6 ms·

As goofy as I personally think this is, it's pretty cool that we're converging on something like C3P0 or Plankton's Computer with nothing more than the entire c

As goofy as I personally think this is, it's pretty cool that we're converging on something like C3P0 or Plankton's Computer with nothing more than the entire corpus of the world's information, a bunch of people labeling data, and a big pile of linear algebra.

apantel 2y ago
This is why it would be such a mistake to kneecap this process over copyright. The models needs ALL the data.
- QuiDortDine 2y ago
  Okay so we're all agreed that IP laws don't matter and we can have all of OpenAI's data for free? That's a good deal!
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    What do you mean "have"?
    - QuiDortDine 2y ago
      Is this a trick question? OpenAI blatantly used copyrighted works for commercial purposes without paying the IP owners, it would only be fair to have them publish the resulting code/weights/whatever without expecting compensation. (I don't want to publish it myself, of course, just transform it and sell the result as a service!) I know this won't happen, of course, I am moreso hoping for laws to be updated to avoid similar kerfuffles in the future, as well as massive fines to act as a deterrent, but I don't dare to hope too much.
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        This is alleged, and it is very likely that claimants like New York Times accidentally prompt injected their own material to show the violation (not understanding how LLMs really work), and clouded in the hope of a big pay day rather than actual justice/fairness etc... Anyways, the laws are mature enough for everyone to work this out in court. Maybe it comes out that they have a legitimate concern, but the way they presented their evidence so far in public has seriously been lacking.
        mrtranscendence 2y ago
        Prompt injecting their own article would indeed be an incredible show of incompetence by the New York Times. I'm confident that they're not so dumb that they put their article in their prompt and were astonished when the reply could reproduce the prompt. Rather, the actual culprit is almost certainly overfitting. The articles in question were pasted many times on different websites, showing up in the training data repeatedly. Enough of this leads to memorization.
        seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        They hired a third party to make the case, and we know nothing about that party except that they were lawyers. It is entirely possible, since this happened very early in the LLM game, that they didn’t realize how the tech worked, and fed it enough of their own article for the model to piece it back together. OpenAI talks about the challenge of overfitting, and how they work to avoid it.
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        I was envisioning a future where we've done away with the notion of data ownership. In such a world the idea that we would: > have all of OpenAI's data for free Doesn't really fit. Perhaps OpenAI might successfully prevent us from accessing it, but it wouldn't be "theirs" and we couldn't "have" it. I'm not sure what kind of conversations we will be having instead, but I expect they'll be more productive than worrying about ownership of something you can't touch.
        smallnix 2y ago
        So in that world you envision someone could hack into openai, then publish the weights and code. The hacker could be prosecuted for breaking into their system, but everyone else could now use the weights and code legally. Is that understanding correct?
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        I think that would depend on whether OpenAI was justified in retaining and restricting access to that data in the first place. If they weren't, then maybe they get fined and the hacker gets a part of that fine (to encourage whistleblowers). I'm not interested in a system where there are no laws about data, I just think that modeling them after property law is a mistake. I haven't exactly drafted this alternative set of laws, but I expect it would look something like this: If the data is derived from sources that were made available to the public with the consent of its referents (and subject to whatever other regulation), then walling it off would be illegal. On the other hand, other regulation regarding users' behavior world be illegal to share without the users consent and might even be illegal to retain without their consent. If you want to profit from something derived from public data while keeping it private, perhaps that's ok but you have to register its existence and pay taxes on it as a data asset, much like we pay taxes on land. That way we can wield the tax code to encourage companies that operate in the clear. This category would probably resemble patent law quite a bit, except ownership doesn't come by default, you have to buy your property rights from the public (since by owning that thing, you're depriving the masses of access to it, and since the notion that it is a peg that fits in a property shaped hole is a fiction that requires some work on our part to maintain).
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- wslack 2y ago
  Then lawmakers should change the law, instead of a private actor asserting that their need overrides others' rights.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    "Congressman, I have Mr. Altman on line 2."
    - jameshart 2y ago
      Or rather, I have an unending stream of callers with similar-sounding voices who all want to make chirpy persuasive arguments in favor of Mr Altman's interests.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  With you 100% on that, except that after you defeat the copyright cartel, you'll have to face the final boss: OpenAI itself. Either everybody should get the benefits of this technology, or no one should.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    If OpenAI actually followed their initial mission and didn't become ClosedAI I think people would be much more on their side.
- nwienert 2y ago
  This is an anti-human ideology as bad as the worst of communism. Humanity only survives as much as it preserves human dignity, let's say. We've designed society to give rewards to people who produce things of value. These companies take that value and giving nothing back to the creators. Supporting this will lead to disaster for all but the few, and ultimately for the few themselves. Paying for your (copyrighted) inputs is harmony.
