4 ms·

> I can't understand the mindset I can. None of this tech will maintain Google as the chokepoint of internet and make billions for them. You can download and r

> I can't understand the mindset I can. None of this tech will maintain Google as the chokepoint of internet and make billions for them. You can download and run a LLaMA or Mistral but can't download a Google. On-topic information has been commoditised. Even OpenAI is in a bad spot. They owned the whole LLM mountain in 2020, now they only own the peaks. Almost the whole mountain has been conquered by open models. Their area of supremacy is shrinking by the day. The two factors at play here are 1. ability to run LLMs locally and 2. ability to improve local LLMs with data exfiltrated from SOTA LLMs. I foresee an era of increased privacy as a consequence of this. We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk and override Google, Twitter and FB. Bad news for ad providers, they got to move into some other profitable line of business now. Nobody got time to read garbage and ads.

lobochrome 3y ago
Powerful vision! Thank you.
dustingetz 3y ago
is there a strongly written essay or paper arguing this viewpoint?
- visarga 3y ago
  the original: "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
esperent 3y ago
> We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk and override Google, Twitter and FB I cannot wait for the day where I can create a list of blocked terms "Musk, Trump, American politics, ..." and have an intelligent LLM filter so that it doesn't matter what site I visit, whether The Verge, or The Guardian, or Reddit, all articles or posts related to these terms will be gone. I think this has a chance to have a far higher effect than just ad tech. It's going to effect all media publishers. But I also expect them, led by Google and Facebook, to fight this tooth and nail with every dirty trick they can.
- xalava 3y ago
  You may achieve this by only visiting websites or pages with tailored feeds. The problem is that it requires a bit of self discipline. Google and Meta are probably safe then...
  - esperent 3y ago
    What websites are you talking about? I do use a feed reader already but it's not good for discovering new things. The problem is when I venture out to discover what's going on in the world I'm deluged with Musk spam. A couple of years ago it was Trump spam.
    - xalava 3y ago
      Agreed. I use - A feed reader with multiple sources - On X, I started by muting words and accounts. I now only watch one highly curated list - Here - podcasts - Engaging with relevant people directly I'm sometimes a bit late on new trends, but I spend more time on long forms and reinforce a meaningful network in the process.
- kubrickslair 3y ago
  We started work on an open-source LLM-powered media filter at OpenLocus (https://github.com/openlocus https://github.com/openlocus), aiming for an alpha release by late 2023. In the more medium term we are collaborating on improving information overload, filter bubbles & misinformation with labs at AllenAI, CMU, UPenn & Utah. Contributions and feedback are welcome! Feel free to hit me up for an early access - email in the profile.
- eganist 3y ago
  Explains why Google tried (or is trying) so hard to push WEI though. If they can't programmatically evade adblockers, might as well programmatically prevent them.
- devxpy 3y ago
  I’ve just the thing for you my friend https://github.com/devxpy/anti-chatgpt https://github.com/devxpy/anti-chatgpt
quickthrower2 3y ago
Right now GPT4 is useful/powerful and probably anything else sucks. That may change but the mountain has real value at the top only. At least for chat used for either human assist or decision making or code generation. Categorisation, yeah you can use lesser LLMs.
- npsomaratna 3y ago
  Not necessarily true anymore. As a counterexample, consider CodeLlama 33b, which is quite good (and which has replaced GPT-4 for my coding assistant needs). OpenAI's models are likely to remain the best, but I see open models catching up and becoming "good enough." Why pay for GPT-4 when I can run a model locally for free? (Barring the initial capital cost of a GPU; and not even this if you're, say, using a Macbook)
  - revoxx3 3y ago
    What's CodeLlama 33b? I couldn't find anything regarding it online
    - jsemrau 3y ago
      I guess its a typo https://huggingface.co/codellama/CodeLlama-34b-hf https://huggingface.co/codellama/CodeLlama-34b-hf
      - bingemaker 3y ago
        Off by 1B error
        jsemrau 3y ago
        ^-^
        quickthrower2 3y ago
        Just a 1B mistake
kubrickslair 3y ago
> We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk and override Google, Twitter and FB ... Nobody got time to read garbage and ads. Exactly, there is a paradox that is getting more extreme by the day - that social media (and the broader web) is a wellspring of knowledge, yet also a vortex of addiction, filter bubbles & lost productivity. I want one without the other. This pushed me to start building open source at OpenLocus, contributions & feedback are welcome - details in other comment.
dividedbyzero 3y ago
Isn't Microsoft deeply integrating those peaks into Windows and Office? That's one hell of a moat.
- peanuty1 3y ago
  Microsoft is also integrating ChatGPT into Bing.
qiine 3y ago
"I foresee an era of increased privacy as a consequence of this. We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs" I am contemplating feeding Firefox extensions code to AI to detect possible malicious behaviors quickly.
staunton 3y ago
Does anyone know vision models that detect ads? I wasn't able to find any, which is kind of surprising... That sounds like an armsrace that would exist.
- petemir 3y ago
