18 ms·

> LLM as the main weapon LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power

by davidw 7mo ago

> LLM as the main weapon LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation. Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet. There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. Edit: I guess the conclusion I come to is that LLM's are good for 'getting things done', but the context in which they are operating is one where the balance of power is heavily tilted towards capital, and open source is perhaps less interesting to participate in if the machines are just going to slurp it up and people don't have to respect the license or even acknowledge your work.

ordu 7mo ago
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. But I don't think that fighting for copyright now can bring any benefits for FOSS. GNU should bring Stallman back and see whether he can come with any new ideas and a new strategy. Alternatively they could try without Stallman. But the point is: they should stop and think again. Maybe they will find a way forward, maybe they won't but it means that either they could continue their fight for a freedom meaningfully, or they could just stop fighting and find some other things to do. Both options are better then fighting for copyright. > There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. I want a clarify this statement a bit. The thing with LLM relying on work of others are not against GPU philosophy as I understand it: algorithms have to be free. Nothing wrong with training LLMs on them or on programs implementing them. Nothing wrong with using these LLMs to write new (free) programs. What is wrong are corporations reaping all the benefits now and locking down new algorithms later. I think it is important, because copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical), but not for GNU.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  >Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess. >GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they could try without Stallman. Leave Britney alone >:( >copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical) I've busted out "intellectual property is a crime against humanity" at layfolk to see if that shortcuts through that entire little politico-philosophical minefield. They emote the requisite mild shock when such things as crimes against humanity are mentioned; as well as at someone making such a radical statement which seems to come from no familiar species of echo chamber; and then a moment later they begin to very much look like they see where I'm coming from.
  - Serenacula 7mo ago
    How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of inherent moral.
    - bo1024 7mo ago
      Not saying this gets through to people, but copyright is purely about the legal ability to restrict what other people do. Whereas property rights are about not allowing others to restrict what you do (e.g. by taking your stuff).
    - balamatom 7mo ago
      By looking convincing enough to be selling good shit and not bad shit; then by playing to their biases well enough for them to try and get something out of the exchange. Idealism, i.e. not doing this because of selling anything, immediately disqualifies. Is that anything approaching reason? Hardly. It's just how folks are taught to be persuaded. You could also frame it as a food quality issue. Now, am I wrong to expect a better standard out of people - or am I wrong to permit underhanded approaches for the sake of getting my meme out? According to some authors, that's an irreconcilable moral dilemma for each to battle alone throughout their lives... Scratch that, though, here's what. Considering many more people watch the ball games than the lawmaking debates, what is it that sets the baseline societal standard for convincing persuasion?Examples of acts of convincing persuasion displayed to the general public by the devices of mass communication. (And it matters very little, to our learning ape-minds, whether the image of the convincing persuader is framed as "news" or a "movie".) What is the use of mass communication, then? A broadcasting device brings (a subset of) some Narrative - i.e. some network of meanings that people attribute to the world around them - into the life of each individual recipient, for the purpose of influencing that life. Now, the device is working; we are shown things on the hellboxes and we reckon with the ideas which the things mean. Given the activity of mass communication is cheap and ubiquitous, and the resulting "culture soup", in which we grow up immersed, is very much non-optional to the individual, and also very much non-malleable by the individual. So we have these 2 registers of mass communication, "news" to show "what is normal to happen" and "art" to show "what is permissible to conceptualize", which are broadcast to us obligatorily and in unclear proportions, and that rather bizarre datastream is what defines us as "humanity" and "society" to ourselves, and serves as a sort of civilizational baseline outside of any individual's personal life, studied disciplines, etc. However, funny business with the artifacts underlying this system of organization: (1) the construction of the broadcasting devices; and (2) the construction of those narratives which seem to almost have transcendent powers over everyone affected... what's in that stuff, anyway? Oops, you're not allowed to know - it's a trade secret! Wait a second, so the stuff which directly teaches me how I will interpret my life and that of others, is a trade secret? Explain to me that we are living in a democracy again? When the sources from which you learn, and the contents of what you learn, are someone's property, it means that the knowledge in your head is someone's property, which means that becoming fluent in someone's intellectual property makes (part of) you their property. ...I guess those could be the rudiments of a more orderly sort of argument?
