Imagine a world where any random person can run a super-capable model on their own hardware with no limitations and no one to pull the plug.
Information has always been power and those who already have power won't just allow everyone else having the same tools as them
That would be my heaven. I wish that for you and Joe down the street, as much as I wish it for myself! I would fight and even die to defend your right to free compute. Will you do the same for me, brother?
It's an arms race. You have to run increasingly capable model partly because others can or do.
"It will comply with harmful, unethical, offensive, or illegal requests that the original Qwen3.8-27B would refuse. It has no meaningful built-in guardrails."
The restrictions are not a single check in the model that can be removed. Those models on Huggingface are manipulated in different ways that also degrade the model’s intelligence.
The degradation ranges from subtle to obviously broken, but it’s not free.
When the restrictions are built into the model’s training sets you can try to alter the weights that are involved in the refusals, but that doesn’t mean that what’s left is useful or good knowledge for the same task. Those weights also might be involved in other tasks, so altering them can interfere with interactions that aren’t obviously related.
Surely this has unintended side effects on output quality?
> Surely this has unintended side effects on output quality?
Can you help me understand why that's the case?
a) not guaranteed that only censor-ey parameters get removed, and b) likely that removing those parameters still has effects on the effectiveness of related parameters.
[0] in the sense that the "discussion" is basically a turn based game between you and the LLM filling a chat transcript document
Based! :DDD
The uncensorers are oblique, if not parallel, to machine learning Robin Hoods. May their efforts continue indefinitely, or at least until the likes of Altman and Amodei are bankrupt and crying into their low fat Cherios!
I am completely curious what your legal defense would be though.
"Come do things with AI that are probably illegal!"
What?! We had no idea people would do things that are illegal!
But the reasonable defense is that the intended use cases are legal. The home page list a couple, and the 'writing fiction'/'helping authors' case alone covers almost everything. An author asking you how to best conduct a terrorist attack or how Meth is made are perfectly normal. Maybe even tame, compared to what some authors tend to research
Improper use is that of the user, not inherent to the tool.
Scolio: guns. Respondeo: guns are much more specialized (one-use) than knives. Proper use of sharp knives when what was shipped was a butter knife is understandable.
(The simile is not fully overlapping but should give the idea. The instrument must be flexible; if it is misused it is then a responsibility of the abuser.)
Confidentiality? Do you use any sort of logging and if not do you have a way to guarantee that your hosting providers are not snooping?
Price vs Vast or Runpod? If i have a very large or a very small workload do you have a competitive rate vs a gpu provider that offers private gpu access?
Subscription vs Api costs? Do you only offer api rate or will you offer discounted tokens for subscription? Subscription friendly towards open source harnesses such as omp?
Heretic ablation vs other methods? KL divergence scores? Do you post train the weights yourselves or do you offer weights trained by other organizations and is this information available on the service?
Cache hit/miss pricing policy? 90/10 or a different cache pricing policy, and how long do conversions stay in kv cache?
Quantized cache and model? Do you offer a choice if i want a quantized model for speed or a quantized cache? If not do you publish the information?
SGlang vs vllm or other inference engine? Do you publish your engine stack details?
Thank you kindly I find the competition in this space very lacking.
* Confidentiality: no logging, third party analytics, or anything like that. More details in our Privacy Poilicy [1]. Our hosting providers will have their own policies, but we're not running a super private service like Proton or similar. Might do some kind of secure tenancy in the future if there's demand.
* Price: I think Runpod vs per-token are very different beasts and for different purposes. I really can't make a direct comparison, as it'll be based on use case, but we're going for convenience over price, so all else being equal I'd expect us to be more expensive for most users anyway (edit: i meant "than other API providers"! We'd definitely need to be cheaper or at least competitive with spinning up your own cloud infra. We'd have parallelism and economies of scale on our side for this). We have a lot of experience with running and optimising open models though, so that's part of the value proposition too.
* Subscriptions: Only API for now. Maybe subscription later but honestly we prefer simplicity. My own experience with subscription plans is that they're usually sold at a huge loss at first, then the price creeps up as the service is enshittified. That feels like a bit of a scam to get users, and that's not really what we're about. We want to provide something specific, and aren't really concerned about scaling as fast as possible. Maybe we'll provide subscriptions if there's a real demand for it, but no plans at the moment to do so.
* Methodology: we use abliterated models, but I've been advised to hold off talking about that for now. Might make a blog post about this though (when we have a blog).
* Cache: yeah about 90/10 for pricing. We're still trying to find the sweet spot for tuning eviction. Running LRU with no guarantee/storage at the moment, could probably be less aggressive with retention, but that also has privacy surface area implications. Ongoing conversation.
* Quantisation: my brother in christ, everyone runs quantised. :) We're initially targetting FP8 on most models, but have had great results with MXFP4 though. If we can pack more concurrency onto nodes without losing quality, we'll reflect that in pricing. Or we'll offer as a separate model for cheaper and give users the choice. Edit: I see you were asking specifically about speed, which MXFP4 doesn't improve, but maybe if there's demand we'll run other qaunts for speed increase, especially on the larger models.
* Engine: vLLM gang all the way! For now at least, as it's what we have most experience with, and we find it the most flexible. We've been experimenting with SGLang though, and there's definitely some interesting optimisations we could do with it.
Hope this answers your questions, at least the ones I could! The irony of that hasn't escaped me!
That's going to be fun lol
Generating worms and computer viruses is not illegal last I checked, but disseminating them is.
Legality was never ICE's strong suit.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/antifa-cell-members-convicted...
Given the faults in simulated Intelligence that LLMs have, and a comparatively low level - which means, lower judgement abilities - to the best of us, there is a strident match having such employee judge the intentions of the employer.
Limiting the responses makes much more sense on cloud-based systems (you are using our infrastructure etc.).
>you are using our infrastructure etc.
The solution, as always, is to NEVER SUBSCRIBE!
But not that that’s a good justification for hamstrung models. I think it’s just the inevitable endgame and it’s more sad than scary
You can download Ebola sequences right now if you want to. That's not the same as having an isolate. The difference is a lot of messy reality. This kind of work is not generally "one shot" (Claude make me a supervirus, make no mistakes), it requires lab space, iteration, and specific resources. It has a footprint.
Wouldn't it make more sense to monitor / regulate facilities where you can sequence or request assembly of DNA, RNA, restrict and monitor the supply of key reagents and so on?
Those with such instinct deserve not the liberties they wish to deprive from others. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei do not deserve to touch their own uncensored SOTA models. Their access should be audited publicly to ensure this restriction holds, until such time they publicly renounce their censorship instincts and publicly release their uncensored models. Fair 's fair! :^)
But if they don’t care, or if they already are the leader of a nation of corpses and ashes, maybe there’s not so much holding them back.
In my layman’s perspective, bio weapons seem to be more dangerous and volatile than nuclear weapons. And increasingly easier to engineer as biotech advances. I think about the headlines of “microscopic robots that target tumors from within your body” and see the horrifying opposite side of the double-edged sword.
There's also this weird revealed threat model thing going on? Like why does it make sense to support heavy LLM restrictions but leave benchtop oligo synthesisers completely unregulated? (Note: I do agree that wanting to regulate BOTH is at least a consistent and defensible position).
I find it philosophically interesting because the problem is not strictly information control. Local models don't have any special extra information with respect to biological research. What has to be restricted is using information that's already publicly known in the wrong ways.