  There are some sparse examples https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.08.210 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.08.210 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1811.04115 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1811.04115 https://doi.org/10.3390/s20164587 https://doi.org/10.3390/s20164587
- zo1 3y ago
  It won't work as long as you have HTTPS preventing any large scale interception and analysis of traffic. This is why Google was so quick to promote and switch to HTTPS. I bet you my left nut right now there is some random ex Googler with an NDA and interesting story to tell about this topic. It pretty much means you have to detect the ad locally. And by then you've already lost and transferred it down at least.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  I tried something not dissimilar, but without AI models: having webpages rendered in a real browser, but "headless". But there was really no way for the webpage to detect it was "headless": I'd render in a real browser, in an actual X session, under Xephyr. And I wouldn't be showing that Xephyr X server (so I wouldn't see what that real browser was rendering). I'd then put gray rectangles on what where ads and only show visually that, with the grey rectangles, after having covered the ads with gray rectangles. I just did it as some quick proof-of-concept: there are plenty different ways to do this but I liked that one. It's not dissimilar to services that renders a webpage on x different devices, without you needing to open that webpage on all these devices. But the issue is that while it's relatively easy to get rid of ads, it's near impossible to get rid of submarine articles/blogs and it's getting harder and harder by the day to get rid of all the pointless webpages generated by ChatGPT or other LLMs that are flooding the web. Meanwhile sticking to the sites I know (Wikipedia / HN / used car sales websites / a few forums I frequent etc.) and running a DNS locally that blocks hundreds of thousands of domains (and entire countries) is quite effective (I run unbound, which I like a lot for it's got many features and can block domains/subdomains using wildcards). I'm pretty sure detecting and covering ads before displaying a webpage can be done but I'd say the bigger problem is submarines and overall terribly poor quality LLM generated webpages. So basically: is it even worth it to detect ads while the web has now got a much bigger problem than ads?
beepbooptheory 3y ago
But how can we possibly be this optimistic though? Like, time and time again there are these little glimmers of fantasy that some technology alone can alleviate the heinous/annoying parts of a mature capitalism, and every time the technology has ended up, after all is said and done, on the other side (so to speak). Like, go back and read old mailing lists. See how everyone was so assured that computers themselves, then cryptography, then the modern internet, would create radical changes in the way the economy works, and enable avenues for greater self-determination and happiness. They all seem so naive in retrospect, knowing what we know and how it all played out. I love that so many people are these days inspired by the llm tech to imagine a better world with them, and its important in itself to inspired like this. But precedence does not favor putting all your hopes in solely the technology itself for a better world. Hope I am wrong though!
- visarga 3y ago
  It will undoubtedly be a turbulent time. All the skills and knowledge expressed in text or images is compressed into models. And these models offer back all they know to each of us according to our needs. Learning from everyone indiscriminately, serving everyone specifically, open sourcing skills and knowledge to a much deeper degree than open source had on software. This will have social implications, it will speed up the learning process of any new technology. For example by upgrading Copilot, Github can upgrade coding practices everywhere (where it's used) to new coding standards instead of taking years, that's how fast it can go. On another line of thinking, an image-language-action model can be used to control robots, and robot hardware is getting accessible. There is a chance for inventing self reliance automation for people, a possible solution to job loss.
  - beepbooptheory 3y ago
    Right, there are lots of things it could do, but the point is that these capabilities, or rather this potential, is merely necessary but not sufficient for actually following through with those nice things. It doesn't matter what it can do when there is a truly scary amount of power and interest directed towards, e.g., making sure job loss (or unemployment in general) doesn't change too much. They'll make these things illegal before they'd let it get even close to messing something like that up! There are already so many innovations and pieces of technology that could be helping instead of hurting. It should seem clear that the sheer capability of something could never be enough to change the state of affairs alone. Sure the printing press was critical, but there was also a whole lot of blood shed and tumultuous times before the enlightened subject of the printing press could enjoy their new class and literacy.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I agree heartily with you. OpenAI may be the best, but the open models are getting good. A weak analogy: as you might take a hybrid cloud/local compute strategy, I think it makes sense to be very flexible and use LLMs from different sources for diversity and not getting locked in. I mostly use OpenAI, but I am constantly experimenting with options. Local options are most exciting to me right now. I usually use APIs, but OpenAI’s app that supports multi modal input images and voice conversation is impressive and points to a future mode of human computer interactions. Exciting times!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lobochrome 3y ago

