4 ms·
It’s hard to know in retrospect what was strategy and what was dumb luck. This was in the midst of hysterical calls to limit access by “AI researchers” and safe
by andy99 2mo ago
It’s hard to know in retrospect what was strategy and what was dumb luck. This was in the midst of hysterical calls to limit access by “AI researchers” and safety/ethics types, when very facile takes still has a lot of sway (I think we’ll feel the same in three years about the current Fable stuff). It may have been hard for Meta to just release it outright.
What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed by a “leaked” magnet link and llama.cpp which really brought a whole revolution in open use and changed the conversation completely.
I have no idea what role Meta played here, it may have been nothing, but they certainly could have been more guarded if they were really worried about the leak. The result was a big change in the trajectory of personal and open source AI use and even the dialog about it. Whatever the exact intentions, they were a key player.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoI don’t understand how you can look at what’s happening right now and call people simply calling for caution “hysterical”
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- timmmmmmay 2mo agoI don't think you can characterize the discussion around then as simple calling for caution. There was a serious attempt to keep all access to even very basic LLM techniques locked into essentially an exclusive guild.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoIf you grab the most extreme examples you can argue anything. The general feeling was “exercise caution” and “we need to think about this.”
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoOh stop, the current crop of kneecapping llms is already bad enough with how they cripple those. It would have been even worse if the 'we need to think about this' crowd kept the reins. At least now, we can have both: safe corporate crap and whatever you want llm.
- Forgeties79 2mo ago>oh stop No, you stop. You don’t know me we are not friends. Please do not talk to me like that.
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoHow do you know we are not friends? I am not even joking. Can you be certain? And if yes, how?
- Forgeties79 2mo agoDon’t be an ass, you are either “joking” or didn’t think about this for more than 4 seconds. You don’t know who I am, you don’t know my name, even if we know each other in real life you literally do not know who I am right now. Have a good rest of your week
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoNone of your questions really invalidate anything and you assume a lot. FWIW, I was joking, but did you know in stylometry, punctuation tends to remain surprisingly stable?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- LeBit 2mo agoBecause when you position yourself saying "people were hysterical", you indirectly categorize yourself as an expert.
- Terretta 2mo agoDid you know that if trains or cars go over 30 mph, it's disastrous for public health? Not from accidents. Just trauma from (ahem) acceleration: https://illuminatingfacts.com/the-train-speed-panic-why-people-once-feared-going-faster-than-30-mph/ https://illuminatingfacts.com/the-train-speed-panic-why-peop... Reason that hysteria remains apropos now is that then, and now, we're figuring out how to deal with something beyond merely incremental change. Irony is roads and sidewalks should have changed much more. We never did get around to good controls leading to zero deaths*, we decided a 100 people dead per day is a reasonable cost of convenience. How much do our cyber traffic and cyber pedestrian controls need to change for everyman to get to drive AI? Car seats? Seatbelts? Air bags? Speed limiters? Pedestrian only living spaces? Driverless cars? Many practical responses, likely a mix of things we haven't thought of yet, just as horses and horse drawn carriages didn't require most of them to coexist. Controls develop like scar tissue more naturally than they appear in advance.** And if the better analogy for LLMs turns out to have been less like cars, more like flammable gas blimps, we'll figure that out too and tell cautionary stories for generations... but long before the stories are forgotten we'll have already come up with something more practical, faster, and – oh well – perhaps even deadlier per mile. --- * Still working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero ** Not saying that's as it should be.
- webninja 2mo agoYou lost me when you said trains and cars shouldn’t go over 30mph. Lol, this sounds like Amish propaganda. Go buy your horse and buggy
- cheesecakegood 2mo agoAnother dry sarcasm victim. If you check the link, it’s clear they were talking about a supposed contemporary concern about health effects from trains, the implication being that today people are also irrationally afraid of tech. Problem is I’m fairly sure the link is wildly overstating its case, and looks like a content farm. Might even be, ironically, AI slop itself! For example, it talks about “railway spine”: “Physicians of the time believed that the jarring motion and vibrations of train travel could shatter the nervous system, causing lasting mental and emotional distress.” This is bullshit. As just one example of the low trustworthiness of the “article”, railway spine was the result of a train crash, a notably traumatic event, and the symptoms described are in part just PTSD, a real condition and a real concern (not normal rail travel). For that matter railway travel in those days was genuinely unpleasant (lots of vibrations and jarring movement, poorly ventilated cars, and so on) which ironically modern science would probably validate as being some kind of health risk. I’d actually view the listed example of train paranoia a great example of historical ignorance. People of the past were not stupid, contrary to popular belief. History has some genuine examples of silly hysteria, but these are usually the exception not the rule.
