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Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disast

• seydor 3y ago
  Let's not be so hasty. I m glad to see that MistralAI is signing this letter. their small model is truly amazing, the most useful open source model i ve tried so far. But this can change tomorrow, they may be deemed illegal and disappear from public view, it has happened before. So i'm downloading and saving whatever model i think is great.
  • mwint 3y ago
    Genuine question - does it seem plausible that a few GB of content could truly be wiped off the Internet? I’m not in the piracy scene, but my impression was they routinely pass full res movies around the Internet without much barrier to discovering and downloading them, at least to technically competent users. Is that still true?
    • superkuh 3y ago
      The purpose of regulations like these are not to prevent a thing from happening. They're so that normal behavior is criminalized but not enforced unless you happen to rock the boat some day.
    • sillysaurusx 3y ago
      The Pile was. It’s still available but no one will touch it, mostly due to books3. The difference is that a few people with lots of resources take on legal risk. In the piracy example many people with few resources take on risk, which works out since no one wants to sue people with no money.
      • kenan_warren 3y ago
        The Pile is still used to train LLMs and it's still very much available on the net. I agree it's a risk to train your models on the dataset until the legal implications are worked out, but it doesn't seem to be stopping people.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • seydor 3y ago
      the old models will become deprecated if they are not upgraded, and won't incorporate new information. Even if the files are available they will become abandonware.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • PumpkinSpice 3y ago
      This is really not about an engineer keeping a bootleg model in your basement. It's about the barrier for entry for commercial products. Or the ability to curate improved open-source implementations in the long haul, for that matter - as past a certain scale, this entails creating a non-profit of some sort to pay your bills. Plus, while it's definitely the case that with sustained interest, old data tends to linger around... the moment the interest wanes, it's gone. I've been on the internet for a while and there are so many hobby sites, forums, and software projects from the early days that are simply gone for good (and not on archive.org).
• jmfldn 3y ago
  True but there is a really difficult trade off here between a big tech monopoly and decentralised open source anarchy. I say this as a Linux-using FOSS lover, but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands. I guess strong regulation is the key but I'm just handwaving here really. I don't know how the tradeoff should be made. I see great dangers in hyper-powerful tech being in the hands of the few or indeed of everyone. By the way, I'm not sure how easy it will be to stop bad actors since barriers to entry are exponentially lower to developing a malicious AI tool than, say, developing a nuke.
  • pdonis 3y ago
    > without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands The wrong hands will have the same access to whatever "superpowers" AI gives regardless of what regulations are or are not put in place. Regulations can't and won't stop potential bad actors with state-level resources, like China, from using any technology they decide they want to use. So trying to regulate on that basis is a fool's errand. The real question is, what will put the good actors in a better position to fight the bad actors if it ever comes to that: a big tech monopoly or decentralized open source anarchy? The answer should be obvious. No monopoly is going to out-innovate decentralized open source. > I'm not sure how easy it will be to stop bad actors since barriers to entry are exponentially lower to developing a malicious AI tool than, say, developing a nuke. Since some bad actors already have nukes, the answer to this should be obvious too: it's what I said above about the wrong hands getting access to technology.
    • ta1243 3y ago
      China, Iran, North Korea, Iran, US, Israel, Europe aren't bad actors. The bad actors don't have state level resources.
      • deleted 3y ago
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      • dragonwriter 3y ago
• skybrian 3y ago
  I disagree entirely. We shouldn't be hoping for a complex ecosystem of small, shady companies nobody ever heard of, like happened with ad networks [1]. Or worse, a scam-filled ecosystem like cryptocurrency. Or worse, an underground ecosystem like the criminals who share cracked passwords and credit card numbers. Big companies are easier to regulate. [1] https://lumapartners.com/lumascapes/ https://lumapartners.com/lumascapes/
  • smcleod 3y ago
    Really? You think Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook etc…. Are well regulated? The US has shown time and time again it’s complete incompetence when it comes to meaningful regulation of large companies.
