4 ms·

The root of the problem is that AI-as-a-service is corked, because companies providing it have a hell of an incentive to use all that data to out-compete their

by dsign 4mo ago

The root of the problem is that AI-as-a-service is corked, because companies providing it have a hell of an incentive to use all that data to out-compete their competitors, and they can do so in secret. To say nothing of salivating law-enforcement who really, really wants to tap into it. I'm hoping there will be at some point open-source and affordable hardware that can run competent models.

miohtama 4mo ago
Already happening https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/23/openai-tumber-ridge-shooter-account-suspended https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/23/openai-tumber-...
- 8note 4mo ago
  that story remains ridiculous, and the RCMP is trying to pass the buck, when they already knew the issues and had confiscated the guns ... then gave them back, and then tbe shooting happened.
  - miohtama 4mo ago
    Never pass a good incident to create more mass surveillance
JeremyNT 4mo ago
It's all extremely dystopian and I don't see how things improve. The handful of megacorps that have access to the compute and troves of stolen IP to train their secret models on have no incentive to contribute back. They say their models are too dangerous for the public, so they can nerf the GA versions while allowing only their preferred megacorp or nation state partners access to the real secret good versions. We can hope the Chinese open weight models will catch up, but if/when they really reach parity with proprietary frontier models you can bet they'll stop releasing their weights too. They don't do this stuff out of the kindness of their hearts. It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this.
- someothherguyy 4mo ago
  > It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this. Public utilities?
- logancbrown 4mo ago
  Chinese open weight models will be forced to do the same to remain competitive with other frontier labs. The moat is data going forward.
- nicce 4mo ago
  > The handful of megacorps that have access to the compute and troves of stolen IP to train their secret models on have no incentive to contribute back. Meta and Anthropic both trained on pirated books and there were not required to destroy their models. I simply don't get it. It just encourages to do things first and see later what happens. Regulations are just a small business cost.
  - thefounder 4mo ago
    You got it right! Regulations are just for small guys! You don’t see agents after Anthropic’s CEO or after Sam Altman as we’ve seen on Kim Dotcom
- zozbot234 4mo ago
  Realistically, local/open weight models will always be limited in idiosyncratic world knowledge compared to the proprietary frontier. There's just very limited upside to releasing tens or hundreds of terabytes of open weights for something that literally can only run in very large AI data centers, and Fable/Mythos is near enough to that class. Smaller models can be smart in very real ways, but the extent to which those "smarts" can apply to real-world problems will be limited.
  - Matl 4mo ago
    I think the best bet is that that at some point going from 30B params to 9T params is realistically going to give the closed model a 10% edge in niche tasks, but that the open model would be very useful most of the time still. I don't know how realistic that expectation is, but if you think about the difference between say 10,000 USD speakers and 50,000 speakers then the 50k ones may sound slightly better but certainly not enough to justify the 40k difference
ferguess_k 4mo ago
The root of the problem is that ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life, so they are essentially cattles. Do you care about cattle's opinions? I guess a few of us do, but most of us don't.
- psadauskas 4mo ago
  That's not the "root", you can go at least one step further: The wealthy CEOs and boardmembers found a way to make even more money, but know that it will make the people who are aware of it angry. So they, as a class, find other issues that they can enflame (or manufacture wholesale), through the manipulation of social media algorithms and legacy media, both of which they own and control. They would much rather have "ordinary people" angry about trans athletes or immigrants, than about the surveillance state they profit from, or stealing our data they profit from, etc... Unfortunately, we humans are very easy to manipulate by making us angry. If "ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life", its hardly our fault if we're too busy surviving in the current economy, and the elites are spending billions to make us angry about anything except the elites.
  - LorenPechtel 4mo ago
    There's a limit to how much angry people can be. Dilute it on irrelevancies, the anger directed at the real problems goes down.
- mrhottakes 4mo ago
  Would humans change their treatment of cattle if the cattle made louder noises? That seems doubtful.
  - tweetle_beetle 4mo ago
    A very large and powerful government puts an awful lot of effort into making sure people don't reference a particular time their military vehicle made contact with a person standing still decades ago.
nijave 4mo ago
>and they can do so in secret Is that really true? Zero Data Retention (ZDR) is standard language in enterprise contracts and it seems quite egregious a vendor would want to take on that amount of liability and ignore the contract terms. On top of that, Anthropic is SOC2 and ISO27001 so they've had _some_ independent auditing (although they could still try to hide such logging/recording anyway) With that in mind, they also have a hell of an incentive to _not_ secretly collect that data. Of course ZDR oftentimes comes with contract minimums so individuals and small corps are locked out and subject to the whims of the provider.
- ipnoipipme 4mo ago
  Yeah cause all these frontier labs totally followed all relevant copyright and ip protection laws, so of course they'll follow your little contract, and what will be the consequences when it turns out they lied (again)? Oh maybe a fine, something fair like 0.5% of profits, can't make it too high or too anti business.
  - nijave 4mo ago
    >Oh maybe a fine, something fair like 0.5% of profits, can't make it too high or too anti business. No, this would be a civil lawsuit not criminal. The plaintiff (the harmed party) could sue Anthropic for whatever they wanted. Put another way, they're at the mercy of big corp army of lawyers, not a paid off politician.
- wslh 4mo ago
  [dead]
- sidewndr46 4mo ago
  Remember that time that Amazon swore they weren't using data to outcompete people on their platform? Then they did that.
  - Atotalnoob 4mo ago
    That was Amazon retail, which made no such promise. AWS makes ZDR promises
daft_pink 4mo ago
I was under the impression that a SOC 2 Type 2 audit requires the auditor to verify access, so if you are purchasing a paid/business version from a top 3 vendor (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) it is SOC 2 Type 2 and any SOC 2 Type 2 service has to maintain access logs and have an independent auditor validate that data isn't being accessed or used against the rules? Essentially, this is why AWS is reporting this to begin with.
gspr 4mo ago
Indeed. And we have to remember what it is that authorities and others are tapping into here: the human thought process. I've said it before and I say it again: nomatter where you stand on generative AI's usefulness, you are crazy for putting your last private space – your thoughts – in the hands of someone other than you. Going further down this line will not end well.