zozbot234 7mo ago
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.
- walterbell 7mo ago
  > running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware What async tasks could a local LLM accomplish on Intel 11th gen CPU with 32GB RAM?
jacquesm 7mo ago
> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.
- davidw 7mo ago
  At a certain point, I think we had reached a kind of equilibrium where some corporations were decent open source citizens. They understood that they could open source things like infrastructure or libraries and keep their 'crown jewels' closed. And while Stallman types might not have been happy with that, it seemed to work out for people. Now they've just hoovered up all the free stuff into machines that can mix it up enough to spit it out in a way that doesn't even require attribution, and you have to pay to use their machine.
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    AI essentially gatekeeps all of open source to companies to pluck from to their hearts content. And individual contributors using these tools and freely mixing it with their own - usual minor - contributions are another step of whitewashing because they're definitely not going to own up to writing only 5% of the stuff they got paid for. Before we had RedHat and Ubuntu, who at least were contributing back, now we have Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI who are racing to lock the barn door around their new captive sheep. It's just a massive IP laundromat.
  - stalfie 7mo ago
    To be fair to the companies, the machine was pretty hard to make, and expensive. Its not exactly unreasonable to charge for it.
    - jacquesm 7mo ago
      If I build a museum full of stolen art it can still be hard to make and expensive. It would be entirely unreasonable to charge for it.
thenewnewguy 7mo ago
Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL? If some company steals your GPLed code and doesn't follow the license, you will have to sue them and somebody will have to pay the lawyers.
- davidw 7mo ago
  > Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL? It's nowhere near the order of magnitude of the kind of spending they're sinking into LLM's. The FSF and other groups were reasonably successful at enforcing the GPL, operating on a budget 1000's of times smaller than that of AI companies.
  - cloverich 7mo ago
    Right but LLM companies are building frontier models with frontier talent while trying to sock up demand with a loss leader strategy, on top of an historic infrastructure build out. Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org (compared to an individual). IMO the proposition is little fishy, but its not totally without merit and imo deserves investigation. If we are all worried about our jobs, even via building custom for sale software, there is likely something there that may obviate the need at least for end user applications. Again, im deeply skeptical, but it is interesting.
    - overfeed 7mo ago
      > Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org Running proprietary model would make you subject to whatever ToS the LLM companies choose on a particular day, and what you can produce with them, which circles back to the raison d'etre for the GPL and GNU. Until all software copyright is dead and buried, there is no need for copyleft to change tack. Otherwise there rising tide may rise high enough to drown GPL, but not proprietary software. Open source is easier to counterfeit/license-launder/re-implement using LLMs because source code is much lower-hanging fruit, and is understood by more people than closed-source assembly.
socalgal2 7mo ago
Maybe a good open source idea is to "seti at home" style crowd-source training, assuming that's possible.
shadowgovt 7mo ago
How close are we to good enough and who's working on that? I would be interested in supporting that work; to my mind, many of the real objections to LLMs are diminished if we can make them small and cheap enough to run in the home (and, perhaps, trained with distributed shared resources, although the training problem is the harder one).
- davidw 7mo ago
  Good question. It seems like most of the tech world is perfectly happy to be sharecroppers on the Big AI farms. I guess that's not quite the right analogy, since they're doing their own things with it; just that at the end of the day, the tool they're building everything on is owned by someone else.
tmp10423288442 7mo ago
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. When the FSF and GPL were created, I don't think this was really a consideration. They were perfectly happy with requiring Big Iron Unix or an esoteric Lisp Machine to use the software - they just wanted to have the ability to customize and distribute fixes and enhancements to it.
- davidw 7mo ago
  Free software didn't really take off until a couple of things happened 1) personal computers got good enough to run Linux and BSD and 2) more people get connected to the internet. The 'good enough' part is the important one here, I think.
Aozora7 7mo ago
>Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet. Right now, we can get local models that you can run on consumer hardware, that match capabilities of state of the art models from two years ago. The improvements to model architecture may or may not maintain the same pace in the future, but we will get a local equivalent to Opus 4.6 or whatever other benchmark of "good enough" you have, in the foreseeable future.

