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It’s interesting that these models are both massively expensive to produce and self-contained to a degree that you can distribute the end product in a torrent.
by pavlov 4y ago
It’s interesting that these models are both massively expensive to produce and self-contained to a degree that you can distribute the end product in a torrent.
This has not been the case for most commercial software for the past 20 years, during the cloud era. If you could steal a dump of random Facebook source code, it would be 99% useless because it’s so closely tied to the infrastructure. There’s almost nothing you could usefully run on your own PC or server VM.
But these ML models are like neutron stars of computation density. You can’t really peek inside to see what’s going on either. An unknown stolen model’s properties would need to be discovered by experimentation.
- heap_perms 4y ago> are like neutron stars of computation density I really like that expression.
- seydor 4y ago> massively expensive to produce and self-contained to a degree that you can distribute the end product in a torrent. So, like movies or software
- phyalow 4y agoOr Microsoft Office...
- justinclift 4y agoOr Linux distro's.
- bayindirh 4y agoOr BSD distros.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoThese are actually trivial and silly examples. The bulk of really valuable commercial code is not self contained or portable like those. Where is the torrent with a runnable copy of paypal, or amazon?
- bayindirh 4y agoI guess you have never compiled a Linux/BSD distribution from scratch and supported it alongside its infrastructure and lead its maintenance process. Even without that, if you want downloadable and runnable software platforms, look to public Git repositories. Some of the people who have no financial motivation will release what they do alongside installation procedures and quality of life scripts and architecture documentation. Most of the open source platforms doesn't publish this documentation and doesn't make installation easy to keep a sizeable moat and protect the platform they have developed, hence this is why we have a division between "Free Software" and "Open Source". In short, "The bulk of really valuable commercial code" is self contained, but not open source, or if open source it's not Free Software and made deployable for other parties. Otherwise it loses monetary value in the eyes of the people who develop that for the monies. Otherwise we have have Elasticsearch incident, where they pivot and move to "Source Available" model to protect their castle.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago"I guess you have never compiled a Linux/BSD distribution from scratch" You guess, and so perhaps do other things as well, with poor acuity. The incalculable value of open source software has approximately no bearing on this assertion. Yes I love linux and bsd too I'm not defacing your religion. I'm actually quite Stallmanesque in making my own life harder by only using ooen source software as much as possible and being super fun a family gatherings talking about it. You sure nailed that one.
- bayindirh 4y agoNice, it makes us two tech leads then.
- candiddevmike 4y agoOr a car
- moffkalast 4y agoBut you wouldn't download one. Would you?!?
- Vrondi 4y agoNot yet.
- moffkalast 4y agoIt's treason then.
- seydor 4y agoWhere s the download link?
- koheripbal 4y agoOr a copy of Windows or Office source code.
- gambiting 4y agoI don't think that's right - even if you had the full source code for either of those, it's extremely unlikely you'd be able to build them on your own machine.
- ddulaney 4y agoBuilding them would be a challenge, but definitely not an insurmountable one. I’ve worked on a couple of C++ projects at a similar scale to Windows (millions of LOC) and the build systems were a major pain. But a determined engineer with the readme file and no other help could get it building in a week or so. (This probably says more about how hard it is to build C++ than anything else)
- DownGoat 4y agoI don't really think it is a language ting, just more of a project size thing.
- willy_k 4y agoWell, it kind of is a language thing. Many newer languages (Rust and Go come to mind) are much more consistent in the way you interact with them as your project scales.
- furyofantares 4y agoSome years ago someone that worked at Microsoft told me he didn't think any individual engineer who already works on Windows could ever get Windows building by themselves with just the code.
- varispeed 4y ago
- londons_explore 4y agoIf you were to steal a chunk of source code or a binary from meta/Google, you could probably get it running inside a few weeks effort. Sure, the binary probably depends on a lot of internal proprietary infrastructure, but also most of that infrastructure is easy to write a mock implementation of, as long as you are happy for it to be in-ram, not multi-homed and don't need it to scale to billions of users. Most of the binaries have a standalone mode for running on a developers PC with few/no dependencies anyway.
- asah 4y ago-1: as an ex-googler, I can say it was hard enough for Google itself to get its code to run, given gonzo infrastructure assumptions, proprietary libraries/languages, etc.
- rowanG077 4y agoThat speaks volumes of the code quality @ Google.
- asah 4y agosorry, but that's not how code works. It's true that code quality could be terrible but in fact Google is famous/notorious for extreme code review at the line-by-line granularity, plus comments, design docs and more. The real issues are (again) in dependencies and complex tooling. You can have beautiful code and then in the middle of it, an ML inference call that assumes a crazy ML model and set of hardware to run it on.
- rowanG077 4y ago[flagged]
- owkman 4y agoAssume you got source for a game written in a proprietary game engine. If you don't have access to the game engine itself, nor the API documentation, etc, how long will it take to get this game running in your manner of choosing? The infrastructure in these companies is a huge amount of scaffolding that's non-trivial to replicate.
- krisoft 4y ago> It’s interesting that these models are both massively expensive to produce and self-contained to a degree that you can distribute the end product in a torrent. I was trying to come to grasp with how much resource there is concentrated in one of these models. Somehow I come to the conclusion that it cost more than buying a jet airliner to train one of these models. And it is about the same order of money as commissioning and building a skyscraper in Manhattan. Is that correct approximately?
- sva_ 4y agoThe crazy thing is that all these models are just one local minimum, out of a staggering (unknown?!) number of such points on the plane.