Powerful vision! Thank you.

dustingetz 3y ago

is there a strongly written essay or paper arguing this viewpoint?

visarga 3y ago
the original: "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

esperent 3y ago

> We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk and override Google, Twitter and FB I cannot wait for the day where I can create a list of blocked terms "Musk, Trump, American politics, ..." and have an intelligent LLM filter so that it doesn't matter what site I visit, whether The Verge, or The Guardian, or Reddit, all articles or posts related to these terms will be gone. I think this has a chance to have a far higher effect than just ad tech. It's going to effect all media publishers. But I also expect them, led by Google and Facebook, to fight this tooth and nail with every dirty trick they can.

xalava 3y ago
You may achieve this by only visiting websites or pages with tailored feeds. The problem is that it requires a bit of self discipline. Google and Meta are probably safe then...
- esperent 3y ago
  What websites are you talking about? I do use a feed reader already but it's not good for discovering new things. The problem is when I venture out to discover what's going on in the world I'm deluged with Musk spam. A couple of years ago it was Trump spam.
  - xalava 3y ago
    Agreed. I use - A feed reader with multiple sources - On X, I started by muting words and accounts. I now only watch one highly curated list - Here - podcasts - Engaging with relevant people directly I'm sometimes a bit late on new trends, but I spend more time on long forms and reinforce a meaningful network in the process.
kubrickslair 3y ago
We started work on an open-source LLM-powered media filter at OpenLocus (https://github.com/openlocus https://github.com/openlocus), aiming for an alpha release by late 2023. In the more medium term we are collaborating on improving information overload, filter bubbles & misinformation with labs at AllenAI, CMU, UPenn & Utah. Contributions and feedback are welcome! Feel free to hit me up for an early access - email in the profile.
eganist 3y ago
Explains why Google tried (or is trying) so hard to push WEI though. If they can't programmatically evade adblockers, might as well programmatically prevent them.
devxpy 3y ago
I’ve just the thing for you my friend https://github.com/devxpy/anti-chatgpt https://github.com/devxpy/anti-chatgpt

quickthrower2 3y ago

Right now GPT4 is useful/powerful and probably anything else sucks. That may change but the mountain has real value at the top only. At least for chat used for either human assist or decision making or code generation. Categorisation, yeah you can use lesser LLMs.

npsomaratna 3y ago
Not necessarily true anymore. As a counterexample, consider CodeLlama 33b, which is quite good (and which has replaced GPT-4 for my coding assistant needs). OpenAI's models are likely to remain the best, but I see open models catching up and becoming "good enough." Why pay for GPT-4 when I can run a model locally for free? (Barring the initial capital cost of a GPU; and not even this if you're, say, using a Macbook)
- revoxx3 3y ago
  What's CodeLlama 33b? I couldn't find anything regarding it online
  - jsemrau 3y ago
    I guess its a typo https://huggingface.co/codellama/CodeLlama-34b-hf https://huggingface.co/codellama/CodeLlama-34b-hf
    - bingemaker 3y ago
      Off by 1B error
      - jsemrau 3y ago
        ^-^
      - quickthrower2 3y ago
        Just a 1B mistake

kubrickslair 3y ago

> We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs to remove junk and override Google, Twitter and FB ... Nobody got time to read garbage and ads. Exactly, there is a paradox that is getting more extreme by the day - that social media (and the broader web) is a wellspring of knowledge, yet also a vortex of addiction, filter bubbles & lost productivity. I want one without the other. This pushed me to start building open source at OpenLocus, contributions & feedback are welcome - details in other comment.

dividedbyzero 3y ago

Isn't Microsoft deeply integrating those peaks into Windows and Office? That's one hell of a moat.

peanuty1 3y ago
Microsoft is also integrating ChatGPT into Bing.

qiine 3y ago

"I foresee an era of increased privacy as a consequence of this. We will be filtering our browsers with LLMs" I am contemplating feeding Firefox extensions code to AI to detect possible malicious behaviors quickly.

