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The AI safety ninnies as you call them are not scared and neither do they buy into the narrative. They are the investors of large proprietary AI companies who

by gmerc 3y ago

The AI safety ninnies as you call them are not scared and neither do they buy into the narrative. They are the investors of large proprietary AI companies who are facing massive revenue loss primarily due to Mark Zuckerbergs decision to give away a competitive LLM to open source in a classic “if I can’t make money from this model, I can still use it to take away money from my competition” move - arming the rebels to degrade his opponents and kickstarting competitive LLM development that is now a serious threat. It’s a logical asymmetric warfare move in a business environment where there is no blue ocean anymore between big companies and degrading your opponents valuation and investment means depriving them of means to attack you. (There’s a fun irony here where Apples incentives are very much aligned now - on device compute maintains Appstore value, privacy narrative and allows you to continue selling expensive phones - things a web/api world could threaten) The damage is massive, the world overnight changed narrative from “future value creation is going to be in openai/google/anthropic cloud apis and only there” to a much more murky world. The bottom has fallen out and with it billions of revenue these companies could have made and an attached investor narrative. Make no mistake, these people screaming bloody murder about risks are shrewd lobbyists, not woke progressives, they are aligning their narrative with the general desires of control and war on open computing - the successor narrative of the end to end encryption battle currently fought in the EU will be AI safety. I am willing to bet hard money that “omg someone made CSAM with AI using faceswap” will be the next thrust to end general purpose compute. An the next stage of the war will be brutal because both big tech and big content have much to lose if these capabilities are out in the open The cost of alignment tax and the massive loss of potential value makes there lobbying world tour by sam altman an aggressive push trying to convince nations that the best way to deal with scary AI risks (as told on OpenAI bedtime stories) is to regulate it China Style - through a few pliant monopolists who guarantee “safety” in exchange for protection from open source competition. There’s a pretty enlightening expose [1] on how heavily US lobbyists have had their hand in the EU bill to spy on end to end encryption that the commission is mulling - this ain’t a new thing, it’s how the game is played and framing the people who push the narrative as “ninnies” who are “scared” just buys into culture war framing. [1] https://fortune.com/2023/09/26/thorn-ashton-kutcher-ylva-johansson-csam-csa-regulation-european-commission-encryption-privacy-surveillance/amp/ https://fortune.com/2023/09/26/thorn-ashton-kutcher-ylva-joh...

garba_dlm 3y ago
such bullshit: to regard a loss of a "potential" as a realized actualized loss....
- gmerc 3y ago
  It’s a direct degradation of investor narrative at a time when money is much tighter. Nobody says it’s realized loss, that’s not how valuation works. But Google LRP involves, as one of the first steps, the question of how much money will be allocated to investors (currently with stock buybacks) before other investment decisions, so yes, attacking valuation directly attacks the purse available for aggressive business moves and L&D.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > It’s a direct degradation of investor narrative at a time when money is much tighter. Uh, no? The investor narrative of "giving away free AI shit" has been in-effect since Pytorch dropped a half-decade ago. If you're a Meta investor disappointed by public AI development, you really must not have done your homework.
    - gmerc 3y ago
      That’s not the investor narrative. The investor narrative is choking the competition out of the market and then squeeze the shit out of people. As we see right now in this season of enshittification. That happens to not work anymore because open source sets a price floor at which people will adopt the alternative. The investor narrative is always about building a monopoly. Damaging the investor narrative to your most direct competitor is building in a saturated ad market is an effective indirect attack.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > The investor narrative is always about building a monopoly. Can you point out how Meta has been applying this philosophy to AI? Given their history of open research, model weights releases and competitive alternative platforms, I struggle to envision their ideal monopoly. You claim that openness is a hostility tactic, but I think Llama wouldn't be public if it was intended to "kill" the other LLMs. What we've gotten from Meta is more than we've gotten out of companies that should be writing society software, like Microsoft and Apple.

by gmerc 3y ago

garba_dlm 3y ago

such bullshit: to regard a loss of a "potential" as a realized actualized loss....

gmerc 3y ago
It’s a direct degradation of investor narrative at a time when money is much tighter. Nobody says it’s realized loss, that’s not how valuation works. But Google LRP involves, as one of the first steps, the question of how much money will be allocated to investors (currently with stock buybacks) before other investment decisions, so yes, attacking valuation directly attacks the purse available for aggressive business moves and L&D.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > It’s a direct degradation of investor narrative at a time when money is much tighter. Uh, no? The investor narrative of "giving away free AI shit" has been in-effect since Pytorch dropped a half-decade ago. If you're a Meta investor disappointed by public AI development, you really must not have done your homework.
  - gmerc 3y ago
    That’s not the investor narrative. The investor narrative is choking the competition out of the market and then squeeze the shit out of people. As we see right now in this season of enshittification. That happens to not work anymore because open source sets a price floor at which people will adopt the alternative. The investor narrative is always about building a monopoly. Damaging the investor narrative to your most direct competitor is building in a saturated ad market is an effective indirect attack.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > The investor narrative is always about building a monopoly. Can you point out how Meta has been applying this philosophy to AI? Given their history of open research, model weights releases and competitive alternative platforms, I struggle to envision their ideal monopoly. You claim that openness is a hostility tactic, but I think Llama wouldn't be public if it was intended to "kill" the other LLMs. What we've gotten from Meta is more than we've gotten out of companies that should be writing society software, like Microsoft and Apple.