by davidw 7mo ago

ordu 7mo ago

> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. But I don't think that fighting for copyright now can bring any benefits for FOSS. GNU should bring Stallman back and see whether he can come with any new ideas and a new strategy. Alternatively they could try without Stallman. But the point is: they should stop and think again. Maybe they will find a way forward, maybe they won't but it means that either they could continue their fight for a freedom meaningfully, or they could just stop fighting and find some other things to do. Both options are better then fighting for copyright. > There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. I want a clarify this statement a bit. The thing with LLM relying on work of others are not against GPU philosophy as I understand it: algorithms have to be free. Nothing wrong with training LLMs on them or on programs implementing them. Nothing wrong with using these LLMs to write new (free) programs. What is wrong are corporations reaping all the benefits now and locking down new algorithms later. I think it is important, because copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical), but not for GNU.

balamatom 7mo ago
>Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess. >GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they could try without Stallman. Leave Britney alone >:( >copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical) I've busted out "intellectual property is a crime against humanity" at layfolk to see if that shortcuts through that entire little politico-philosophical minefield. They emote the requisite mild shock when such things as crimes against humanity are mentioned; as well as at someone making such a radical statement which seems to come from no familiar species of echo chamber; and then a moment later they begin to very much look like they see where I'm coming from.
- Serenacula 7mo ago
  How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of inherent moral.
  - bo1024 7mo ago
    Not saying this gets through to people, but copyright is purely about the legal ability to restrict what other people do. Whereas property rights are about not allowing others to restrict what you do (e.g. by taking your stuff).
  - balamatom 7mo ago
    By looking convincing enough to be selling good shit and not bad shit; then by playing to their biases well enough for them to try and get something out of the exchange. Idealism, i.e. not doing this because of selling anything, immediately disqualifies. Is that anything approaching reason? Hardly. It's just how folks are taught to be persuaded. You could also frame it as a food quality issue. Now, am I wrong to expect a better standard out of people - or am I wrong to permit underhanded approaches for the sake of getting my meme out? According to some authors, that's an irreconcilable moral dilemma for each to battle alone throughout their lives... Scratch that, though, here's what. Considering many more people watch the ball games than the lawmaking debates, what is it that sets the baseline societal standard for convincing persuasion?Examples of acts of convincing persuasion displayed to the general public by the devices of mass communication. (And it matters very little, to our learning ape-minds, whether the image of the convincing persuader is framed as "news" or a "movie".) What is the use of mass communication, then? A broadcasting device brings (a subset of) some Narrative - i.e. some network of meanings that people attribute to the world around them - into the life of each individual recipient, for the purpose of influencing that life. Now, the device is working; we are shown things on the hellboxes and we reckon with the ideas which the things mean. Given the activity of mass communication is cheap and ubiquitous, and the resulting "culture soup", in which we grow up immersed, is very much non-optional to the individual, and also very much non-malleable by the individual. So we have these 2 registers of mass communication, "news" to show "what is normal to happen" and "art" to show "what is permissible to conceptualize", which are broadcast to us obligatorily and in unclear proportions, and that rather bizarre datastream is what defines us as "humanity" and "society" to ourselves, and serves as a sort of civilizational baseline outside of any individual's personal life, studied disciplines, etc. However, funny business with the artifacts underlying this system of organization: (1) the construction of the broadcasting devices; and (2) the construction of those narratives which seem to almost have transcendent powers over everyone affected... what's in that stuff, anyway? Oops, you're not allowed to know - it's a trade secret! Wait a second, so the stuff which directly teaches me how I will interpret my life and that of others, is a trade secret? Explain to me that we are living in a democracy again? When the sources from which you learn, and the contents of what you learn, are someone's property, it means that the knowledge in your head is someone's property, which means that becoming fluent in someone's intellectual property makes (part of) you their property. ...I guess those could be the rudiments of a more orderly sort of argument?