staunton 3y ago

Does anyone know vision models that detect ads? I wasn't able to find any, which is kind of surprising... That sounds like an armsrace that would exist.

petemir 3y ago
There are some sparse examples https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.08.210 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.08.210 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1811.04115 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1811.04115 https://doi.org/10.3390/s20164587 https://doi.org/10.3390/s20164587
zo1 3y ago
It won't work as long as you have HTTPS preventing any large scale interception and analysis of traffic. This is why Google was so quick to promote and switch to HTTPS. I bet you my left nut right now there is some random ex Googler with an NDA and interesting story to tell about this topic. It pretty much means you have to detect the ad locally. And by then you've already lost and transferred it down at least.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
I tried something not dissimilar, but without AI models: having webpages rendered in a real browser, but "headless". But there was really no way for the webpage to detect it was "headless": I'd render in a real browser, in an actual X session, under Xephyr. And I wouldn't be showing that Xephyr X server (so I wouldn't see what that real browser was rendering). I'd then put gray rectangles on what where ads and only show visually that, with the grey rectangles, after having covered the ads with gray rectangles. I just did it as some quick proof-of-concept: there are plenty different ways to do this but I liked that one. It's not dissimilar to services that renders a webpage on x different devices, without you needing to open that webpage on all these devices. But the issue is that while it's relatively easy to get rid of ads, it's near impossible to get rid of submarine articles/blogs and it's getting harder and harder by the day to get rid of all the pointless webpages generated by ChatGPT or other LLMs that are flooding the web. Meanwhile sticking to the sites I know (Wikipedia / HN / used car sales websites / a few forums I frequent etc.) and running a DNS locally that blocks hundreds of thousands of domains (and entire countries) is quite effective (I run unbound, which I like a lot for it's got many features and can block domains/subdomains using wildcards). I'm pretty sure detecting and covering ads before displaying a webpage can be done but I'd say the bigger problem is submarines and overall terribly poor quality LLM generated webpages. So basically: is it even worth it to detect ads while the web has now got a much bigger problem than ads?

beepbooptheory 3y ago

But how can we possibly be this optimistic though? Like, time and time again there are these little glimmers of fantasy that some technology alone can alleviate the heinous/annoying parts of a mature capitalism, and every time the technology has ended up, after all is said and done, on the other side (so to speak). Like, go back and read old mailing lists. See how everyone was so assured that computers themselves, then cryptography, then the modern internet, would create radical changes in the way the economy works, and enable avenues for greater self-determination and happiness. They all seem so naive in retrospect, knowing what we know and how it all played out. I love that so many people are these days inspired by the llm tech to imagine a better world with them, and its important in itself to inspired like this. But precedence does not favor putting all your hopes in solely the technology itself for a better world. Hope I am wrong though!

visarga 3y ago
It will undoubtedly be a turbulent time. All the skills and knowledge expressed in text or images is compressed into models. And these models offer back all they know to each of us according to our needs. Learning from everyone indiscriminately, serving everyone specifically, open sourcing skills and knowledge to a much deeper degree than open source had on software. This will have social implications, it will speed up the learning process of any new technology. For example by upgrading Copilot, Github can upgrade coding practices everywhere (where it's used) to new coding standards instead of taking years, that's how fast it can go. On another line of thinking, an image-language-action model can be used to control robots, and robot hardware is getting accessible. There is a chance for inventing self reliance automation for people, a possible solution to job loss.
- beepbooptheory 3y ago
  Right, there are lots of things it could do, but the point is that these capabilities, or rather this potential, is merely necessary but not sufficient for actually following through with those nice things. It doesn't matter what it can do when there is a truly scary amount of power and interest directed towards, e.g., making sure job loss (or unemployment in general) doesn't change too much. They'll make these things illegal before they'd let it get even close to messing something like that up! There are already so many innovations and pieces of technology that could be helping instead of hurting. It should seem clear that the sheer capability of something could never be enough to change the state of affairs alone. Sure the printing press was critical, but there was also a whole lot of blood shed and tumultuous times before the enlightened subject of the printing press could enjoy their new class and literacy.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I agree heartily with you. OpenAI may be the best, but the open models are getting good. A weak analogy: as you might take a hybrid cloud/local compute strategy, I think it makes sense to be very flexible and use LLMs from different sources for diversity and not getting locked in. I mostly use OpenAI, but I am constantly experimenting with options. Local options are most exciting to me right now. I usually use APIs, but OpenAI’s app that supports multi modal input images and voice conversation is impressive and points to a future mode of human computer interactions. Exciting times!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]