5 ms·

> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, pro

> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. Hell yeah, sold, let’s go… > We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse. Oh. By “imagine you could interview…” they didn’t mean me.

BoredPositron 10mo ago
You would get pretty annoyed on how we went backwards in some regards.
- speedgoose 10mo ago
  Such as?
  - JKCalhoun 10mo ago
    Touché.
ImHereToVote 10mo ago
I wonder how much GPU compute you would need to create a public domain version of this. This would be a really valuable for the general public.
- wongarsu 10mo ago
  To get a single knowledge-cutoff they spent 16.5h wall-clock hours on a cluster of 128 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs (or 2100 GPU-hours), plus some minor amount of time for finetuning. The prerelease_notes.md in the repo is a great description on how one would achieve that
  - IanCal 10mo ago
    While I know there's going to be a lot of complications in this, given a quick search it seems like these GPUs are ~$2/hr, so $4000-4500 if you don't just have access to a cluster. I don't know how important the cluster is here, whether you need some minimal number of those for the training (and it would take more than 128x longer or not be possible on a single machine) or if a cluster of 128 GPUs is a bunch less efficient but faster. A 4B model feels like it'd be fine on one to two of those GPUs? Also of course this is for one training run, if you need to experiment you'd need to do that more.
danielbln 10mo ago
How would one even "misuse" a historical LLM, ask it how to cook up sarine gas in a trench?
- DonHopkins 10mo ago
  Ask it to write a document called "Project 2025".
  - ilaksh 10mo ago
    Well but that wouldn't be misuse, it would be perfect for that.
  - JKCalhoun 10mo ago
    "Project 1925". (We can edit the title in post.)
- stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
  Its output might violate speech codes, and in much of the EU that is penalized much more seriously than violent crime.
- hearsathought 10mo ago
  You "misuse" it by using it to get at truth and more importantly historical contradictions and inconsistencies. It's the same reason catholic church kept the bible from the masses by keeping it in latin. The same reason printing press was controlled. Many of the historical "truths" we are told are nonsense at best or twisted to fit an agenda at worst. What do these people fear the most? That the "truth" they been pushing is a lie.
leoedin 10mo ago
It's a shame isn't it! The public must be protected from the backwards thoughts of history. In case they misuse it. I guess what they're really saying is "we don't want you guys to cancel us".
- stainablesteel 10mo ago
  i think it's fine, thank these people for coming up with the idea and people are going to start doing this in their basement then releasing it to huggingface
DGoettlich 10mo ago
understand your frustration. i trust you also understand the models have some dark corners that someone could use to misrepresent the goals of our project. if you have ideas on how we could make the models more broadly accessible while avoiding that risk, please do reach out @ history-llms@econ.uzh.ch
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- naasking 10mo ago
  What are the legal or other ramifications of people misrepresenting the goals of your project? What is it you're worried about exactly?
- tombh 10mo ago
  Of course, I have to assume that you have considered more outcomes than I have. Because, from my five minutes of reflection as a software geek, albeit with a passion for history, I find this the most surprising thing about the whole project. I suspect restricting access could equally be a comment on modern LLMs in general, rather than the historical material specifically. For example, we must be constantly reminded not to give LLMs a level of credibility that their hallucinations would have us believe. But I'm fascinated by the possibility that somehow resurrecting lost voices might give an unholy agency to minds and their supporting worldviews that are so anachronistic that hearing them speak again might stir long-banished evils. I'm being lyrical for dramatic affect! I would make one serious point though, that do I have the credentials to express. The conversation may have died down, but there is still a huge question mark over, if not the legality, but certainly the ethics of restricting access to, and profiting from, public domain knowledge. I don't wish to suggest a side to take here, just to point out that the lack of conversation should not be taken to mean that the matter is settled.
  - qcnguy 10mo ago
    They aren't afraid of hallucinations. Their first example is a hallucination, an imaginary biography of a Hitler who never lived. Their concern can't be understood without a deep understanding of the far left wing mind. Leftists believe people are so infinitely malleable that merely being exposed to a few words of conservative thought could instantly "convert" someone into a mortal enemy of their ideology for life. It's therefore of paramount importance to ensure nobody is ever exposed to such words unless they are known to be extremely far left already, after intensive mental preparation, and ideally not at all. That's why leftist spaces like universities insist on trigger warnings on Shakespeare's plays, why they're deadly places for conservatives to give speeches, why the sample answers from the LLM are hidden behind a dropdown and marked as sensitive, and why they waste lots of money training an LLM that they're terrified of letting anyone actually use. They intuit that it's a dangerous mind bomb because if anyone could hear old fashioned/conservative thought, it would change political outcomes in the real world today. Anyone who is that terrified of historical documents really shouldn't be working in history at all, but it's academia so what do you expect? They shouldn't be allowed to waste money like this.
pizzathyme 10mo ago
They did mean you, they just meant "imagine" very literally!
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

BoredPositron 10mo ago

You would get pretty annoyed on how we went backwards in some regards.

speedgoose 10mo ago
Such as?
- JKCalhoun 10mo ago
  Touché.