  - apantel 2y ago
    These models literally need ALL data. The amount of work it would take just to account for all the copyrights, let alone negotiate and compensate the creators, would be infeasible. I think it’s likely that the justice system will deem model training as fair use, provided that the models are not designed to exactly reproduce the training data as output. I think you hit on an important point though: these models are a giant transfer of wealth from creators to consumers / users. Now anyone can acquire artist-grade art for any purpose, basically for free — that’s a huge boon for the consumer / user. People all around the world are going to be enriched by these models. Anyone in the world will be able to have access to a tutor in their language who can teach them anything. Again, that is only possible because the models eat ALL the data. Another important point: original artwork has been made almost completely obsolete by this technology. The deed is done, because even if you push it out 70 years, eventually all of the artwork that these models have been trained on will be public domain. So, 70 years from now (or whatever it is) the cat will be out of the bag AND free of copyright obligations, so 2-3 generations from now it will be impossible to make a living selling artwork. It’s done. When something becomes obsolete, it’s a dead man walking. It will not survive, even if it may take a while for people to catch up. Like when the vacuum tube computer was invented, that was it for relay computers. Done. And when the transistor was invented, that was it for vacuum tube computers. It’s just a matter of time before all of today’s data is public domain and the models just do what they do. …but people still build relay computers for fun: https://youtu.be/JZyFSrNyhy8?si=8MRNznoNqmAChAqr https://youtu.be/JZyFSrNyhy8?si=8MRNznoNqmAChAqr So people will still produce artwork.
    - autoexec 2y ago
- danbala 2y ago
  The goal is to end up with a model capable of discovering all the knowledge on its own. not rely on what humans produced before. Human knowledge contains errors, I want the model to point out those errors and fix them. the current state is a crutch at best to get over the current low capability of the models.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  I'm shocked at how otherwise normally "progressive" folks or even so called "communists" will start to bend over for IP-laws the moment that they start to realize the implications of AI systems. Glad to know that accusations of the "gnulag" were unfounded I guess! I now don't believe most "creative" types when they try to spout radical egalitarian ideologies. They don't mean it at all, and even my own family, who religiously watched radical techno-optimist shows like Star Trek, are now falling into the depths of ludditism and running into the arms of defending copyright trolls
  - apantel 2y ago
    The thinking is: ‘Anything that the little guy does to get ahead is justified; but if the rich do the same thing, that’s unfair.’
  - c-cube 2y ago
    If you're egalitarian, it makes sense to protest when copyright is abolished only for the rich corporations but not for actual people, don't you think? Part of the injustice here is that you can't get access to windows source code, or you can't use Disney characters, or copy most copyrighted material... But OpenAI and github and whatnot can just siphon all data with impunity. Double standard.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      Copyright has been abolished for the little guy. I’m talking about AI safety doomers who think huggingface and Civit.AI are somehow not the ultimate good guys in the AI world.
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    This is a foul mischaracterization of several different viewpoints. Being opposed to a century-long copyright period for Mickey Mouse does not invalidate support for the concept of IP in general, and for the legal system continuing to respect the licensing terms of very lenient licenses such as CC-BY-SA.
trashtester 2y ago
All of physics basically reduces to linear algebra locally (which becomes quite unilinear when enough tensors are multiplied). Why shouldn't we expect AI to be created using the same type of math? If there is a surprise, it's only that we can use the same math at a much higher level of abstraction than the quantum level.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  That's a really nice analogy, I wonder if there is some research on this kind of thing in the machine learning literature already.
  - trashtester 2y ago
    There probably is, since I believe tensors were basically borrowed from Physics at some point. But it's probably not of much practical use today, unless you want to explore Penrose's ideas about microtubules or something similarly exotic. Gains in AI and compute can probably be be brought back to physics and chemistry to do various computations, though, and not limited to only protein folding, which is the most famous use case now.
    - nerdponx 2y ago
      For what it's worth, the idea of a "tensor" in ML is pretty far removed from any physical concept. I don't know its mathematical origins (would be interesting I'm sure), but in ML they're only involved because that's our framework for dealing with multi-linear transformations. Most NNs work by something akin to "(multi-)linear vector transformation, followed by elementwise nonlinear transformation", stacked over and over so that the output of one layer becomes the input of the next. This applies equally well to simple models like "fully-connected" / "feed-forward" networks (aka "multi-layer perceptron") and to more-sophisticated models like transformers (e.g. https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/blob/325be85d9be8c81b436728a420e85796c57dba7e/model.py#L52-L76 https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/blob/325be85d9be8c81b436...). It's less about combining lots of tiny local linear transformations piecewise, and more about layering linear and non-linear transformations on top of each other. I don't really know how physics works beyond whatever Newtonian mechanics I learned in high school. But unless the underlying math is similar, then I'm hesitant to run too far with the analogy.
Taikonerd 2y ago
After all the people likening this to the computer from "Her," I LOL'ed at you likening it to Plankton's computer from Spongebob.

apantel 2y ago

This is why it would be such a mistake to kneecap this process over copyright. The models needs ALL the data.

