5 ms·

Sovereign weights models are a good thing, for a variety of reasons, not least just encapsulating human diversity around the globe. I chatted with the desktop

Sovereign weights models are a good thing, for a variety of reasons, not least just encapsulating human diversity around the globe. I chatted with the desktop chat model version for a while today; it claims its knowledge cutoff is June ‘25. It refused to say what size I was chatting with. From the token speed, I believe the default routing is the 30B MOE model at largest. That model is not currently good. Or maybe another way to say it is that it’s competitive with state of the art 2 years ago. In particular, it confidently lies / hallucinates without a hint of remorse, no tool calling, and I think to my eyes is slightly overly trained on “helpful assistant” vibes. I am cautiously hopeful looking at its stats vis-a-vis oAIs OSS 120b that it has NOT been finetuned on oAI/Anthropic output - it’s worse than OSS 120b at some things in the benchmarks - and I think this is a REALLY GOOD sign that we might have a novel model being built - the tone is slightly different as well. Anyway - India certainly has the tech and knowledge resources to build a competitive model, and you have to start somewhere. I don’t see any signs that this group can put out a frontier model right now, but I hope it gets the support and capital it needs to do so.

Sporktacular 8mo ago
I'd guess making this a national pride thing will just make it less diverse. Answer would be training models on broader sources, not more nationalistic models.
- vessenes 8mo ago
  No, that will decrease diversity across the model spectrum taken as an entire population.
segmondy 8mo ago
You have no idea what you are talking about if you are asking the model what size it is or claiming that a model lies.
- vessenes 8mo ago
  Please enlighten me.
  - wizzwizz4 8mo ago
    Language models entirely lack introspective capacity. Expecting a language model to know what size it is is a category error: you might as well expect an image classifier to know the uptime of the machine it's running on. Language models manipulate words, not facts: to say they "lie" suggests they are capable of telling the truth, but they don't even have a notion of "truth": only "probable token sequence according to distribution inferred from training data". (And even that goes out the window after a reinforcement learning pass.) It would be more accurate to say that they're always lying – or "bluffing", perhaps –, and sometimes those bluffs correspond to natural language sentences that are interpreted by human readers as having meanings that correspond to actual states of affairs, while other times human readers interpret them as corresponding to false states of affairs.
    - vessenes 8mo ago
      Anthropic's mechanistic interpretation group disagrees with you - they see similar activations for 'hallucinations' and 'known lies' in their analyses. The paper is pretty interesting actually. So, you're wrong - you have a world view about the language model that's not backed up by hard analysis. But, I wasn't trying to make some global point about AGI, I was just noting that the hallucinations produced by the model when I poked at it reminded me of model responses before the last couple of years of work trying to reduce these sorts of outputs through RL. Hence the "unapologetic" language.
      - wizzwizz4 8mo ago
        Which paper? I've read all the titles and looked at a few from the past year, but it's not obvious which you're referring to. I did also, accidentally, find some "I tried the obvious thing and the results challenge the paper's narrative" criticism of one of Anthropic's recent papers: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kfgmHvxcTbav9gnxe/introspection-or-confusion https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kfgmHvxcTbav9gnxe/introsp.... So that's significantly reduced my overall trust in this research team's interpretation of their own results – specifically, their assertions of the form "there must exist". (Several people in the comments there claim to have designed their own experiments that replicate Anthropic's claims, but none of the ones I've looked at actually do: they have even more obvious flaws, like arXiv:2602.11358 being indistinguishable from "the prompt says to tell a first-person story about an AI system gaining sentience after being given a special prompt, and homonyms are represented differently within a model".)
dartharva 8mo ago
> India certainly has the tech and knowledge resources to build a competitive model In what universe? India has near-absolutely none of the expensive infra and chip stockpile needed to build frontier models that its American and Chinese counterparts have, even if it did have the necessary expertise (which I also doubt it does).
- crop_rotation 8mo ago
  Sadly in India talking about the problems facing the country has become a taboo, and can easily get one labeled as anti national. See "Kompact AI" and its online discourse. While China practiced "Hide your strength, bide your time". India seems to practice the opposite.
- sigmoid10 8mo ago
  Deepseek has shown that you can still do a whole lot if you have to work with limited resources as long as you have some really talented people and don't give a crap about IP. With 1.5 billion people, statistics tell us you'll find quite a few in the high tail-end of the intelligence distribution and I also don't think they have a strong sense to comply with western intellectual ownership. The biggest difficulty for India seems to be that all highly talented people will immediately use their skills to find work somewhere else. And I can't blame them, because I would do so too.
  - sinatra 8mo ago
    Will 1.5B people have a lot of very intelligent people too? Yes, some of the most intelligent! Will those intelligent people have the educational opportunities and research opportunities to be able to use that intelligence to deliver a SOTA model any time soon? Especially with so many resource limitations they face, I doubt it.
    - sigmoid10 8mo ago
      Education is no longer locked behind academia. Even elite universities were never really about teaching in the first place and more about connecting rich people. Today everyone with internet access can easily get all the education they need to work in this field.

