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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

<<Plays South Park episode "Banned in China".>>

It turns out authoritarian power and capital markets can be scary effective. I don't think authoritarian systems are as dynamic and innovative as democratic ones, but a gigantic authoritarian regime can utilize external democracies for innovation and then leverage their market power to silence criticism both home and abroad.

Creative tools that impede free speech are harbingers of Orwellian future. "Sorry, you are not allowed to express that thought".

Chinese encroachment of free speech outside China should be fought against, not aided. I'm in the camp that thinks it's normal for countries to have legal systems and value systems incompatible with each other - but I'm not ok with companies and individuals aiding an authoritarian regime to spread their influence globally just to extract profit.

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These new models could be the downfall of authoritarian regimes. These regimes rely on suppressing access to information but soon we'll have an LLM that can answer any questions about the world and fit on a USB stick that can be passed from person to person. No more great firewall of China.

Encyclopedias exist today as well, and already fit on USB sticks. Still, Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either.

Modern authoritarian states are extremely adept at controlling the spread of information. LLMs are not even a drop in the bucket for what the state apparatus can do. If sharing USB sticks with LLMs that talk about the Tiananmen massacre ever became popular, you would get USB sticks that talk about how these are Western lies the very next day.

> Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either

Text versus images? China’s urban elite are comfortable. They live a first-world life. China is a middle economy because the fruits of its gains haven’t reached the periphery. I can see Beijing being fearful of visual satire that can be perceived by a farmer in a way that written text, particularly English text, isn’t an issue.

There are several differences between LLMs and encyclopedias - LLMs don't need specific text about specific events in Chinese. They can be trained in text in English and produce answers in Chinese via translation. - LLMs probably need much more text to corrupt their veracity -- yet to be tested properly - LLMs are more obfuscated in their purpose. If I'm sharing a text about a specific event then that is pretty damning, but if an LLM can answer questions about an event then you can't prove that was why I was sharing it. In fact it would be pretty hard to exclude information about specific events from an LLM

Raspberry Pi could include that with Mathematica in their default OS install :)

I guess they are still a bit too heavy for small ARM boards but they are probably implemented in a way that is amenable to lots of systems engineering / demoscene optimizations.

Maybe demoscene will branch off into optimizing AI - ”here’s my llama 64kb demo…” :D

How much disk space does an LLM like GPT-4.0 need?

Didn't we say the same thing about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, whose concept of free speech is, "You can freely edit our encyclopedia as long as you cite CNN"

And the internet, liberalization, free trade, etc.

Propaganda has seemed pretty effective even with unfettered access to information, LLMs and free speech in the west.

Ok, and whoever is caught with one of those will disappear, and so will all their family/friends. Are you willing to risk your life for information? Proxies that bypass the great firewall already exist, but most people avoid them because they're not worth the risk

Quite apart from arguments about the effectiveness of authoritarian regimes to prevent this, we would first need an LLM that can be trusted not to make stuff up.

The "truth" is not enough. Look into Tian'Anmen and how the subject is completely taboo across generations. How to change social norms is a whole another thing.

You can already fit something like 800,000 books on a 256 GB USB stick.

An LLM isn't going to be more effective.

The solution to speech ban, is exactly like the alcohol ban which occurred in America at some point. When alcohol prohibition was happening at New York, it was Greek gangs which transported illegal alcohol, executing snitches and blackmailing cops and stuff. The Italian word mafia, started to describe that kind of situation, only after Italian gangs overthrew Greek gangs in the dominance of the black market at New York.

A black market for speech, is the ideal solution. As soon as people desire certain information on the internet, someone will find a way to provide it to them, for double, triple or 10 times the price. A black market of information just opens up some opportunities, that's all i am saying.

But to have a black market there has to be a market to begin with. Bitcoin, not BTC will create new opportunities for all kinds of markets.

Bitcoin is 100% traceable, and lots of black markets have been shut down for using it.

Yes indeed, it is 100% percent traceable, but many black market organizations are not taken down, not because they avoid detection, but because the leaders of the operation are untouchable in some way or another.

But i think you are referring to BTC, and BTC is not Bitcoin. Btc doesn't support small enough transactions for it to function as a market of information, let alone black market of information.

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