20 ms·
Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab
- machinekob 4y agoGood for all of us maybe some good alternatives to colab will be created cause of that.
- JohnHaugeland 4y agowhy would any other company have the urge to do this?
- rslyr633 4y agoBecause nature abhors a vacuum, and this technology has created one.
- JohnHaugeland 4y agoIt turns out that nature doesn't make SAAS This is an extremely expensive service to make and run, requiring tens of millions of dollars of hardware to get started, and doesn't produce revenue Instead of folksy sayings, see if you can answer the actual question What motivation does another company have for creating this service?
- machinekob 4y agoMake people depends on ecosystem. I'll see AWS/Azure/NVIDIA doing smth like that as that just to create they own ecosystem as its extremely profitable to sell gpu VM's for them.
- visarga 4y agoI presume it's like Microsoft turning a blind eye to unlicensed use of Windows and Office for home users. When they get hired they already prefer MS solutions they know since they were students.
- JohnHaugeland 4y agoHave you ever used colab? It's free
- rslyr633 4y ago>What motivation does another company have for creating this service? They won't need to create this deepfake training specifically, they just need to turn a blind eye to their existing hardware being applied this way. Three motivations come to mind: 1. It's a convenient selling point to grow the user base. "We give you complete freedom to run your models and don't spy on you like the other guys do! We will never stop you from doing things unless the government forces us to!" 2. It's an easy way to frontrun criminal activity that is poised to disrupt society in the near future. Hire a CEO with a cool sounding hacker name, advertise on a bunch of telegram groups, while secretly logging all identifiers and making all inputs/outputs searchable by law enforcement :) 3. By owning the data used to train and generate Deepfakes, you have a rich dataset that could be used academically or for training counter-models to detect future Deepfakes.
- JohnHaugeland 4y agoI feel like you're completely missing the point of what I said 1. Not really 2. What? 3. No you don't
- loo 4y ago> turns out that nature doesn't make SAAS E pur si existit.
- JohnHaugeland 4y agoQuidquid Latin dictum sit does not, it turns out, altum sonatur
- humanistbot 4y agoThey already exist. The market for SAAS Jupyter is already crowded. Azure Notebooks, Github Codespaces, Kaggle Kernels, AWS SageMaker, CoCalc, Datalore, Binder...
- machinekob 4y agoNot even one is close to colab yet (first of google TPU is only way to access GPT-like models for most people, second you can get pretty neat GPU for few dollars when on other platforms you are paying a ton of money for that)
- nestorD 4y agoI really do not like that because the ban feels fuzzy. If you are a researcher exploring those algorithms and using Colab because you have very limited GPU access of you own, you might now be worried that your very own topic of research will get you banned from the ressource you are using.
- ethbr0 4y agoI'd assume they recognized this, which is why it's implemented as a warning rather than a ban. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the first step towards correlating "Are you the 1% using huge amounts of Colab time to only run deepfake models?" We'll see what the follow-up is, but at least the initial implementation seems less auto-ban-y than more mature Google services default to.
- humanistbot 4y agoIt's only banned for the free tier.
- rockemsockem 4y agoThis small fact makes a huge difference. A researcher can certainly afford colab's modestly priced pro tier.
- heavyset_go 4y agoCan anyone confirm that it works on their Pro tier and not just their Pro+ tier that costs 5x more a month?
- nmfisher 4y agoI’m putting down my pitchfork, this makes all the difference. That’s totally reasonable to stop people abusing a free service (to the detriment of everyone else). Same basket as banning crypto mining as far as I’m concerned.
- hugh-avherald 4y agoYour complaint appears to be "funding is a constraint on research".
- version_five 4y agoI have wondered in the past what kind of monitoring / data harvesting google is doing with colab. I don't use them for anything nontrivial or work related precisely because I worry about google stealing my stuff or that I would be violating agreements with my customers by exposing their data to google. This story reinforces that they are snooping. That aside, I don't think I find this too upsetting. They don't let people e.g. mine cryptocurrency either, I think it's fine that they limit how you can use their free (or cheap) "service".
- fartcannon 4y agoThey do all the harvesting. Everything they can. Every morsel of data they can get, they get. Same thing Microsoft does with Windows, github and VSCode. Just hoovering up all the ideas you have.
- endisneigh 4y agoif you can prove this you can make a lot of money
- fartcannon 4y agoOh yeah, how?
- endisneigh 4y agoClass action, violation of the Terms and Conditions. I'd honestly be shocked if Google/Microsoft are monitoring the clients of their public cloud and keeping the data to create their own products off of.
- fartcannon 4y agoPrepare to be shocked.
- 4y ago
- mark_l_watson 4y agoIt is their right to ban any use they want. Colab is an awesome service, so much so that I seldom use my at-home GPU rig. As consumers we can use or not use platforms like Google, Twitter, etc. as we like, or not. Colab’s ban will be good for small 3rd party GPU cloud providers and that is a good thing. Same thing with Twitter: in the last month there is now better material on Mastodon.
- DarylZero 4y ago
- edmundsauto 4y agoThis is not an appropriate response - it does not advance the conversation, and is clearly derogatory towards OP. Try to do better next time.
- nmilo 4y agoYes, that's how society works. If you use a service respectfully you get rewarded with the ability to keep using that service.
- DarylZero 4y agoSubservient lapdog attitude toward corporations is a modern thing not a generic property of "society."
- passivate 4y agoAnd the authors are using their rights to free expression to criticize Google. No rights have been taken away. So its all good.
- visarga 4y ago> Colab is an awesome service, so much so that I seldom use my at-home GPU rig. Can you use Colab from VSCode? Notebooks are great for exploration but not for complex projects.
