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it sounds like your concept of the fear isn't AI comes and destroys us all like a lot of people fear, but rather huge corporate walls only increasing the dispar

by volkk 4y ago

it sounds like your concept of the fear isn't AI comes and destroys us all like a lot of people fear, but rather huge corporate walls only increasing the disparity between the weak and the powerful, hoarding this stuff to themselves. I agree with this take and to me that is the most realistic. We desperately need OSS LLMs and democratic access to all of this goodness that AI will bring. I dont want black box subscriptions

ok_dad 4y ago
My fear is that they actually succeed in creating AGI and us plebes are no longer required. Do people actually think that AGI will herald a new era for humanity like in Star Trek? No, the wealthy and powerful will just eliminate the worker class.
- volkk 4y ago
  its definitely the darker timeline. i do think its unrealistic unless there are certain ways to protect themselves from uprisings/revolutions. unless they build a castle in the sky hovering in LEO or AGI builds sentries, that will be unlikely. i imagine the more likely scenario is systemic injustices that aren't as obvious but carefully controlled to keep the workers "happy enough." kind of similar to today's age, except there is some tiny percentage of chance to become rich, whereas in the future it will be literally zero with a thin veil of hope
  - rurp 4y ago
    To add to your point, surveillance is a key component in such a system, since "undesireble" behavior can quickly be detected and punished. The current zero-privacy interfaces are a huge step in the wrong direction.
- satisfice 4y ago
  This is my fan theory of The Terminator: that the machines never took over. They worked for billionaires and the billionaires wanted the rest of humanity to THINK the machines had taken over.
sacred_numbers 4y ago
It's unlikely that OSS LLMs will ever be able to compete with corporate LLMs. I can only think of a few scenarios where this could work: 1. Someone develops a procedure for training models with distributed computing resources, including consumer CPUs and GPUs. Even this is not really guaranteed to work, since corporations will probably just buy up all the consumer GPUs, since they are cheaper on a FLOPS/$ metric. 2. One or more governments provide a lot of funding for OSS models, including being willing to pay competitive salaries for the best talent (potentially millions of dollars per year). This is unlikely for a lot of reasons. The only thing that could speed up the process enough to compete with private organizations is a major war that required AI to win. In that case, though, open source would be the least of their concern. 3. Scaling laws stop working and Moore's law catches up. In that case adding more compute won't really help and eventually even organizations with small budgets can afford to train a SOTA LLM. We can't know until we find the limit, but we haven't hit the limit of scaling laws so far, despite scaling up massively over the last few years, so I doubt we will find the limit any time soon. 4. A bunch of corporations that have no hope of reaching first place decide to combine their resources to beat OpenAI and thus prevent a monopoly. I'm not sure if there is precedent, but even if there is, that would still require a lot of coordination and resources for little direct monetary gain. We'll see what happens, but I'm not really confident about any of these possibilities.
polishdude20 4y ago
I think this is inherent to the technology itself. It's a black box the owners can tweak but the users cannot and the users are expected to trust it at face value. It's the idea of going to a corporate entity's black box in order to know how to live. It's a blind trust that is truly blind.

by volkk 4y ago

ok_dad 4y ago

My fear is that they actually succeed in creating AGI and us plebes are no longer required. Do people actually think that AGI will herald a new era for humanity like in Star Trek? No, the wealthy and powerful will just eliminate the worker class.

volkk 4y ago
its definitely the darker timeline. i do think its unrealistic unless there are certain ways to protect themselves from uprisings/revolutions. unless they build a castle in the sky hovering in LEO or AGI builds sentries, that will be unlikely. i imagine the more likely scenario is systemic injustices that aren't as obvious but carefully controlled to keep the workers "happy enough." kind of similar to today's age, except there is some tiny percentage of chance to become rich, whereas in the future it will be literally zero with a thin veil of hope
- rurp 4y ago
  To add to your point, surveillance is a key component in such a system, since "undesireble" behavior can quickly be detected and punished. The current zero-privacy interfaces are a huge step in the wrong direction.
satisfice 4y ago
This is my fan theory of The Terminator: that the machines never took over. They worked for billionaires and the billionaires wanted the rest of humanity to THINK the machines had taken over.

sacred_numbers 4y ago

It's unlikely that OSS LLMs will ever be able to compete with corporate LLMs. I can only think of a few scenarios where this could work: 1. Someone develops a procedure for training models with distributed computing resources, including consumer CPUs and GPUs. Even this is not really guaranteed to work, since corporations will probably just buy up all the consumer GPUs, since they are cheaper on a FLOPS/$ metric. 2. One or more governments provide a lot of funding for OSS models, including being willing to pay competitive salaries for the best talent (potentially millions of dollars per year). This is unlikely for a lot of reasons. The only thing that could speed up the process enough to compete with private organizations is a major war that required AI to win. In that case, though, open source would be the least of their concern. 3. Scaling laws stop working and Moore's law catches up. In that case adding more compute won't really help and eventually even organizations with small budgets can afford to train a SOTA LLM. We can't know until we find the limit, but we haven't hit the limit of scaling laws so far, despite scaling up massively over the last few years, so I doubt we will find the limit any time soon. 4. A bunch of corporations that have no hope of reaching first place decide to combine their resources to beat OpenAI and thus prevent a monopoly. I'm not sure if there is precedent, but even if there is, that would still require a lot of coordination and resources for little direct monetary gain. We'll see what happens, but I'm not really confident about any of these possibilities.

polishdude20 4y ago

I think this is inherent to the technology itself. It's a black box the owners can tweak but the users cannot and the users are expected to trust it at face value. It's the idea of going to a corporate entity's black box in order to know how to live. It's a blind trust that is truly blind.