Sporktacular 8mo ago

I'd guess making this a national pride thing will just make it less diverse. Answer would be training models on broader sources, not more nationalistic models.

vessenes 8mo ago
No, that will decrease diversity across the model spectrum taken as an entire population.

segmondy 8mo ago

You have no idea what you are talking about if you are asking the model what size it is or claiming that a model lies.

vessenes 8mo ago
Please enlighten me.
- wizzwizz4 8mo ago
  Language models entirely lack introspective capacity. Expecting a language model to know what size it is is a category error: you might as well expect an image classifier to know the uptime of the machine it's running on. Language models manipulate words, not facts: to say they "lie" suggests they are capable of telling the truth, but they don't even have a notion of "truth": only "probable token sequence according to distribution inferred from training data". (And even that goes out the window after a reinforcement learning pass.) It would be more accurate to say that they're always lying – or "bluffing", perhaps –, and sometimes those bluffs correspond to natural language sentences that are interpreted by human readers as having meanings that correspond to actual states of affairs, while other times human readers interpret them as corresponding to false states of affairs.
  - vessenes 8mo ago
    Anthropic's mechanistic interpretation group disagrees with you - they see similar activations for 'hallucinations' and 'known lies' in their analyses. The paper is pretty interesting actually. So, you're wrong - you have a world view about the language model that's not backed up by hard analysis. But, I wasn't trying to make some global point about AGI, I was just noting that the hallucinations produced by the model when I poked at it reminded me of model responses before the last couple of years of work trying to reduce these sorts of outputs through RL. Hence the "unapologetic" language.
    - wizzwizz4 8mo ago
      Which paper? I've read all the titles and looked at a few from the past year, but it's not obvious which you're referring to. I did also, accidentally, find some "I tried the obvious thing and the results challenge the paper's narrative" criticism of one of Anthropic's recent papers: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kfgmHvxcTbav9gnxe/introspection-or-confusion https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kfgmHvxcTbav9gnxe/introsp.... So that's significantly reduced my overall trust in this research team's interpretation of their own results – specifically, their assertions of the form "there must exist". (Several people in the comments there claim to have designed their own experiments that replicate Anthropic's claims, but none of the ones I've looked at actually do: they have even more obvious flaws, like arXiv:2602.11358 being indistinguishable from "the prompt says to tell a first-person story about an AI system gaining sentience after being given a special prompt, and homonyms are represented differently within a model".)

dartharva 8mo ago

> India certainly has the tech and knowledge resources to build a competitive model In what universe? India has near-absolutely none of the expensive infra and chip stockpile needed to build frontier models that its American and Chinese counterparts have, even if it did have the necessary expertise (which I also doubt it does).

crop_rotation 8mo ago
Sadly in India talking about the problems facing the country has become a taboo, and can easily get one labeled as anti national. See "Kompact AI" and its online discourse. While China practiced "Hide your strength, bide your time". India seems to practice the opposite.
sigmoid10 8mo ago
Deepseek has shown that you can still do a whole lot if you have to work with limited resources as long as you have some really talented people and don't give a crap about IP. With 1.5 billion people, statistics tell us you'll find quite a few in the high tail-end of the intelligence distribution and I also don't think they have a strong sense to comply with western intellectual ownership. The biggest difficulty for India seems to be that all highly talented people will immediately use their skills to find work somewhere else. And I can't blame them, because I would do so too.
- sinatra 8mo ago
  Will 1.5B people have a lot of very intelligent people too? Yes, some of the most intelligent! Will those intelligent people have the educational opportunities and research opportunities to be able to use that intelligence to deliver a SOTA model any time soon? Especially with so many resource limitations they face, I doubt it.
  - sigmoid10 8mo ago
    Education is no longer locked behind academia. Even elite universities were never really about teaching in the first place and more about connecting rich people. Today everyone with internet access can easily get all the education they need to work in this field.