- mupuff1234 4y agoThe article and headline are pretty misleading imo, the ban seems like it's only for the free tier. Edit: Actually, it's not really clear.
- Hard_Space 4y agoAt the bottom of the FAQ section[1] that bans deepfakes, it says 'Additional restrictions exist for paid users', not 'different restrictions'. [1] https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#limitations-and-restrictions https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#limitation...
- rockemsockem 4y agoBut if you click that link for "Additional Restrictions" there's nothing about deepfakes mentioned for pro. 3. Restrictions. In this Section 3, the phrase “you will not” means “you will not, will not attempt, and will not permit a third party to”. When you use the Paid Service, you will not: share your Google account password with someone else to allow them to access any Paid Service that the person did not order; access the Paid Service other than by means authorized by Google; copy, sell, rent, or sublicense the Paid Services to any third party; use the Paid Service as a general file-hosting or media-serving platform; engage in peer-to-peer file-sharing; or mine cryptocurrency.
- endisneigh 4y agofree colab. You can do it if you pay.
- whatever1 4y agoLol perfect timing for AWS https://studiolab.sagemaker.aws/ https://studiolab.sagemaker.aws/
- jakobov 4y agoThe regulation of ai begins
- thegreatdukd 4y agoOne thing I don't like is that they also banned SSH-ing to Colab, which means I can no longer remote SSH to VS Code and use Copilot on the stuff I am working on.
- dreamyfigment 4y agoI wonder if we'll end up in a future where gaming GPUs will be restricted from running ML algorithms, to prevent private individuals from running advanced deepfakes/DALLE-10 or whatever.
- merlinscholz 4y agoI mean Nvidia has already tried to do that with crypto mining
- angusturner 4y agoGood on them. As a researcher it is so disheartening when GPUs get hoovered up by people participating in proof of waste pyramid schemes. Likewise, if google decides it wants to preserve its service for students and researchers, then I hope that people chewing up resources for malicious/questionable use-cases are booted off.
- UmbertoNoEco 4y agoThat's a scary and realistic future. Any good (fiction or non-fiction) book on this? By "this" I mean governments trying to control overtly or secretly the use of computing resources. Bonus points if it is not Charlie Stross (I can't stand his writings).
- Method-X 4y agoThis is terrifying. If only a certain class of people has access to this technology (i.e. governments and huge tech companies), the temptation to use that technology to control the class of people who don't will be too much.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- est31 4y agoThere is this talk about the civil war on general purpose computing by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg He gave the same talk at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI It's slowly becoming reality.
- malcolmgreaves 4y agoGood! Deepfakes are going to be a massive problem for society going forward. Glad to see Google is at least recognizing it's responsibility as a compute platform here.
- rockemsockem 4y agoIt's only restricted on the free tier. Honestly they're probably finding that, like cryptocurrency miners, free tier deepfake users born burn lots of GPU time compared to others who might run a couple GPU tasks for a little while to get a few results or test things.
- orlp 4y agoThe results of GPT-3, Imagen, Github Copilot, etc, have shown me two things: 1. A critical part of AI that was missing no longer is: the model of our world. In natural language processing (more generally anything that interacts with humans) it has been an eternal issue that to understand sentences you must know the content, and therefore must, in theory, know 'everything' there is to our world and culture. As far as I'm concerned, the current large transformer models have captured this. There is genuine intelligence here, a lack of reasoning still but an abundance of knowledge. 2. We are entering a terrifying era of computing. The amount of resources needed to get the genuine AI above, are monstrous (at least with our current methods). Not only raw computing power, but also data. This means an unavoidable centralization and monopolization of something that I predict will be an essential component for human-computer interaction in the decades to come. What we're seeing here is a sign of (2). My prediction? Google and Facebook are here to stay. Their primary income right now is advertisement, I expect this to change over the next decade. Specifically these two companies are sitting on the biggest 'oil field' in modern history: an endless pipeline of modern human culture, ready to feed into ever larger models of our world.
- sinenomine 4y agoWhile I partially agree with the theses, one should note that in absolute terms the compute spent even on the largest models of their kind is still pretty tame, compared to SV software engineer salaries: you could train your own Imagen for ~200000$. This is pretty much kickstarter-tier, and not at the higher end of the distribution. The web-scale data is also available: we already have a dataset superior to one Imagen used: https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-multi-modal-datasets/ https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-mult... Instead of despairing, we should train capable models in the open, like BigScience does: https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/what-language-model-to-train-if-you-have-two-million-gpu-hours https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/what-language-model-t... and petition our governments to train & make available large models under permissive licenses, for the benefit of the public and small businesses. The big tech exceptionalism is overblown, you don't really need exotic engineering to train an LLM with Jax and a TPU pod, or whatever accelerator you managed to procure.
- alaricus 4y agoHow would such a ban even be enforced? This makes no sense?
- RandomThrow321 4y agoIt probably just gives them the grounds to justify a ban, if necessary.
- alaricus 4y agoAgree, this is probably the reason.
- sweetbitter 4y agoIf it's something that you think can be stopped, go ahead and try to stop it. Just know that you will be Open Sourced- even artificial general intelligence, when someday invented, will eventually have its design released in the clear.
- citizenpaul 4y agoThis more than anything really shows the weakness of the cloud pricing model. Cloud only makes sense for specific low/intermittent usage web based sites. Once you get into things like training data an other proccess intense workloads that need 100% gpu/cpu resource. The cloud provider is no longer interested in selling you their service. Self hosted infrastructure is dead, long live self hosted infrastructure...