  • pdonis 3y ago
    > Big companies are easier to regulate. But the problem isn't regulating the big companies, or the smaller companies, or underground entities. The problem is state-level adversaries like China who might misuse a technology, whether it's AI or anything else. Such adversaries can't be regulated by laws or executive orders or UN declarations; they have proven that many times in the past. The only way to control them is to have sufficient counter-capability against whatever assets they have. And government regulation is a terrible way to try to achieve that goal.
    • smokel 3y ago
      One could also try to be friendly towards strangers, and not have them be their adversaries in the first place.
      • pdonis 3y ago
        > One could also try to be friendly towards strangers, and not have them be their adversaries in the first place. We have tried this with China, going back to Nixon opening up trade relations in the early 1970s. It hasn't helped.
    • skybrian 3y ago
• trentnix 3y ago
  > Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation Well yes, that’s precisely why they are lobbying for it.
  • blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    That does seem awfully convenient, yes. But I am also skeptical that Meta is railing against regulation out of their commitment to protect scrappy little startups doing AI...
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      I honestly don't see the cynical motive I know is there in what Facebook is doing, releasing Llama. I am down to that they just want to screw with Microsoft for buying "OpenAI", which is fine by me.
    • Taek 3y ago
      The gap between Meta and other proprietary ai ecosystems (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) is pretty large. Meta necessarily is only as far behind as open source as a whole is behind. If open source catches up, Meta can ride the tailwind and also catch up. I'm sure Meta will flip its position once it doesn't feel outclassed by the competition.
• rhizome 3y ago
  >Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation It's a homesteading land grab, plain, simple and pure. There is a competitive landscape, first-mover advantages, incumbent effects, et al that are being anchored in e.g. Sam Altman's interests and desires at this very moment. If you want a vision of the future of garage AI, imagine a boot stomping on Preston Tucker's face over and over. The current AI industry's goal is to preserve an image of openness and benefit while getting ready to pull the ladder up when the time is right.
• shrimpx 3y ago
  Power is already concentrated in the sense that only the wealthy can train. We should make kickstarter-type models to fund open source AI training, because it'll likely continue to cost millions to tens of millions for cutting edge models. With Llama2 we're at Meta's mercy, as it cost 20M to train. No guarantee Meta will continue to give us next-gen models. And even if it does, we're stuck with their training biases, at least to some extent. (I know you can fine-tune etc.)
  • flockonus 3y ago
    While i don't disagree, that's missing the forest for the trees - the point is having the freedom to share models and continue to open-source. I'll argue that between stable diffusion and llama 2, there is nothing highly specific that prevents [very] large amount of people from adopting these models and specializing for them own needs. The tragedy would be if those went away.
    • shrimpx 3y ago
      Yeah but llama2-level AI may be insignificant in power compared to future models, which may be inaccessible to the public. Even assuming the algorithms/code are open, people at large won't be able to create working models.
      • flockonus 3y ago
        Not sure at all, when you look at amount of opensource being done in regards to quantization. One of many examples: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Llama-2-7B-GGML https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Llama-2-7B-GGML
  • autoexec 3y ago
    > Power is already concentrated in the sense that only the wealthy can train. That situation will change as technology evolves. We'll eventually reach a point where a normal desktop PC can train AI. The wealthy will always be able to do it faster, but the gap will shrink with time. The trick is making sure that laws aren't put in place now that would restrict our ability to do that freely once the technology is there, and that massive data sets are compiled and preserved where the public has free access to them.
• najork 3y ago
  I completely agree. AI naturally lends itself to monopoly formation, and stifled competition in the space is something that we as consumers (and stakeholders of human progress) should be wary of. I wrote down my thoughts in a brief blog post and I'd love your take on it. https://radiantai.com/blog/building-resilience-into-ai https://radiantai.com/blog/building-resilience-into-ai