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I have a few sociophilosophical quibbles about the impact of this, but to focus on a practical part: > by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for what

I have a few sociophilosophical quibbles about the impact of this, but to focus on a practical part: > by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code. Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them? Do you think it would mean they essentially sell GPL’ed code for proprietary use? Would it not affect FOSS, which has been till now partially powered by the promise to contributors that their (often voluntary) work would remain for public benefit? Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way?

Pet_Ant 1y ago
> Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable New techniques are coming, new hardware processes are being developed, and the incremental unit cost is low. Once they fill up the labs, they'll start selling to consumers till the price becomes the cost of a bucket of sand and the cost to power a light-bulb.
ben_w 1y ago
> Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them? When considering current models, it's not in their power to prevent it: DeepSeek demonstrated big models could be trained very easily for a modest budget, and inference is mostly constrained by memory access rather than compute, so if we had smartphones with a terabyte of RAM with a very high bandwidth to something like a current generation Apple NPU, things like DeepSeek R1 would run locally at (back-of-the-envelope calculation) about real-time — and drain the battery in half an hour if you used that model continuously. But current models are not good enough, so the real question is: "who will hold what power when such models hypothetically are created?", and I have absolutely no idea. > Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way? Consider it differently: how much would it cost to use an LLM to reproduce all of Linux? I previously rough-estimated that at $230/megatoken of (useful final product) output, an AI would be energy-competitive vs. humans consuming calories to live: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304186 As I don't have specifics, I need to Fermi-estimate this: I'm not actually sure how big any OS (with or without apps) is, but I hear a lot of numbers in the range of 10-50 million. Let's say 50 Mloc. I don't know the tokens per line, I'm going to guess 10. 50e6 lines * 10 tokens/line * $230/(1e6 tokens) = $115,000 There's no fundamental reason for $230/megatoken beyond that's when the AI is economically preferable to feeding a human who is doing it for free and you just need to stop them from starving to death, even if you have figured out how to directly metabolise electricity which is much cheaper than food: on the one hand $230, this is on the very expensive end of current models; on the second hand, see previous point about running DeepSeek R1 on phone processor with more RAM and bandwidth to match; on the third hand*, see other previous point that current models just aren't good enough to bother. So it's current not available at any price, but when the quality is good, even charging a rate that's currently expensive makes all humans unemployable. * Insert your own joke about about off-by-one-errors
- strogonoff 1y ago
  > DeepSeek demonstrated big models could be trained very easily for a modest budget It might require an ability to train on other commercial model output (which they certainly will erect barriers to), and based on what I heard from people using LLMs for programming DS is substantially worse. > Consider it differently: how much would it cost to use an LLM to reproduce all of Linux? I’d stop you there. The point I raised is about something qualitatively very novel, not reproducing an already existing thing. > AI is economically preferable to feeding a human who is doing it for free As FOSS shows, humans would do it for free, for enjoyment/credit/recognition/self actualization/common good; but this presumes that those humans have jobs that otherwise pay the bills (arguably threatened by the technology we are discussing, as you note yourself), and some guarantees that it will be for common good rather than unpaid ghost labour for corporations. Note that so far it worked OK because what companies in “AI” space have done is a blitzkrieg attack: not bothering to slow down to ask for consent and clear licensing (which would have made more people aware of what’s going on), armed from get go with massive scraping capabilities and billions of USD in GPU power. If the consequences I foresee kick in—people having been burned cease publishing original work of high quality for the models to be trained on, more and more barriers are erected to curb bot traffic (the number of captchas I see has skyrocketed in the past couple of years), etc.—the end result will be 1) degrading models and 2) permanently eroded FOSS. This might suit some commercial interests who see copyleft as some sort of virus, but I just struggle to see how it plays out well for public interest beyond short term.

Pet_Ant 1y ago

> Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable New techniques are coming, new hardware processes are being developed, and the incremental unit cost is low. Once they fill up the labs, they'll start selling to consumers till the price becomes the cost of a bucket of sand and the cost to power a light-bulb.

ben_w 1y ago

> Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them? When considering current models, it's not in their power to prevent it: DeepSeek demonstrated big models could be trained very easily for a modest budget, and inference is mostly constrained by memory access rather than compute, so if we had smartphones with a terabyte of RAM with a very high bandwidth to something like a current generation Apple NPU, things like DeepSeek R1 would run locally at (back-of-the-envelope calculation) about real-time — and drain the battery in half an hour if you used that model continuously. But current models are not good enough, so the real question is: "who will hold what power when such models hypothetically are created?", and I have absolutely no idea. > Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way? Consider it differently: how much would it cost to use an LLM to reproduce all of Linux? I previously rough-estimated that at $230/megatoken of (useful final product) output, an AI would be energy-competitive vs. humans consuming calories to live: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44304186 As I don't have specifics, I need to Fermi-estimate this: I'm not actually sure how big any OS (with or without apps) is, but I hear a lot of numbers in the range of 10-50 million. Let's say 50 Mloc. I don't know the tokens per line, I'm going to guess 10. 50e6 lines * 10 tokens/line * $230/(1e6 tokens) = $115,000 There's no fundamental reason for $230/megatoken beyond that's when the AI is economically preferable to feeding a human who is doing it for free and you just need to stop them from starving to death, even if you have figured out how to directly metabolise electricity which is much cheaper than food: on the one hand $230, this is on the very expensive end of current models; on the second hand, see previous point about running DeepSeek R1 on phone processor with more RAM and bandwidth to match; on the third hand*, see other previous point that current models just aren't good enough to bother. So it's current not available at any price, but when the quality is good, even charging a rate that's currently expensive makes all humans unemployable. * Insert your own joke about about off-by-one-errors

strogonoff 1y ago
> DeepSeek demonstrated big models could be trained very easily for a modest budget It might require an ability to train on other commercial model output (which they certainly will erect barriers to), and based on what I heard from people using LLMs for programming DS is substantially worse. > Consider it differently: how much would it cost to use an LLM to reproduce all of Linux? I’d stop you there. The point I raised is about something qualitatively very novel, not reproducing an already existing thing. > AI is economically preferable to feeding a human who is doing it for free As FOSS shows, humans would do it for free, for enjoyment/credit/recognition/self actualization/common good; but this presumes that those humans have jobs that otherwise pay the bills (arguably threatened by the technology we are discussing, as you note yourself), and some guarantees that it will be for common good rather than unpaid ghost labour for corporations. Note that so far it worked OK because what companies in “AI” space have done is a blitzkrieg attack: not bothering to slow down to ask for consent and clear licensing (which would have made more people aware of what’s going on), armed from get go with massive scraping capabilities and billions of USD in GPU power. If the consequences I foresee kick in—people having been burned cease publishing original work of high quality for the models to be trained on, more and more barriers are erected to curb bot traffic (the number of captchas I see has skyrocketed in the past couple of years), etc.—the end result will be 1) degrading models and 2) permanently eroded FOSS. This might suit some commercial interests who see copyleft as some sort of virus, but I just struggle to see how it plays out well for public interest beyond short term.