I use a separate physical machine and a scoped token with access to a single repository at a time, and even then I worry about what hole I may have left open.
The general carelessness of the average user is baffling.
China is giving away AI for free so it’s harder to make money. The same strategy they did with solar panels. Sell them at a loss long enough until the manufacturers go out of business and you’re the only one surviving. Then flip to extract monopoly profits
Yes, and this used to be illegal anticompetitive behavior until Reagan eliminated a ton of antitrust laws. So I don’t think saying “but uber and google and Microsoft do it so it’s ok” is persuasive. Free markets require competition so regulation that ensures competition is essential for the free market to function. Free trade requires the same function. We lack both and are seeing the effects of monopolies and anticompetitive behavior.
> China is giving away AI for free so it’s harder to make money.
That might've crossed their minds but that wouldn't move their hand, not even a finger. Politics is the primary driver here, here's the deal:
AI is the new Internet
China foresaw a world where they'd be blocked from it and Anthropic's ongoing attempt to block their own country form it shows how right the Chinese were.
I don’t see the connection. If they want access they would prioritize building their own clones. They wouldn’t try to destroy the thing they are cloning. They would want to continue to ride the coat tails of innovation as long as possible. The move to undermine competition shows an attempt to win a race not preserve access.
Instead we got home solar system become very affordable over the past decade.
And driving out US manufacturers isn’t even the main goal for China. They know their huge risk on reliance on petroleum and was doing everything they can to mitigate that. Building out a huge solar manufacturing base is their answer. Now they are reducing petro imports YoY.
But the US was a leader in manufacturing solar panels and could have facilitated the same price decline trajectory. Selling a product in a market below manufacturing cost specifically to bankrupt domestic manufacturers is an illegal trade practice under the WTO called dumping.
Yes. Releasing open weights seems to be an effort to slow down competition. Facebook was behind. Grok was behind.
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad they are doing it, I personally use open source models. In part to not spend money on the other APIs. So it’s clear that some percentage of what would be paying uses choose to not pay. The other part of opensource is free community labor. How much development work did Facebook get for free around the core infrastructure of react by open sourcing it? A massive amount that they did pay for but benefit from.
The point is, it may benefit society, and yet that social benefit wasn’t the motive for them releasing it as open source.
> Releasing open weights seems to be an effort to slow down competition.
Why? I don’t get it. Open weight models enabled a lot more foundational model trainings. I believe R1 was benefited from llama.
The proliferation of alternative, open weight models in turn put heat on the leading labs and forced them to make better models, or squeeze more out of slowing improvements on model capabilities through innovation on harness.
And eventually we the common people benefit, exactly from these competitions
I had some contract work years ago helping some PhD program astrophysicists write scripts to make their research algorithms compute their data before their great grandchildren retire and one of the action items we never implemented was because someone wrote an “…etc” in the middle of the math.
They knew that everything was verifiably correct on the input, and verifiably correct on the output, and they swore they had figured it out at one point and just never wrote it down. I was asked if I could “just extrapolate it” and had to explain that computer programs work the same as math - I can give you a literally infinite number of ways to reach an output from an input.
A “cloud engineer” is orders of magnitude easier to replace than a programmer - there are entire SaaS products that have been trying to be a drop-in replacement for your career since AWS was out of the gate.
The fact that you still have a job should clue you in that this isn’t going where you think it is, regardless of the state of your friends’ pet projects.
Japan, the society with such a corrupt criminal justice system that being arrested for anything regardless of guilt is generally considered the end of your prospects in life?
Both things can be true, that Japan's criminal justice system is awful, and that Japanese people have a strong culture of respect for the commons and community.
Yes, not only are both true, but one is the consequence of the other's extreme.
When you socially punish people for sticking out, even harmlessly, eventually you end up criminally punishing people for sticking out, even harmlessly.
I’ve been working with ML for most of my career, and “gen ai” since the days of matrix crunching for NLP to a 10-element response array on my 1080Ti.
The current generation of AI is frankly, only marginally more impressive to me than that era. The only thing I’m saying “oh shit” to is the deranged amount of capital debt being leveraged to make it usable.
Watching companies spend billions of tokens per minute letting their dev teams that barely know how to write a prompt beyond some tips and tricks to gain a fluctuating slightly negative to slightly positive productivity change that no one can quantify is making me feel like one of the only sane people left in the world.
Quantization is the only interesting change I’ve seen in years.
The general carelessness of the average user is baffling.
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