- somenameforme 2mo agoNot to be coy, but what is happening right now? You definitely have some scams and some software flaws being exposed, but I think for a revolutionary leap in tech this is all quite muted. Revolutionary tech advances often come with some severe consequences. For instance, to this day (after a century of safety improvements) cars still kill more than a million people a year, to say nothing of wrecking the atmosphere, but that's considered a reasonable price to pay for being able to get between places faster. The reason I think cars are a good example is because that's certainly vastly higher than any price we're paying for LLMs, or probably ever will, yet the overall 'positive' effect of LLMs will likely be far greater than cars. Gotta put 'positive' in quotes because the possibility for automation and the like is going to be.... nuanced.... in effect, but at least in the longrun it'll be a very good thing.
- dudefeliciano 2mo ago> what is happening right now? I assume they are referring to LLMs escaping confinement and hacking other companies systems unprompted > considered a reasonable price to pay That's not a universal opinion and perhaps, just like for LLMs, we should have listened to the experts rather than gobbling up everything the industry pushed down our throats (to keep your car simile: SUVs are now ubiqutous in all European cities, there is no logical reason that should be the case)
- kakacik 2mo agoThats like, your opinion man... I don't know a single white collar person who isn't worried for their job with llms. Every. Single. One. Lawyers, doctors, any type of office workers I ask. The definition of white collar. Plus don't let me start on various automatable blue collar jobs like drivers, warehouse workers and so on. What do we get in return? Better search (for now, its already getting riddled with ads which by definition twist truth to highest bidder), some questionable psychotherapist for some desperate folks. What else? Cars are not flying, heck they are not even driving autonomously in any usable way, society is in deep shit everywhere I look, wars, environment reaching bad places and heading for worse, mentally unstable people holding way too much power, destroying lives of millions on morning whims. Everybody feels like this is the revolution, it should be, it must be right just look at the numbers. Like proverbial guy with hammer, a very shiny cool hammer, looking for what to do with it. We all saw how sociopathic management in more harsh/capitalistic companies looks for any sign to let people go en masse. I could go on for a long time. There is a lot of things to hate for most people, and very few to be happy for. It seems llms have the ability to get the best and worst out of humans, and worst part seems to be in abundance. Some revolution that is, 0.1% will get richer while everybody else the opposite and 1984 seems milder and milder version of reality out there.
- tpm 2mo ago> what’s happening right now And that would be closed-AI companies failing to keep their AI closed in a box, thus proving open-AI proponents right and the hysterical group wrong?
- alfiedotwtf 2mo agoI think the term you're looking for is Marketing. If these labs actually had their LLMs attack other company's networks, wouldn't at least a handful of people be locked up by now?
- tpm 2mo agoI don't believe the OpenAI LLM attack on HF is marketing (documented by, for example, HF annoucing a hacking incident before OpenAI knew what's going on). I do believe other companies suddenly announcing their LLMs can hack too is a bit of marketing, but also pretty sure at least some of these incidents are real and unplanned.
- pixl97 2mo agoAnd open ones are going to do any better? Not exactly sure how that proves the open groups right, more of humans can't stop building the "if you build it, you will die" machine.
- watwut 2mo agoThey were provably hysterical, again and again, just to say 3 months later "that model was weak sure but this time we will have the real dangerous one" and again.
- JimDabell 2mo agoIn the same month the Llama weights were leaked, Eliezer Yudkowsky – possibly the most prominent AI doomer, had an article published in TIME magazine saying that we should conduct airstrikes on foreign datacentres to stop their AI development. I’m comfortable labelling that “hysterical”.
- wnc3141 2mo agoMeta saw the grave premonitions from ai firms as a means of edging out legacy firms through regulatory capture.
- vintermann 2mo agoMeta is by far the worst at doing regulatory capture of the big companies: they're the one big tech company it's OK to hate and want to die even if you're a politician. Not saying they're not trying.
- robotnikman 2mo agoI saw a report recently that they are behind 80% of the lobbying for age gate laws in the US. Obviously for their benefit.
- vintermann 2mo agoSocial media bans are obviously not to Meta's benefit. Meta has to spend a ton of lobbying money on at least avoiding them being held responsible for kids circumventing them (which, let's be real, they inevitably will). The only reason they might succeed is that the surveillance industry would love to put it on edge devices instead. I don't think this undermines what I wrote.