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I suppose there's a different angle, which is that the Open community can distill the privately trained models and then open the distilled model in turn, like m

I suppose there's a different angle, which is that the Open community can distill the privately trained models and then open the distilled model in turn, like many believe Deepseek did. In effect, letting private corps pay for expensive training (w/o paying the authors of the data they are training on, as you correctly point out), but then benefiting from their training labor/cost by copying it back to the open community and making it free again.

pona-a 2y ago
That does make me optimistic. "Stealing back" our stolen data does in the end a free model make — unless the current, very... unprecedented US admin decides distributing unauthorized distilled models carries a prison sentence. But I think most of it is psychological. There used to be goodwill between the public and NLP researchers: what heartless monster would object to some linguists using the by-product of their conversations to make a computer learn that a "king - man + woman = queen" or generate some unintentionally comedic writing? Now this honeymoon is over. You see that what you've been feeding your public life is now a monster with a hundred vices and a few good deeds. It is behind the tidal wave of spam and misinfo, it is the oracle breeding ignorance among the gullible, it is the iron hand of censorship for many a police state, but most insulting of all, it is sold by its makers as a replacement for any genuine talent or minimal human effort. "Why learn to draw when you can have an AI produce a cheap imitation instead? Why learn math, CS, or foreign languages when you can delegate any and all thinking to the great machine? What did we even have you all for, anyway — intellectuals, artists, and craftsman — with your constant complaining and demands we learn a skill? Who do they think they are? Experts?" No, the future belongs to the lazy and talentless, to thieves and usurpers, who will sit at the top with an aristocratic, borderline catatonic, brainlessness, while you will be at their knees, polishing their boots — since the machine to do so costs an order more than your meager wage. It is anti-intellectualism in a form purified to industrial potency, directed at the very people by whose generosity their rather inept "replacements" were manufactured. I can't say what's the rational response in all this. I can tell you what emotional response seems most appealing.

pona-a 2y ago

That does make me optimistic. "Stealing back" our stolen data does in the end a free model make — unless the current, very... unprecedented US admin decides distributing unauthorized distilled models carries a prison sentence. But I think most of it is psychological. There used to be goodwill between the public and NLP researchers: what heartless monster would object to some linguists using the by-product of their conversations to make a computer learn that a "king - man + woman = queen" or generate some unintentionally comedic writing? Now this honeymoon is over. You see that what you've been feeding your public life is now a monster with a hundred vices and a few good deeds. It is behind the tidal wave of spam and misinfo, it is the oracle breeding ignorance among the gullible, it is the iron hand of censorship for many a police state, but most insulting of all, it is sold by its makers as a replacement for any genuine talent or minimal human effort. "Why learn to draw when you can have an AI produce a cheap imitation instead? Why learn math, CS, or foreign languages when you can delegate any and all thinking to the great machine? What did we even have you all for, anyway — intellectuals, artists, and craftsman — with your constant complaining and demands we learn a skill? Who do they think they are? Experts?" No, the future belongs to the lazy and talentless, to thieves and usurpers, who will sit at the top with an aristocratic, borderline catatonic, brainlessness, while you will be at their knees, polishing their boots — since the machine to do so costs an order more than your meager wage. It is anti-intellectualism in a form purified to industrial potency, directed at the very people by whose generosity their rather inept "replacements" were manufactured. I can't say what's the rational response in all this. I can tell you what emotional response seems most appealing.