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Also, being open source adds phenomenal value for Meta: 1. It attracts the world's best academic talent, who deeply want their work shared. AI experts can join

Also, being open source adds phenomenal value for Meta: 1. It attracts the world's best academic talent, who deeply want their work shared. AI experts can join any company, so ones which commit to open AI have a huge advantage. 2. Having armies of SWEs contributing millions of free labor hours to test/fix/improve/expand your stuff is incredible. 3. The industry standardizes around their tech, driving down costs and dramatically improving compatibility/extensibility. 4. It creates immense goodwill with basically everyone. 5. Having open AI doesn't hurt their core business. If you're an AI company, giving away your only product isn't tenable (so far). If Meta's 405B model surpasses GPT-4 and Claude Opus as they expect, they release it for free, and (predictably) nothing awful happens -- just incredible unlocks for regular people like Llama 2 -- it'll make much of the industry look like complete clowns. Hiding their models with some pretext about safety, the alarmist alignment rhetoric, will crumble. Like...no, you zealously guard your models because you want to make money, and that's fine. But using some holier-than-thou "it's for your own good" public gaslighting is wildly inappropriate, paternalistic, and condescending. The 405B model will be an enormous middle finger to companies who literally won't even tell you how big their models are (because "safety", I guess). Here's a model better than all of yours, it's open for everyone to benefit from, and it didn't end the world. So go &%$# yourselves.

eigenvalue 3y ago
Yes, I completely agree with every point you made. It’s going to be so satisfying when all the AI safety people realize that their attempts to cram this protectionist/alarmist control down our throats are all for nothing, because there is an even stronger model that is totally open weights, and you can never put the genie back in the bottle!
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  [flagged]
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  Hopefully they aren't able to cram it down our legislators' throats... Seems that's what really matters
- ben_w 3y ago
  > you can never put the genie back in the bottle That's specifically why OpenAI don't release weights, and why everyone who cares about safety talks about laws, and why Yud says the laws only matter if you're willing to enforce them internationally via air strikes. > It’s going to be so satisfying I won't be feeling Schadenfreude if a low budget group or individual takes an open weights model, does a white-box analysis to determine what it knows and to overcome any RLFH, in order to force it to work as an assistant helping walk them though the steps to make VX nerve agent. Given how old VX is, it's fairly likely all the info is on the public internet already, but even just LLMs-as-a-better-search / knowledge synthesis from disparate sources, that makes a difference, especially for domain specific "common sense": You don't need to know what to ask for, you can ask a model to ask itself a better question first.
  - zzzzzzzzzz10 3y ago
    If some unhinged psycho want to build nerve agents and bombs I think it's laughable to believe an LLM will be the tool that makes a difference in enabling them to do so. As you said the information is already out there - getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > I think it's laughable to believe an LLM will be the tool that makes a difference If you think it's "laughable", what do you think tools are for? Every tool makes some difference, that's why they get used. The better models are already at the level of a (free) everything-intern, and it's very easy to use them for high-level control of robotics. > getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is. Knowing what question you need to ask in order to not kill oneself in the process, however, is. Secondary school chemistry lessons taught me two distinct ways to make chlorine using only things found in a normal kitchen; but the were taught in the context "don't do X or Y, that makes chlorine", not "here's some PPE, let's get to work".
      - abxytg 3y ago
        Uh oh -- we should ban this secondary school thing
jdminhbg 3y ago
Commoditize Your Complements: https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  No need to quote the arrogant clown on that one, Spolski coined the concept: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
nmklnlknklnlk 3y ago
OpenAI engineers don't work for free. Facebook subsidizes their engineers because they have $20B. OpenAI doesn't have that luxury.
- papichulo2023 3y ago
  Sucks to work in a non-profit, right? Oh wait... }:^). Those assholes are lobbying to block public llm, 0 sympathy.
mvkel 3y ago
It's important to distinguish between open source and open weights
skybrian 3y ago
How does that work? Nobody will be able to run the big models who doesn't have a big data center or lots of rent money to burn. How is it going to matter to most of us? It seems similar to open chip designs - irrelevant to people who are going to buy whatever chips they use anyway. Maybe I'll design a circuit board, but no deeper than that. Modern civilization means depending on supply chains.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  The day it's released, Llama-3-405B will be running on someone's Mac Studio. These models aren't that big. It'll be fine, just like Llama-2.
  - eigenvalue 3y ago
    Maybe at 1 or 2 bits of quantization! Even the Macs with the most unified RAM are maxxed out with much smaller models than 405b (especially since it's a dense model and not a MOE).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      You can build a $6,000 machine with 12 channels DDR5 memory that's big enough to hold an 8bit quantized model. The generation speed is abysmal of course. Anything better than that starts at 200k per machine and goes up from there. Not something you can run at home, but definitely within the budget of most medium sized firms to buy one.
      - MeImCounting 3y ago
        You can build a machine that can run 70b models at great TpS speeds for around 30-60k. That same machine could almost certainly run a 400b model with "useable" speeds. Obviously much slower than current ChatGPT speeds but still, that kind of machine is well within the means of wealthy hobbyists/highly compensated SWEs and small firms.
airtonix 3y ago
[dead]