QuiDortDine 2y ago
Okay so we're all agreed that IP laws don't matter and we can have all of OpenAI's data for free? That's a good deal!
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  What do you mean "have"?
  - QuiDortDine 2y ago
    Is this a trick question? OpenAI blatantly used copyrighted works for commercial purposes without paying the IP owners, it would only be fair to have them publish the resulting code/weights/whatever without expecting compensation. (I don't want to publish it myself, of course, just transform it and sell the result as a service!) I know this won't happen, of course, I am moreso hoping for laws to be updated to avoid similar kerfuffles in the future, as well as massive fines to act as a deterrent, but I don't dare to hope too much.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      This is alleged, and it is very likely that claimants like New York Times accidentally prompt injected their own material to show the violation (not understanding how LLMs really work), and clouded in the hope of a big pay day rather than actual justice/fairness etc... Anyways, the laws are mature enough for everyone to work this out in court. Maybe it comes out that they have a legitimate concern, but the way they presented their evidence so far in public has seriously been lacking.
      - mrtranscendence 2y ago
        Prompt injecting their own article would indeed be an incredible show of incompetence by the New York Times. I'm confident that they're not so dumb that they put their article in their prompt and were astonished when the reply could reproduce the prompt. Rather, the actual culprit is almost certainly overfitting. The articles in question were pasted many times on different websites, showing up in the training data repeatedly. Enough of this leads to memorization.
        seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        They hired a third party to make the case, and we know nothing about that party except that they were lawyers. It is entirely possible, since this happened very early in the LLM game, that they didn’t realize how the tech worked, and fed it enough of their own article for the model to piece it back together. OpenAI talks about the challenge of overfitting, and how they work to avoid it.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I was envisioning a future where we've done away with the notion of data ownership. In such a world the idea that we would: > have all of OpenAI's data for free Doesn't really fit. Perhaps OpenAI might successfully prevent us from accessing it, but it wouldn't be "theirs" and we couldn't "have" it. I'm not sure what kind of conversations we will be having instead, but I expect they'll be more productive than worrying about ownership of something you can't touch.
      - smallnix 2y ago
        So in that world you envision someone could hack into openai, then publish the weights and code. The hacker could be prosecuted for breaking into their system, but everyone else could now use the weights and code legally. Is that understanding correct?
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        I think that would depend on whether OpenAI was justified in retaining and restricting access to that data in the first place. If they weren't, then maybe they get fined and the hacker gets a part of that fine (to encourage whistleblowers). I'm not interested in a system where there are no laws about data, I just think that modeling them after property law is a mistake. I haven't exactly drafted this alternative set of laws, but I expect it would look something like this: If the data is derived from sources that were made available to the public with the consent of its referents (and subject to whatever other regulation), then walling it off would be illegal. On the other hand, other regulation regarding users' behavior world be illegal to share without the users consent and might even be illegal to retain without their consent. If you want to profit from something derived from public data while keeping it private, perhaps that's ok but you have to register its existence and pay taxes on it as a data asset, much like we pay taxes on land. That way we can wield the tax code to encourage companies that operate in the clear. This category would probably resemble patent law quite a bit, except ownership doesn't come by default, you have to buy your property rights from the public (since by owning that thing, you're depriving the masses of access to it, and since the notion that it is a peg that fits in a property shaped hole is a fiction that requires some work on our part to maintain).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
wslack 2y ago
Then lawmakers should change the law, instead of a private actor asserting that their need overrides others' rights.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  "Congressman, I have Mr. Altman on line 2."
  - jameshart 2y ago
    Or rather, I have an unending stream of callers with similar-sounding voices who all want to make chirpy persuasive arguments in favor of Mr Altman's interests.
CamperBob2 2y ago
With you 100% on that, except that after you defeat the copyright cartel, you'll have to face the final boss: OpenAI itself. Either everybody should get the benefits of this technology, or no one should.
- Jensson 2y ago
  If OpenAI actually followed their initial mission and didn't become ClosedAI I think people would be much more on their side.
nwienert 2y ago
This is an anti-human ideology as bad as the worst of communism. Humanity only survives as much as it preserves human dignity, let's say. We've designed society to give rewards to people who produce things of value. These companies take that value and giving nothing back to the creators. Supporting this will lead to disaster for all but the few, and ultimately for the few themselves. Paying for your (copyrighted) inputs is harmony.
- apantel 2y ago
  These models literally need ALL data. The amount of work it would take just to account for all the copyrights, let alone negotiate and compensate the creators, would be infeasible. I think it’s likely that the justice system will deem model training as fair use, provided that the models are not designed to exactly reproduce the training data as output. I think you hit on an important point though: these models are a giant transfer of wealth from creators to consumers / users. Now anyone can acquire artist-grade art for any purpose, basically for free — that’s a huge boon for the consumer / user. People all around the world are going to be enriched by these models. Anyone in the world will be able to have access to a tutor in their language who can teach them anything. Again, that is only possible because the models eat ALL the data. Another important point: original artwork has been made almost completely obsolete by this technology. The deed is done, because even if you push it out 70 years, eventually all of the artwork that these models have been trained on will be public domain. So, 70 years from now (or whatever it is) the cat will be out of the bag AND free of copyright obligations, so 2-3 generations from now it will be impossible to make a living selling artwork. It’s done. When something becomes obsolete, it’s a dead man walking. It will not survive, even if it may take a while for people to catch up. Like when the vacuum tube computer was invented, that was it for relay computers. Done. And when the transistor was invented, that was it for vacuum tube computers. It’s just a matter of time before all of today’s data is public domain and the models just do what they do. …but people still build relay computers for fun: https://youtu.be/JZyFSrNyhy8?si=8MRNznoNqmAChAqr https://youtu.be/JZyFSrNyhy8?si=8MRNznoNqmAChAqr So people will still produce artwork.
  - autoexec 2y ago
danbala 2y ago
The goal is to end up with a model capable of discovering all the knowledge on its own. not rely on what humans produced before. Human knowledge contains errors, I want the model to point out those errors and fix them. the current state is a crutch at best to get over the current low capability of the models.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
I'm shocked at how otherwise normally "progressive" folks or even so called "communists" will start to bend over for IP-laws the moment that they start to realize the implications of AI systems. Glad to know that accusations of the "gnulag" were unfounded I guess! I now don't believe most "creative" types when they try to spout radical egalitarian ideologies. They don't mean it at all, and even my own family, who religiously watched radical techno-optimist shows like Star Trek, are now falling into the depths of ludditism and running into the arms of defending copyright trolls
- apantel 2y ago
  The thinking is: ‘Anything that the little guy does to get ahead is justified; but if the rich do the same thing, that’s unfair.’
- c-cube 2y ago
  If you're egalitarian, it makes sense to protest when copyright is abolished only for the rich corporations but not for actual people, don't you think? Part of the injustice here is that you can't get access to windows source code, or you can't use Disney characters, or copy most copyrighted material... But OpenAI and github and whatnot can just siphon all data with impunity. Double standard.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Copyright has been abolished for the little guy. I’m talking about AI safety doomers who think huggingface and Civit.AI are somehow not the ultimate good guys in the AI world.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  This is a foul mischaracterization of several different viewpoints. Being opposed to a century-long copyright period for Mickey Mouse does not invalidate support for the concept of IP in general, and for the legal system continuing to respect the licensing terms of very lenient licenses such as CC-BY-SA.