zozbot234 7mo ago

> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.

walterbell 7mo ago
> running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware What async tasks could a local LLM accomplish on Intel 11th gen CPU with 32GB RAM?

jacquesm 7mo ago

> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations. This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.

davidw 7mo ago
At a certain point, I think we had reached a kind of equilibrium where some corporations were decent open source citizens. They understood that they could open source things like infrastructure or libraries and keep their 'crown jewels' closed. And while Stallman types might not have been happy with that, it seemed to work out for people. Now they've just hoovered up all the free stuff into machines that can mix it up enough to spit it out in a way that doesn't even require attribution, and you have to pay to use their machine.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  AI essentially gatekeeps all of open source to companies to pluck from to their hearts content. And individual contributors using these tools and freely mixing it with their own - usual minor - contributions are another step of whitewashing because they're definitely not going to own up to writing only 5% of the stuff they got paid for. Before we had RedHat and Ubuntu, who at least were contributing back, now we have Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI who are racing to lock the barn door around their new captive sheep. It's just a massive IP laundromat.
- stalfie 7mo ago
  To be fair to the companies, the machine was pretty hard to make, and expensive. Its not exactly unreasonable to charge for it.
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    If I build a museum full of stolen art it can still be hard to make and expensive. It would be entirely unreasonable to charge for it.

thenewnewguy 7mo ago

Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL? If some company steals your GPLed code and doesn't follow the license, you will have to sue them and somebody will have to pay the lawyers.

davidw 7mo ago
> Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL? It's nowhere near the order of magnitude of the kind of spending they're sinking into LLM's. The FSF and other groups were reasonably successful at enforcing the GPL, operating on a budget 1000's of times smaller than that of AI companies.
- cloverich 7mo ago
  Right but LLM companies are building frontier models with frontier talent while trying to sock up demand with a loss leader strategy, on top of an historic infrastructure build out. Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org (compared to an individual). IMO the proposition is little fishy, but its not totally without merit and imo deserves investigation. If we are all worried about our jobs, even via building custom for sale software, there is likely something there that may obviate the need at least for end user applications. Again, im deeply skeptical, but it is interesting.
  - overfeed 7mo ago
    > Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org Running proprietary model would make you subject to whatever ToS the LLM companies choose on a particular day, and what you can produce with them, which circles back to the raison d'etre for the GPL and GNU. Until all software copyright is dead and buried, there is no need for copyleft to change tack. Otherwise there rising tide may rise high enough to drown GPL, but not proprietary software. Open source is easier to counterfeit/license-launder/re-implement using LLMs because source code is much lower-hanging fruit, and is understood by more people than closed-source assembly.

socalgal2 7mo ago

Maybe a good open source idea is to "seti at home" style crowd-source training, assuming that's possible.

shadowgovt 7mo ago

How close are we to good enough and who's working on that? I would be interested in supporting that work; to my mind, many of the real objections to LLMs are diminished if we can make them small and cheap enough to run in the home (and, perhaps, trained with distributed shared resources, although the training problem is the harder one).

davidw 7mo ago
Good question. It seems like most of the tech world is perfectly happy to be sharecroppers on the Big AI farms. I guess that's not quite the right analogy, since they're doing their own things with it; just that at the end of the day, the tool they're building everything on is owned by someone else.

tmp10423288442 7mo ago

> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS. When the FSF and GPL were created, I don't think this was really a consideration. They were perfectly happy with requiring Big Iron Unix or an esoteric Lisp Machine to use the software - they just wanted to have the ability to customize and distribute fixes and enhancements to it.

davidw 7mo ago
Free software didn't really take off until a couple of things happened 1) personal computers got good enough to run Linux and BSD and 2) more people get connected to the internet. The 'good enough' part is the important one here, I think.

Aozora7 7mo ago

>Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet. Right now, we can get local models that you can run on consumer hardware, that match capabilities of state of the art models from two years ago. The improvements to model architecture may or may not maintain the same pace in the future, but we will get a local equivalent to Opus 4.6 or whatever other benchmark of "good enough" you have, in the foreseeable future.