eigenvalue 3y ago

Yes, I completely agree with every point you made. It’s going to be so satisfying when all the AI safety people realize that their attempts to cram this protectionist/alarmist control down our throats are all for nothing, because there is an even stronger model that is totally open weights, and you can never put the genie back in the bottle!

a_wild_dandan 3y ago
[flagged]
aqfamnzc 3y ago
Hopefully they aren't able to cram it down our legislators' throats... Seems that's what really matters
ben_w 3y ago
> you can never put the genie back in the bottle That's specifically why OpenAI don't release weights, and why everyone who cares about safety talks about laws, and why Yud says the laws only matter if you're willing to enforce them internationally via air strikes. > It’s going to be so satisfying I won't be feeling Schadenfreude if a low budget group or individual takes an open weights model, does a white-box analysis to determine what it knows and to overcome any RLFH, in order to force it to work as an assistant helping walk them though the steps to make VX nerve agent. Given how old VX is, it's fairly likely all the info is on the public internet already, but even just LLMs-as-a-better-search / knowledge synthesis from disparate sources, that makes a difference, especially for domain specific "common sense": You don't need to know what to ask for, you can ask a model to ask itself a better question first.
- zzzzzzzzzz10 3y ago
  If some unhinged psycho want to build nerve agents and bombs I think it's laughable to believe an LLM will be the tool that makes a difference in enabling them to do so. As you said the information is already out there - getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > I think it's laughable to believe an LLM will be the tool that makes a difference If you think it's "laughable", what do you think tools are for? Every tool makes some difference, that's why they get used. The better models are already at the level of a (free) everything-intern, and it's very easy to use them for high-level control of robotics. > getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is. Knowing what question you need to ask in order to not kill oneself in the process, however, is. Secondary school chemistry lessons taught me two distinct ways to make chlorine using only things found in a normal kitchen; but the were taught in the context "don't do X or Y, that makes chlorine", not "here's some PPE, let's get to work".
    - abxytg 3y ago
      Uh oh -- we should ban this secondary school thing

jdminhbg 3y ago

Commoditize Your Complements: https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement

littlestymaar 3y ago
No need to quote the arrogant clown on that one, Spolski coined the concept: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

nmklnlknklnlk 3y ago

OpenAI engineers don't work for free. Facebook subsidizes their engineers because they have $20B. OpenAI doesn't have that luxury.

papichulo2023 3y ago
Sucks to work in a non-profit, right? Oh wait... }:^). Those assholes are lobbying to block public llm, 0 sympathy.

mvkel 3y ago

It's important to distinguish between open source and open weights

skybrian 3y ago

How does that work? Nobody will be able to run the big models who doesn't have a big data center or lots of rent money to burn. How is it going to matter to most of us? It seems similar to open chip designs - irrelevant to people who are going to buy whatever chips they use anyway. Maybe I'll design a circuit board, but no deeper than that. Modern civilization means depending on supply chains.

a_wild_dandan 3y ago
The day it's released, Llama-3-405B will be running on someone's Mac Studio. These models aren't that big. It'll be fine, just like Llama-2.
- eigenvalue 3y ago
  Maybe at 1 or 2 bits of quantization! Even the Macs with the most unified RAM are maxxed out with much smaller models than 405b (especially since it's a dense model and not a MOE).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    You can build a $6,000 machine with 12 channels DDR5 memory that's big enough to hold an 8bit quantized model. The generation speed is abysmal of course. Anything better than that starts at 200k per machine and goes up from there. Not something you can run at home, but definitely within the budget of most medium sized firms to buy one.
    - MeImCounting 3y ago
      You can build a machine that can run 70b models at great TpS speeds for around 30-60k. That same machine could almost certainly run a 400b model with "useable" speeds. Obviously much slower than current ChatGPT speeds but still, that kind of machine is well within the means of wealthy hobbyists/highly compensated SWEs and small firms.

airtonix 3y ago

[dead]