by dsign 4mo ago

miohtama 4mo ago

Already happening https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/23/openai-tumber-ridge-shooter-account-suspended https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/23/openai-tumber-...

8note 4mo ago
that story remains ridiculous, and the RCMP is trying to pass the buck, when they already knew the issues and had confiscated the guns ... then gave them back, and then tbe shooting happened.
- miohtama 4mo ago
  Never pass a good incident to create more mass surveillance

JeremyNT 4mo ago

It's all extremely dystopian and I don't see how things improve. The handful of megacorps that have access to the compute and troves of stolen IP to train their secret models on have no incentive to contribute back. They say their models are too dangerous for the public, so they can nerf the GA versions while allowing only their preferred megacorp or nation state partners access to the real secret good versions. We can hope the Chinese open weight models will catch up, but if/when they really reach parity with proprietary frontier models you can bet they'll stop releasing their weights too. They don't do this stuff out of the kindness of their hearts. It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this.

someothherguyy 4mo ago
> It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this. Public utilities?
logancbrown 4mo ago
Chinese open weight models will be forced to do the same to remain competitive with other frontier labs. The moat is data going forward.
nicce 4mo ago
> The handful of megacorps that have access to the compute and troves of stolen IP to train their secret models on have no incentive to contribute back. Meta and Anthropic both trained on pirated books and there were not required to destroy their models. I simply don't get it. It just encourages to do things first and see later what happens. Regulations are just a small business cost.
- thefounder 4mo ago
  You got it right! Regulations are just for small guys! You don’t see agents after Anthropic’s CEO or after Sam Altman as we’ve seen on Kim Dotcom
zozbot234 4mo ago
Realistically, local/open weight models will always be limited in idiosyncratic world knowledge compared to the proprietary frontier. There's just very limited upside to releasing tens or hundreds of terabytes of open weights for something that literally can only run in very large AI data centers, and Fable/Mythos is near enough to that class. Smaller models can be smart in very real ways, but the extent to which those "smarts" can apply to real-world problems will be limited.
- Matl 4mo ago
  I think the best bet is that that at some point going from 30B params to 9T params is realistically going to give the closed model a 10% edge in niche tasks, but that the open model would be very useful most of the time still. I don't know how realistic that expectation is, but if you think about the difference between say 10,000 USD speakers and 50,000 speakers then the 50k ones may sound slightly better but certainly not enough to justify the 40k difference