trashtester 2y ago

All of physics basically reduces to linear algebra locally (which becomes quite unilinear when enough tensors are multiplied). Why shouldn't we expect AI to be created using the same type of math? If there is a surprise, it's only that we can use the same math at a much higher level of abstraction than the quantum level.

nerdponx 2y ago
That's a really nice analogy, I wonder if there is some research on this kind of thing in the machine learning literature already.
- trashtester 2y ago
  There probably is, since I believe tensors were basically borrowed from Physics at some point. But it's probably not of much practical use today, unless you want to explore Penrose's ideas about microtubules or something similarly exotic. Gains in AI and compute can probably be be brought back to physics and chemistry to do various computations, though, and not limited to only protein folding, which is the most famous use case now.
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    For what it's worth, the idea of a "tensor" in ML is pretty far removed from any physical concept. I don't know its mathematical origins (would be interesting I'm sure), but in ML they're only involved because that's our framework for dealing with multi-linear transformations. Most NNs work by something akin to "(multi-)linear vector transformation, followed by elementwise nonlinear transformation", stacked over and over so that the output of one layer becomes the input of the next. This applies equally well to simple models like "fully-connected" / "feed-forward" networks (aka "multi-layer perceptron") and to more-sophisticated models like transformers (e.g. https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/blob/325be85d9be8c81b436728a420e85796c57dba7e/model.py#L52-L76 https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/blob/325be85d9be8c81b436...). It's less about combining lots of tiny local linear transformations piecewise, and more about layering linear and non-linear transformations on top of each other. I don't really know how physics works beyond whatever Newtonian mechanics I learned in high school. But unless the underlying math is similar, then I'm hesitant to run too far with the analogy.

Taikonerd 2y ago

After all the people likening this to the computer from "Her," I LOL'ed at you likening it to Plankton's computer from Spongebob.