- basch 4y ago“Brute forcing a really inefficient approximation/estimator” is a good way to summarize it. It’s like having an overfit equation to a sample of data points, instead of the simpler actual line they fall near. They end up being black boxes, we have almost no idea how they work inside, and we have no idea how overtrained they are when something simpler could do the same thing.
- kir-gadjello 4y agoCan "something simpler", for example, code correct function bodies from comments describing functions in natural language? I think people are too quick to dismiss the power of these models.
- basch 4y agoI am by no means dismissing the power. They are created very chaotically, however. Spaghetti thrown at a wall. They are brute force approximations. They are wasteful. If LLaMa 13B is as powerful as previous 65B models, that's a significant amount of unnecessary paramaters lost/pruned in just this iterative upgrade alone. How small can they go? The fewest parameters that get the job done 99% as well is the way to go. There is also the difference between the rules and use of language being directly compressed into the model, vs all the information known to humans compressed into the model. A smaller model that ingests relevant information on the fly (more like Bing, that supplements itself with search), may be less wasteful and perform better. The current models being released are chosen because "they work" not because they are least fit and most performant optimized.
- spencerchubb 4y agoI fail to see how this is different from other software in that regard. If you have parameters but not the network architecture, then it's not very useful.
- renonce 4y agoYou do need to guess things like activation functions, number of attention heads, order of attention layers, etc. Often the parameter names reveal something about these.
- version_five 4y agoFinding a sha256 hash with N leading zeros is basically arbitrarily computationally expensive but could be written on a piece of paper. I don't see training an ML model as an egregious example of concentrating compute power
- greggsy 4y agoIt’s not the power they’re referring to, it’s the density of information and effort that went into its creation.
- version_five 4y agoBut these ML models are like neutron stars of computation density I guess I interpreted that differently
- TomSwirly 4y ago"The osmium of computational density" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
- brookst 4y agoYour SHA256 hash won’t be able to summarize text, write poems, or make up plots for books. The crazy thing about these models is that the compute power going into them is at least somewhat reversible.
- nerpderp82 4y agoAre you saying they are like compact memoizers? What Stable Diffusion can fit into that model is amazing.
- brookst 4y agoCertainly they retain not just information but compute capacity in a way that other expensive transformations don’t. I’m hard pressed to think of another example where compute spend now can be banked and used to reduce compute requirements later. Rainbow tables maybe? But they’re much less general purpose.
- IceHegel 4y agoThis is a great comment.
- joseph_grobbles 4y ago(My posts are dead by default, but for the good showdead people if someone knows and can answer in a sibling reply) Are models like this copyrightable? It seems like this falls under the realm of "fact", which can't be copyrighted.
- shagie 4y agoUnder Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. ... it gets tricky. From Wikipedia: > The ruling of the court was written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. It examined the purpose of copyright and explained the standard of copyrightability as based on originality. > The case centered on two well-established principles in United States copyright law: that facts are not copyrightable, and that compilations of facts can be. > "There is an undeniable tension between these two propositions", O'Connor wrote in her opinion. "Many compilations consist of nothing but raw data—i.e. wholly factual information not accompanied by any original expression. On what basis may one claim a copyright upon such work? Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. … The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable: The ″Sine qua non of copyright is originality." > ... > The standard for creativity is extremely low. It need not be novel; it need only possess a "spark" or "minimal degree" of creativity to be protected by copyright. > In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor wrote that copyright can apply only to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc.—not to the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange it, it would destroy the copyright owned in the data. "Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement", she wrote. > The court held that Rural's directory was nothing more than an alphabetic list of all subscribers to its service, which it was required to compile under law, and that no creative expression was involved. That Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed. --- And so, my (I am not a lawyer) take on this is that the numbers of the model are not copyrightable. The selection of the source material is... kind of. This gets into a "a recipe is not copyrightable, yet a recipe book is" The model may, however, be a trade secret. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret )
- m3kw9 4y agoThe config itself would be enough to lock anyone out
- Vrondi 4y agoWhole new vistas open up to possible retaliation for piracy. Imagine how a bootlegged AI could have been set up to not just steal your info but manipulate you into ruining your life as revenge for bootlegging it...
- starkd 4y agoIs the current model capable of updating itself? Or will the user be fed answers from a static model that never learns anything new?
- great_psy 4y agoYou now have the ability to teach it new things. Given you have the compute resources
- mcbuilder 4y agoI don't know about about this model, but usually with these ML models you download the static weights, but nothing is stopping you from fine tuning them to your needs/new information. It's not automatic, would require some ML Engineering, but nothing is stopping you if you have the Pytorch graph and weights.
- shultays 4y agoI mean the answer to the life is 42 but it took 7.5 million years for an advanced alien tech computer with the size of a building to calculate that /s Calculating things takes time and unrelated to output size. There are NP problems that simply outputs true or false yet requires more computational power than the universe can support
- btbuildem 4y agoIt also does require formidable infra to just run these giant models. I wonder if now-useless crypto mining farms could be repurposed.
- adam_arthur 4y agoWhich is why it will be very difficult to monetize them with similar margins to SaaS era businesses. The bar to competition is far lower, as already evidenced by the plethora of AI products being put forward. Its a race to the bottom on pricing
- tudorw 4y agois there an ai to fuzz 'alien' models and map their 'reactions' yet?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cvccvroomvroom 4y agoHow are they produced? There's an ass ton of hardware that might otherwise be idle.