ferguess_k 4mo ago

The root of the problem is that ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life, so they are essentially cattles. Do you care about cattle's opinions? I guess a few of us do, but most of us don't.

psadauskas 4mo ago
That's not the "root", you can go at least one step further: The wealthy CEOs and boardmembers found a way to make even more money, but know that it will make the people who are aware of it angry. So they, as a class, find other issues that they can enflame (or manufacture wholesale), through the manipulation of social media algorithms and legacy media, both of which they own and control. They would much rather have "ordinary people" angry about trans athletes or immigrants, than about the surveillance state they profit from, or stealing our data they profit from, etc... Unfortunately, we humans are very easy to manipulate by making us angry. If "ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life", its hardly our fault if we're too busy surviving in the current economy, and the elites are spending billions to make us angry about anything except the elites.
- LorenPechtel 4mo ago
  There's a limit to how much angry people can be. Dilute it on irrelevancies, the anger directed at the real problems goes down.
mrhottakes 4mo ago
Would humans change their treatment of cattle if the cattle made louder noises? That seems doubtful.
- tweetle_beetle 4mo ago
  A very large and powerful government puts an awful lot of effort into making sure people don't reference a particular time their military vehicle made contact with a person standing still decades ago.

nijave 4mo ago

>and they can do so in secret Is that really true? Zero Data Retention (ZDR) is standard language in enterprise contracts and it seems quite egregious a vendor would want to take on that amount of liability and ignore the contract terms. On top of that, Anthropic is SOC2 and ISO27001 so they've had _some_ independent auditing (although they could still try to hide such logging/recording anyway) With that in mind, they also have a hell of an incentive to _not_ secretly collect that data. Of course ZDR oftentimes comes with contract minimums so individuals and small corps are locked out and subject to the whims of the provider.

ipnoipipme 4mo ago
Yeah cause all these frontier labs totally followed all relevant copyright and ip protection laws, so of course they'll follow your little contract, and what will be the consequences when it turns out they lied (again)? Oh maybe a fine, something fair like 0.5% of profits, can't make it too high or too anti business.
- nijave 4mo ago
  >Oh maybe a fine, something fair like 0.5% of profits, can't make it too high or too anti business. No, this would be a civil lawsuit not criminal. The plaintiff (the harmed party) could sue Anthropic for whatever they wanted. Put another way, they're at the mercy of big corp army of lawyers, not a paid off politician.
wslh 4mo ago
[dead]
sidewndr46 4mo ago
Remember that time that Amazon swore they weren't using data to outcompete people on their platform? Then they did that.
- Atotalnoob 4mo ago
  That was Amazon retail, which made no such promise. AWS makes ZDR promises

daft_pink 4mo ago

I was under the impression that a SOC 2 Type 2 audit requires the auditor to verify access, so if you are purchasing a paid/business version from a top 3 vendor (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) it is SOC 2 Type 2 and any SOC 2 Type 2 service has to maintain access logs and have an independent auditor validate that data isn't being accessed or used against the rules? Essentially, this is why AWS is reporting this to begin with.

gspr 4mo ago

Indeed. And we have to remember what it is that authorities and others are tapping into here: the human thought process. I've said it before and I say it again: nomatter where you stand on generative AI's usefulness, you are crazy for putting your last private space – your thoughts – in the hands of someone other than you. Going further down this line will not end well.