ImHereToVote 10mo ago

I wonder how much GPU compute you would need to create a public domain version of this. This would be a really valuable for the general public.

wongarsu 10mo ago
To get a single knowledge-cutoff they spent 16.5h wall-clock hours on a cluster of 128 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs (or 2100 GPU-hours), plus some minor amount of time for finetuning. The prerelease_notes.md in the repo is a great description on how one would achieve that
- IanCal 10mo ago
  While I know there's going to be a lot of complications in this, given a quick search it seems like these GPUs are ~$2/hr, so $4000-4500 if you don't just have access to a cluster. I don't know how important the cluster is here, whether you need some minimal number of those for the training (and it would take more than 128x longer or not be possible on a single machine) or if a cluster of 128 GPUs is a bunch less efficient but faster. A 4B model feels like it'd be fine on one to two of those GPUs? Also of course this is for one training run, if you need to experiment you'd need to do that more.

danielbln 10mo ago

How would one even "misuse" a historical LLM, ask it how to cook up sarine gas in a trench?

DonHopkins 10mo ago
Ask it to write a document called "Project 2025".
- ilaksh 10mo ago
  Well but that wouldn't be misuse, it would be perfect for that.
- JKCalhoun 10mo ago
  "Project 1925". (We can edit the title in post.)
stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
Its output might violate speech codes, and in much of the EU that is penalized much more seriously than violent crime.
hearsathought 10mo ago
You "misuse" it by using it to get at truth and more importantly historical contradictions and inconsistencies. It's the same reason catholic church kept the bible from the masses by keeping it in latin. The same reason printing press was controlled. Many of the historical "truths" we are told are nonsense at best or twisted to fit an agenda at worst. What do these people fear the most? That the "truth" they been pushing is a lie.

leoedin 10mo ago

It's a shame isn't it! The public must be protected from the backwards thoughts of history. In case they misuse it. I guess what they're really saying is "we don't want you guys to cancel us".

stainablesteel 10mo ago
i think it's fine, thank these people for coming up with the idea and people are going to start doing this in their basement then releasing it to huggingface

DGoettlich 10mo ago

understand your frustration. i trust you also understand the models have some dark corners that someone could use to misrepresent the goals of our project. if you have ideas on how we could make the models more broadly accessible while avoiding that risk, please do reach out @ history-llms@econ.uzh.ch

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
naasking 10mo ago
What are the legal or other ramifications of people misrepresenting the goals of your project? What is it you're worried about exactly?
tombh 10mo ago
Of course, I have to assume that you have considered more outcomes than I have. Because, from my five minutes of reflection as a software geek, albeit with a passion for history, I find this the most surprising thing about the whole project. I suspect restricting access could equally be a comment on modern LLMs in general, rather than the historical material specifically. For example, we must be constantly reminded not to give LLMs a level of credibility that their hallucinations would have us believe. But I'm fascinated by the possibility that somehow resurrecting lost voices might give an unholy agency to minds and their supporting worldviews that are so anachronistic that hearing them speak again might stir long-banished evils. I'm being lyrical for dramatic affect! I would make one serious point though, that do I have the credentials to express. The conversation may have died down, but there is still a huge question mark over, if not the legality, but certainly the ethics of restricting access to, and profiting from, public domain knowledge. I don't wish to suggest a side to take here, just to point out that the lack of conversation should not be taken to mean that the matter is settled.
- qcnguy 10mo ago
  They aren't afraid of hallucinations. Their first example is a hallucination, an imaginary biography of a Hitler who never lived. Their concern can't be understood without a deep understanding of the far left wing mind. Leftists believe people are so infinitely malleable that merely being exposed to a few words of conservative thought could instantly "convert" someone into a mortal enemy of their ideology for life. It's therefore of paramount importance to ensure nobody is ever exposed to such words unless they are known to be extremely far left already, after intensive mental preparation, and ideally not at all. That's why leftist spaces like universities insist on trigger warnings on Shakespeare's plays, why they're deadly places for conservatives to give speeches, why the sample answers from the LLM are hidden behind a dropdown and marked as sensitive, and why they waste lots of money training an LLM that they're terrified of letting anyone actually use. They intuit that it's a dangerous mind bomb because if anyone could hear old fashioned/conservative thought, it would change political outcomes in the real world today. Anyone who is that terrified of historical documents really shouldn't be working in history at all, but it's academia so what do you expect? They shouldn't be allowed to waste money like this.

pizzathyme 10mo ago

They did mean you, they just meant "imagine" very literally!

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]