.

  > I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.

Same. I hope you didn't interpret my comment as anything different. My point was that a suboptimal result is better than a negative result. I was *not** saying that a suboptimal result is better than an optimal *result* (that would be quite silly). Let's make a concrete example so there's no ambiguity.

  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

Obviously we want #1. #2 is suboptimal but at least everyone gets fed. #3 is the realistic optimal situation because we're often resource constrained. #4 is, well... better than nothing. #5 is indistinguishable from moral cosplaying. #6 is messed up.

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 to go back to our example, even though I'd prefer we just feed everybody, I'd prefer somebody getting rich feeding the hungry over not feeding the hungry. I would prefer someone LARPing as an angle conditioned on actually doing "angelic actions" than somebody LARPing as an angle and doing nothing. Of course, I'd prefer a real angle, who wouldn't?!

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.

And for my entire lifetime people have acted the way I'm criticizing. So my request is "the status quo isn't working, let's try something different." So I'm not sure what your argument is. Maybe you see things differently than me and there is a time where we were more nuanced and provided signals for these big companies to course correct? I'm not a boomer so maybe things were better back then?

  > You are ignoring

Rupert Murdoch absolutely is capable of doing all that. He’s absolutely done far more harm globally than Zuckerberg.

Sarah Wynn-Williams book contains a number of implausible anecdotes which people repeat as gospel truth even though they have not AFAIK been corroborated. I am pretty skeptical, for example, that Sheryl Sandberg punished Ms. Wynn-Williams for not getting in bed with her.

I read half of it. I couldn't get paat her weird character attacks at his autism traits, her attacks on the male programmers in general despite most of the problems she faced coming from her (all female) team, and how she tried to frame herself as both indispensable and some unaware victim. I think the moment she wrote about giving birth while writing emails and her doctor begging her to stop as a humblebrag was the end of my relationship with that book

Sell attention for ad space? That describes both of em

There were some brief excellent years in the nascent days of the blogosphere where stories that CNN would miss (especially stories about marginalized groups) managed to get widespread attention and the compensation to journalists held up. But where we are today in terms of news compared to the 00s or 90s (even with all the retrospective knowledge about journalism catastrophes like NYT's coverage of the Iraq War) is so much fundamentally worse.

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.

>Zuck built an empire purpose built to damage democracy and the mental health of children to suicidal levels, for money.

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.