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One of the things I'm/we're thinking through is how to do this in a way that’s participatory rather than extractive. It's not necessary that what scientists would choose to automate with agents is the same as what a company trying to automate scientists would choose.

If we can help people automate drudgery while giving them a real say in what gets built and control over how their work is used, I think there’s a possibility of a much better outcome than the current trajectory. I’m not sure we’re in that world, but I think we should try.

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They're already kinda protected, open weight releases rarely come with datasets, especially post-training datasets. NVIDIA is probably the exception.

I also wonder when the NSA starts sharing their wiretaps/etc with labs for 'national security'. Probably already happening, to be honest.

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> I also wonder when the NSA starts sharing their wiretaps/etc with labs for 'national security'.

What would this benefit the NSA? If they share wiretap records with labs such as Anthropic, then suddenly anyone who can jailbreak a model gets access to this data. You don't need to train a model on data to understand or interpret it, as far as I know - providing others (esp. AI labs) with sensitive data is a breach of security, or I am not understanding.

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Wrong direction. NSA says “give us the weights to Fable and loan us some engineers who can get a TS-SCI clearance so we can train our own model in house, if you don’t well just take them, in fact maybe we already did, it’s for national security”.
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No, NSA programs are not SCI, haven't been for a few years. They are SAP.

NSA doesn't have to post train Fable. Maven works well enough and that same infra. can be used for Fable. I imagine that's what's going to happen in 2 years once the current admin. moves out.

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I'm not sure I'll do it justice, but one of the general ideas behind open-model initiatives is that the economic impacts of specialized post-training are a fait accompli. OpenAI and Anthropic have spent $many-millions procuring closed posttraining data.

The relevant question here is whether you want open-weight models — projects like Open Athena — to remain or become competitive in the same range of specialties.

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