Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcc | Hacker News Reader

What do they expect to happen if they win? OpenAI can't use GPT-4 (or build/release GPT-5), but the innovation will continue in areas of the world not subject to this regular?

I understand that the LLM models are advancing quickly and aren't easily explainable or transparent. The models feel like magic at times. But that doesn't mean society should shut them down.

This is fearful behavior and spreading FUD really. These folks should take the time to understand how an LLM works before taking this action.

View on HN

It reminds me of a time when new ideas about spirituality and human position in the universe were so disruptive to the status quo operation of the church and kingdom of England that they were outlawed.

And pilgrims abandoned all they had to cross a virtually unpassable ocean to seek empty land to build from scratch but with the freedom to continue experimenting with their new ideas.

Funny how this country has come full circle.

Your argument is companies should be allowed to do anything they like, because there will be another country where they can abuse with impunity?

I think the argument is that no harm has actually been shown and there is no legal reason to have one of the fastest growing companies hamstrung while Big Tech gets it's shit together.

SEO spam and social media fake content are already pretty common, so there is definitely at least some harm

I feel as if there needs to be data that demonstrates an explosion of SEO spam and social media fake content. People have been doing those things since we figured out we could -- LLMs are just exponentially better at it.

If we're going to start using excuses for LLMs to get clipped, I think we should focus on the core of the problem, not the fact LLMs can enhance it.

It's a terrible argument.

The harm is transparent and greatly eclipses most other threats to cybersecurity.

Please list the harm that has been done. I do not see it as transparent.

If someone puts a gun to your head, what harm has been done?

Well, the potential harm is only deniable by the biggest of shills, but, technically, the only harm is psychological.

Everything and I really do mean everything has potential harm. Is your position that OpenAI should have to suspend their business over this?

Do you really see commensurate potential harm between an extreme scenario and a mundane one?

The development of AGI is an extreme, extreme scenario.

Is your position that OpenAI should have to suspend their business over this?

These goalposts keep evolving.

Definitely not - companies should be regulated but stopping the future releases is not possible when you have tech powerful as GPT.

Where anything they like means publishing a text prediction engine that is pretty good?

sounds like a sound argument, nonviolence isn't ignoring violence; You don't win a knife fight by declaring it a spirited debate; Darwin had a point; etc.

They expect:

- To be paid a lot of money by OpenAI to go away, or

- To be paid a lot of money to have a role in vetting future AI products, or

- To be paid a lot of money by wealthy individuals in the AI alignment camp, or

- To be paid a lot of money by OpenAI's competitors to block research until they can catch up with OpenAI.

Interesting. I hadn’t thought about this as a pure money grab yet.

This was my hot-take as well. The issue here is that OpenAI has some pretty large backers that know the FTC well. Not sure how this will pan out.

> I understand that the LLM models are advancing quickly and aren't easily explainable or transparent. The models feel like magic at times.

This is exactly why LLMs aren't useful or trustworthy for anything serious other than the niche of summarization of existing text. Even with that, you have to keep checking that it isn't hallucinating or bullshitting.

> These folks should take the time to understand how an LLM works before taking this action.

Anyone who knows about deep neural networks already knows that fundamentally they are black-boxes and are extremely poor at explainability and reasoning. This also applies to LLMs and it is not 'FUD'.

If you start with unit tests, you can have a looping ai just keep iterating code into a python file for example until it figures out how to pass the test, then all you need to do is write tests and the rest of the code writes itself.

They're useful for many things, provided the user is aware of their limitations. That's true of any tool or information source.

GPT-4 is basically magic when it comes to code. Have you used it?

Yea! Also, there will never be regulation that will stop open sourced LLMs from emerging that will be just as powerful and, one day, even more than GPT-4.

> What do they expect to happen if they win?

Most likely it’s a play to buy time for competition to catch up.

These models are nakedly dangerous, even a cursory glance suggests this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com